This will be a hybrid (in-person & online) book talk taking place in Portland, Oregon (& virtually via Zoom).
Join us for a timely conversation about Layla K. Feghali’s newly released book, The Land in Our Bones. Highlighting lineages of herbal resilience, diasporic stewardship, and unraveling the rippling impacts of colonial violence on our earth and communities, this book about people and traditions of the Levant offers relevant fodder to grapple with the dire times we are in. Join us in a conversation hosted by Iman Labanieh of Baylasan Botanicals, for a brief reading, interview, and a chance to ask your own questions, plus receive a signed book!
Questions inspiring our conversation include:
- What is the relationship between herbal healing practices, land-based stewardship, and global sovereignty movements?
- How can our relationships with land and culture support, inspire, and guide the cultivation of more liberated and dignified worlds?
- What is the role and responsibility of diasporic land-tenders in confronting empire, genocides, and climate collapse in a rapidly deteriorating world?
- How can the earth and our traditions feed our steadfastness, capacity, and skills to support movements on the ground?
As organizers and herbalists with roots in Lebanon & Syria, the ongoing genocide in Gaza has been particularly heavy on our hearts and minds. Many of us have shifted our practices to respond to the needs of this moment including organizing, fundraising, and providing political education. It is our hope that this conversation will provide generative insight into more practical wisdom for action in our local and care-taking communities — for Palestine and beyond.
This is a masked event. Extra masks will be available if needed.
Exact location TBA to ticket holders.
Limited capacity, so get your tickets now!
IMPORTANT: *Please select "allow River Rose to contact me" upon purchase so you receive email updates about the event only, including location updates and more.*
** If you have the means, please consider offering an "additional donation" upon ticket purchase to support the organizers of this event to sustain their community work. **
ABOUT US
LAYLA K. FEGHALI is an ethnobotanist, cultural worker, and author who lives between her ancestral village in Lebanon, and California, where she was born and raised. Feghali’s work is about restoring relationships to earth-based ancestral wisdom as an avenue towards eco-cultural stewardship, collective healing, and liberation. Feghali hosts a line of plantcestral medicine, community education, mutual aid efforts, and other culturally-rooted offerings, with an emphasis on land-based lifeways from the Crossroads (Southwest Asia + North Africa) and its diasporas. Her recent book, The Land in Our Bones, documents cultural herbal and healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world.
IMAN LABANIEH is a farmer, herbalist, cultural worker, and educator based in Portland, OR. Her ancestors are rooted in Damascus and Aleppo, Syria, but she was raised in Southern California before making her way to the Bay Area where she studied Ethnic Studies and Psychology at UC Berkeley. She comes to land-based work because she sees ecological stewardship as our roadmap to liberating our lands and our selves. Iman loves to exchange knowledge about plants, their medicine, and ethnobotany and is currently an educator at Zenger Farm where she teaches earth-based programming to young people. Additionally, Iman tends a small medicinal herb farm called Baylasan Botanicals where she grows an abundance of medicine to distribute to her community.