For much of teta’s life, she covered her hair with a headscarf, mostly white in color, beige, but also black after the death of her husband and then son. She preserved it underneath the colorful soft fabric because hair is sacred and needs to be protected.

When I was little, my grandmother’s hair had already begun its transformation—streaked with white, though sometimes, she coaxed it back to brown with henna before she moved to modern dyes, leaving the roots pale and the ends burning copper in the sun. 

Like many Palestinian women before her, she washed it with olive oil soap, worked warm oil through it with her fingers. And despite the wildness of her hair, it was always soft, almost as soft as the creases in her palms. She braided it back before heading to the land, her hands busy with watering the soil beneath her, planting another pomegranate tree, or plunging them into soapy water, scrubbing clothes clean. 

She smelled of home, of earth, of olive trees and time.

Inherited Threads

My mother, aunts, and older cousins inherited traces of her stubborn hair, echoes of its texture, but never quite the same. There was always something missing, something altered—until me. I believe I was her 18th grandchild, the first she wanted named after her. But it didn’t happen. Her name, Sadika, was deemed too heavy, too old-fashioned, and was set aside by my sister. 

Yet she lived on in me—in my despise of tomatoes, in my grumpiness, and indeed, in my curls. In the way I carried them, untamed and bold. A crown I had to learn to control, but never to diminish.

The knowledge of tending to hair was passed down, from my grandmother to my mother, and from my mother to me—an act of love, nourishment, and quiet resilience. My mother carried the ritual forward—scrubbing my scalp with steady hands, cultivating strength and growth. After washing, she worked olive oil into my scalp with tenderness and patience. As she braided my hair each morning before school, I felt the comfort and power of womanhood flowing through her touch. 

When my grandma was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018, her hair began to change. When I was diagnosed with a desmoid tumor in 2020, mine did too. Her curls loosened; mine abandoned me altogether. At one point, we found ourselves on the same hormonal drug—tamoxifen. 

I was a fraction of her age, yet walking a path that mirrored hers. She recovered, though her hair thinned and turned completely white. I would look at her and think: At least one of us is still holding onto the curls. That, of course, until mine slowly grew back in 2021.

We were bound by more than blood. By loss. By renewal. 

Living Memory

On 8 April 2024, as a great total solar eclipse darkened the sky and Ramadan neared its end, Teta, who had been bedbound for some time, took her final breath. When she passed, my father’s voice on the phone was heavy, my mother’s cries trailing behind him. I ran my fingers through my curls, tracing their shape, feeling her there in every strand.

There are a thousand ways to remember her, a thousand stories I could tell, but my hair will always be ours alone. A thread spun through generations, a gift from the women before me. It is wild, fearless, unapologetic—stubborn and beautiful, just like her.

Palestinian women have always braided their hair in devotion and defiance. They have combed olive oil through the strands, just as they have tended their trees—both symbols of resilience, of roots that refuse to be displaced. Hair loss comes with autumn, like leaves surrendering to the wind. Even as a child, I noticed how much more hair I shed in the fall, a quiet reminder that I am part of nature, that the weak strands must fall away to make room for stronger ones. 

In the spring, cutting the ends is essential, like pruning branches so they may bloom again. Every February, we would trim our hair, trusting that it would grow back healthier, fuller—another lesson in patience and renewal.

Resistance, Return

However, right now, as I write this piece, I am once again losing my hair from chemotherapy. This time, my Teta is not here to witness it. She is not here to brush her hands over my head, to whisper prayers, to remind me that what falls will grow again. She has passed, and with her, the stories she carried, her braid falling down her head, her wrinkly hands and face, and the quiet strength of a woman who lived, endured, and gave.

I refuse to believe she’s completely gone. I carry her story now. Every curl that grows back is a verse, every strand a memory woven into my being. I carry her with me, in my hair, in my roots, in the land that shaped us both, and in the soil in which her body currently inhabits. But my grandmother’s loss was not just personal—it was woven into a greater history of displacement.

Like countless Palestinian women, my grandmother carried both personal and collective grief. She was fourteen when her family was forced to flee their home in the village of El-Mzer’a during the Nakba of 1948. They walked for days, searching for refuge after their land was taken and their village destroyed. She witnessed a world she once knew crumble before her eyes–the orange orchards, the narrow pathways of her village, and the old structures. Today, only one remains: a Roman mausoleum, later converted to a mosque dedicated to Al-Nabi Yahya (John the Baptist).

But even after all that devastation, teta held onto traditions—farming, embroidery, and careful rituals of hair and skin care. These were not just acts of survival but acts of defiance, of persistence, of love.

Occupation, like cancer, has robbed us of our identity, land, and parts of ourselves. But we persevere. We persist, filled with resilience, finding other parts of ourselves connecting us to our land, heritage, bodies, and ancestors.

My hair will return, stronger than ever—a promise to my grandmother, to the women before her, and those yet to come.

Allah yerhamik ya Teta.

The post Teta’s Hair: A Story of Palestinian Women’s Resilience, Resistance, and Renewal appeared first on Untold.

With a cold expression that hid the true depth of her anguish, Inas Ait Abdel-Salam answered my question: “How are you?”

“Fine, for those who don’t care and refuse to acknowledge my existence,” she replied. Then, after a moment of silence, she added, “As for the rest, I want to say that ever since the night my soul first tasted the bitterness of death, I’ve been haunted by relentless questions about my right to mourn. Does society have the right to deny me the ability to grieve or to take part in funeral rites? Is it fair to force my soul to suppress the cries of my deepest sorrow? Can I be expected to accept decisions made by people my partner didn’t even like when she was alive? Will anyone honor her final wishes after she’s gone?

How do I tell her that I failed to make anyone respect her choices, that I couldn’t even say a word? How do I keep moving forward despite the overwhelming feelings of oppression and exclusion? How can I cope with the struggle between accepting the situation and asserting my right to express the depth of my anguish, while battling the frustration of being powerless to change anything and denied the chance to grieve with dignity?”

Living with two identities

The lives of LGBTQ people in Algeria are fraught with challenges due to legal criminalization, deeply rooted traditional values, and rigid social norms. These pressures force them to lead a double life, constantly navigating the divide between their public and private selves.

In my circle, there are diverse experiences among non-normative individuals. In private, LGBTQ people experience love and friendships in total secrecy, hidden from prying eyes, driven by the constant fear of exposure, which could result in social ostracism or legal prosecution.

In public, they are compelled to conform to societal expectations, often entering heterosexual relationships or marriage to avoid suspicion. They must adopt the traditional values and behaviors necessary to keep their true identities concealed. At work and in social settings, they avoid discussing their private lives in order to maintain a semblance of normalcy and stability.

This dual existence comes with significant consequences. The constant secrecy and fear create intense psychological pressure, often leading to depression and emotional breakdowns. These burdens also strain personal relationships, deepening their social isolation.

To illuminate a piece of that darkness, I conducted this fictional dialogue with Inas Ait Abdel Salam, an imagined young Algerian lesbian. She lives under the relentless weight of anxiety, seized by it, in a society that utterly denies her existence.

I know attending must have been painful, but were you able to endure that moment? Did you manage to attend the funeral?

Yes, but it was incredibly hard. I had to pull myself together, go out, and offer condolences to her official family. I had to pretend, almost overnight, that she hadn’t been lying next to me for months. I couldn’t tell anyone how death’s shadow was haunting me in the solitude of the house we shared, where her voice still echoes. While I was forced to spend the night staring at the strands of her hair clinging to the pillow, her official family received all the sympathy and comfort. 

I hesitated, but when I heard the coffin was going to her family’s house for a final farewell, I couldn’t stop myself. I ran, despite all the conflicting emotions, knowing it was my last chance to say goodbye. I didn’t think about what I would say, how to make my presence known among her relatives, or how to steal those last few moments with her… I hated the world in that instant. She had died with me, but they were the ones burying her.

Were you able to say goodbye the way you wanted? Did you get the chance to take one last look at her face?

Yes, I believe someone gently pushed me forward among the close ones. At first, I couldn’t bring myself to look at her face and wanted to escape. I was overwhelmed by the coldness of death standing before her coffin and terrified of her family’s judgment and reproach.

I broke down crying outside the house, unaware of everything around me until I noticed people preparing to move the coffin to the cemetery. My mind wavered between collapse and recovery, constantly fearing that someone might be watching me. Did anyone find out the truth? In those moments, when the bitterness of death consumed me, I wanted to tell everyone the truth, disregarding the authority and mindset of a society that forces us to live and die in the shadows. But fear and oppression silenced me.

In those final moments, her father spoke to me, as if sensing her will. He asked if I wanted to see her one last time before the vehicle departed, and I couldn’t hold back. I approached the coffin after everyone had left. Surrounded by the few men assigned to carry and accompany it, I held my breath and tears, uncovered her face, kissed her forehead, and ran away.

I wonder… did her father have any idea about your relationship?

I’m not sure, but I’ve come to realize that families gradually start to suspect their children’s orientations. Some reject it, some fight it… Others ignore it, and some suppress it until they finally give in. What all families share, though, is a deadly silence and the refusal to confront the truth head-on.

 I was surprised by her father’s gesture, but I didn’t hesitate to take advantage of the opportunity. 

In our customs, men accompany the coffin to the cemetery for burial, while women stay behind to handle the remaining funeral rites. Although I reject these traditional roles, on that day, my situation made me indifferent to them. 

The house that brought us together, where she spent her final days, didn’t host her funeral, and the cemetery wasn’t open to women during the burial. Despite that, I did what felt natural to me. I followed the vehicle, watching her burial from afar, as though realizing that those moments might be what saved me from the horror of feeling like I belonged to nothing.

I was completely distracted and shattered, yet many people kept asking me about her family and close relatives. At that moment, I felt like a nobody. I had to answer their questions, reassuring some and comforting others. I was expected to care for everyone’s feelings and forget that my own pain might be the deepest. But isn’t that normal? Am I not already ostracized by a society that would seek forgiveness for me and pray against me if they knew about my existence, and would fight me if I dared to assert myself?

After all of that, how was the journey home?

I felt an overwhelming sense of loneliness. I’m not sure why, but I was uncomfortable with the presence of some of my acquaintances. Most of them weren’t from our ostracized community—the community of forbidden and outlawed relationships, the LGBTQ community. My family was completely absent. That day, I couldn’t help but wonder, how come no one from my family is here to console me, to support me in this difficult time, or to honor the memory of my partner? Is this loneliness simply because I am different? Would anyone forgive me if I failed to console them after losing a spouse or a child? Why does it feel impossible to have my needs met in these moments? Even when I called some friends to tell them I wasn’t okay, their responses were similar—each one dismissing my pain. They told me others in life face far worse than I do, especially those who lose a close family member.

Even some of our close friends, who knew about our relationship, chose to offer their condolences to her family, whom they had never even met, rather than stand by me and support the fears I had shared with my partner for so long.

I had never felt as cold as I did that day, despite the warm weather. I tried to honor her memory but failed. I couldn’t bear how some disregarded my feelings. I couldn’t endure the rationalizing and intellectualizing of emotions, as some friends visited only to talk about my situation in a detached, theoretical way, without considering my emotions or my mental state. I had never seen this happen at any other funeral.

In the midst of the bitterness of losing my partner, I was confronted by a whirlwind of emotions—anger, despair, weakness, and terrifying fear. That day, I reached a point where I could no longer bear it and retreated to our room—no, my terrifying room. I didn’t sleep that night. I waited impatiently for the morning, desperate to visit my lover’s grave. It was the morning after her burial. When I arrived at the cemetery, I rushed toward her final resting place. I couldn’t grasp the meaning of life or death in those moments. I remembered her beliefs and choices—the ones I would have imposed at her funeral if I had been her spouse, if I had been the person society acknowledges and respects.

Standing by her peaceful grave, I kept apologizing. I couldn’t do more because I was nobody. The bitterness of my grief mixed with the coldness of fear, and I found myself drowning in thoughts, until a final blow struck my heart, which could bear no more. Someone whispered to me, “Move away; you must leave space for the family.”

When I heard those words, I realized her recognized relatives had arrived. They were harsh words, though I forced a fake smile and left, as I had no choice. Of course, the family, the close ones—they are the ones with rights in those moments. But me? No one cares about me, because I am nobody. From that day on, our relationship was no longer a challenge; it had become an illusion. Overnight, I became a stranger to her—a stranger forced into silence, a silence as bitter as death itself. Even the right to grieve, the right to receive condolences, was denied to me. Since we came together, we were destined to remain in the darkness of oblivion.

Since that day, I walk in the streets everyday, seeking exhaustion… seeking oblivion. I’ve wanted to forget my grief and longing, what had been imposed on me, and what I had been deprived of. In moments when the force of conflicting emotions overwhelms me, my steps quicken, just as they did when I ran toward her grave, as if I were fleeing ghosts that haunt me, finding solace only when the wind brushes against my face. I don’t know why the wind makes me feel free… Freedom, or perhaps the illusion of it, can only be fragments of childhood memories, filled with dreams. And hope, it seems, can only survive when illusions kill us.

Against my will, I lived the first months of separation in absolute solitude.

Don’t you think this neglect might also affect partners in heterosexual relationships outside of marriage? 

Maybe, I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t want to know. We don’t choose to be together outside of marriage. Marriage is only available to heterosexuals. We are forced into secret relationships and live with dual identities. Our relationships are criminalized by law, even though love between consenting adults poses no harm to the safety of others or society. Frankly, I don’t want to think about or answer questions concerning heterosexuals, even in their moments of vulnerability.

Their vulnerability isn’t connected to my existence, but the reverse is true.

And now, what are you thinking? Will you continue on like this, or are you considering migrating to a country that recognizes LGBTQ+ rights?

No, after everything I’ve been through, it’s too late for me to consider another life. What’s the point, when I’m now completely incapable of experiencing romantic life again?

Today, I am just a woman demanding her right to mourn, without receiving sermons from people who can’t comprehend what I’ve gone through. I am the result of experiences and struggles they’ve never faced. I will continue to resist, to live my solitude in peace, and to silence those who are indifferent to the suffering of marginalized communities. They have no right to claim they understand me, or to assume they know what’s best for me.

I don’t want others to indulge in describing and justifying what we go through as an unrecognized community because, in the hardest times, I was treated as less than nothing. When I was completely devastated, those with privileges couldn’t console me. My partner passed away, and the worst part is that she took her own life after 20 years of battling mental illness. Her doctor didn’t advise me like she advised her family, because she considered me a nobody. Even though she knew we lived together, she didn’t see me as relevant to my partner’s health and care. I wasn’t treated like family.

I didn’t have the legal status to admit her to a psychiatric hospital when her condition worsened because, despite everything we shared as life partners, the law doesn’t recognize our relationship and criminalizes it. My partner was fading away, and we were fighting just to protect our relationship—and protect her—from the tightening grip of her father’s health guardianship, which turned into tyranny that forced us, and especially me, to fail. I failed because I was weaker than any partner who has the right to fail. I failed because I forgot who I was. I ignored the fact that when I try to appear without a mask to satisfy society, I am nothing but nobody.

This painful experience opened my eyes to another side of the discrimination faced by the LGBTQ community. In the last few months, I had to take responsibility for everything due to my partner’s deteriorating mental and financial state. Her family was involved to some extent, but my partner hid her deepest thoughts from them, afraid that revealing them would cost her the few freedoms she had fought so hard to win. I was fighting alone, but I failed. I couldn’t save her.

Yes, I failed, but I’m not guilty. I failed because I faced the limits imposed by my sexual identity. Perhaps I meant something important to her and to our relationship, but ultimately, I was nothing, I was nobody.

The post The bitterness of death, the loneliness of separation: On the right to grieve appeared first on Untold.

What are the effects of hostile policies against migration when couples are separated by the power of their passports? US author and journalist Anna-Lekas Miller decided to navigate this in her first book “Love Across Borders. Passports, Papers and Romance in a Divided World” (Algonquin Books), reflecting also on her own experience.

From Istanbul to Erbil, for love

It is said that the personal is political, but the personal is also journalistic. Since the beginning of the so-called refugee crisis, there has been a debate on whether journalists should get involved or keep themselves detached and “objective” from the suffering of millions of displaced people.

“I never wanted to be one of those detached journalists in the first place. That became so much harder when I made the decision to move to the Middle East, where I trace my roots [from Lebanon]. I started meeting people of my age, exactly like me, for all intents and purposes and we had so much in common” Lekas Miller tells UntoldMag.

However, as Lekas-Miller points out, they were born in the Middle East, they were refugees from Syria or Palestine, and therefore their freedom of movement was very much restricted compared to hers.

A documentary dedicated to the late US historian Howard Zinn is tellingly titled “You can’t be neutral on a moving train” and this applies to all kinds of injustices; in Lekas-Miller’s case, the central element is the encounter with the man who became her partner, a fellow journalist, Salem Rizk, from Syria, in Istanbul.

When Anna and Salem fell in love and lived together, the crackdown on refugees from the Turkish government came into place, and Rizk, who is Syrian, could not stay any longer in Turkey and could not return to Syria, putting the author in front of a consequential choice.

In the end, Miller followed Rizk to Iraq, in Erbil, and also ended up reporting from Mosul, when the Daesh militias had only been recently pushed away by the Iraqi forces and their regional and international allied forces.

Then Anna and Salem’s story follows the byzantine tracks of the asylum claims for the latter, the cruelty of Trump’s Muslim ban, and a multitude of challenges, all the way to London.

Her personal experience led Miller to put together the stories of those who have faced what happens when border policies systematically fall over relationships.

Borders are different and passports are not created equal 

The cruelty of border policies tends to be accepted as if they were unchangeable and had always existed, but this is not the case.

“It is really important to remember that it was not always this way. In the US, you would have politicians comparing their family’s privileged “Mayflower” history of migration and it is very factually inaccurate to compare these experiences with Latin Americans trying to cross the Mexico-US border today,” says Lekas Miller.

“We are talking about people who have to either experience the asylum system or live like undocumented people. There is this element and it is important to be honest about it and the fact that there are so many unjust laws curtailing people’s freedom that there have been in the past. This is the way we need to see the migration debate fairly”.

“I also think that it is interesting to consider what the world looked like with open borders. You had people from Europe and the Middle East going to the United States to settle there, you also had Europeans colonising Africa and other parts of the world. In a way, this shows what open borders meant for better and for worse. It would be important to think about that and reimagine how this could look like now and in the future” Lekas Miller adds.

Colonialism and the history of passports are strongly connected, and the Otherisation and the hierarchy of passports and related rights are strictly linked with this.

“I am grateful that the book gave me a space to navigate my identity as a US citizen of Lebanese descent. We have a community in the diaspora from the Middle East of people who fit this profile. We are proud of our connection to the Middle East but we have a Western passport. I see a lot of people struggling to put this together and I wanted to do this and create a model for other people”. A model for other people of Middle Eastern descent with a Western passport to bridge the gap between what can be seen as privilege and the connection with their family roots.

A central element of the book stands at the core of the global debate on migration, but at the same time is severely overlooked: the power of passports.

If we simply look at the Nomad Passport Index for 2023 we can clearly identify the inequality between passports; while the passports of the Global North countries occupy the first positions and the United Arab Emirates the very first, countries like Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia and Eritrea stand at the bottom of the list.

The more a passport requires a visa, the more the freedom of movement of the Global South citizens is at the mercy and the whims of the bureaucracy in the Global North, with all that it entails.

The author also delves into the history of passports as we know them, born out of the French Revolution, focused on internal movement and how much this has changed in the XX century, with passports becoming more and more a trademark of class and geographical privilege, if we consider how some countries have golden passports schemes.

Every conversation on migration that does not face this crucial point, as Lekas Miller explains and points out, is a flawed one at best.

The emotional wounds left can be found in many of the stories narrated in the book.

Love with or without borders

There is the story of Wala’a and Ahmed, who grew up in Aleppo, a story with a happy ending, after the Syrian civil war and the dangerous crossing of the Aegean Sea.

There is the story of Amal and Mohammed; they both grew up in the same village in Yemen but grew up to lead very different lives, the former stayed in the country, while the latter moved to  the US with his family. 

Still, their feelings crossed continents and years of separation, and they found love in one another, but the Muslim ban by the Trump administration left Amal stranded in Djibouti for a long time, while Mohamed was trying to keep the attention on their story in the eyes of lawyers and journalists.

While their story had a happy ending, not all similar stories ended in the same way. In 2018, a Yemeni-US citizen, Mahmood Salem had drowned in depression and debt, while attempting to bring his wife and children to the US in the midst of the ban and ended up shooting himself.

After his suicide, a visa was waivered for his wife and family to attend his funeral in Louisiana.

Then there is Ava, whose husband Josè was deported to Mexico.

And then there is the story of Mona and of the scandalous treatment of the Windrush generation [those Jamaican and Caribbean citizens, and their children who migrated to the UK following WWII and found themselves stateless or deported back to countries where they were only born or only their parents were born] in the United Kingdom by the Home Office, a testament to how institutional racism can bring borders back.

Lekas Miller is a passionate and real kaleidoscope of different experiences, through different continents and different paths.

Another element that the author highlights is the need to bring closer together, through smaller steps, the imbalance between the Global North and South, something that sometimes may escape the attention of those who are focused on migration justice and removing borders, as there is a lot of work to do in the middle, also in the name of love.

The post Love across borders: passports, papers, and romance in a divided world appeared first on Untold.