Leyla King is a Palestinian American Episcopal priest who serves as the canon for mission in small congregations for the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas. In her book Daughters of Palestine: A Memoir in Five Generations, she writes with skill and empathy about Palestine, faith, family and the immigrant experience. I want to thank Leyla for this conversation recorded at the Seminary of the Southwest in Austin.
Greg Garrett: Could you talk just a little bit about why you felt led to write Daughters of Palestine?
Leyla King: I always knew I wanted to write this book. I spent the summer after I graduated from college back in 2002 with my grandmother. I bought one of those mini-cassette tape recorders and for about eight weeks, every weekday morning, I would go over to her house and she would just start talking. I carried those stories in my body for two decades more.
The word that comes to mind is that idea of kairos (God’s appointed time). It was really a kairos moment. I think had I tried to write this book 10 years ago or 15 years ago, or right after I recorded the stories, it couldn’t have come into being as it did. This was the right moment, and I had come to a place in my life that was the right moment for me and the person I was and the priest I was.
GG: One of the things you do is this act of faithful imagination to try and understand the female forbears you write about as well as other point-of-view characters. I’m wondering what sort of process you went through to try and imagine or reimagine their lives.
Leyla King
LK: It was very easy with my grandmother (Bahi) both because I literally had her voice, but also I was so, so close to her growing up. And then in my early adulthood it was very easy to imagine myself looking at the world through her eyes. It was a little bit more difficult with my great grandmother (Aniiseh), the other first-person character in these stories, who died when I was quite young.
But what I do know is what it’s like to live in my body in this time and in this place. And I do think I feel very physically connected, particularly to the matriarchs in my family. I feel as though it is their blood that runs through my veins. It is their voices that inhabit my dreams in a way that is visceral and physical. I could imagine myself as myself almost in the situations they find themselves in, and I felt like the way I would respond was very much the way they would respond in those situations as well.
“I didn’t really know I was Palestinian until I was in my early teens.”
I didn’t really know I was Palestinian until I was in my early teens. And in a weird way, I think that really helped in this exploration because I had to decide intentionally to go back and learn what it means to be Palestinian in a way that people who grow up knowing that identity probably don’t have to do. There was this sense that I am excavating this whole history, and it allowed me to explore what characters would be feeling. I was coming with a curiosity I wouldn’t have had if I had known all along this is part of who I am and what my identity is.
GG: The book feels like a quest.
LK: It is very much. There’s this sort of level of quest for women in that part of the world to find their place and claim their own belonging. There’s my grandmother’s quest to get to America that’s written into her whole life story without her ever really realizing it. And then there’s my quest to unearth what it means to be a Palestinian woman who is also American and has this white skin.
GG: Your book coming out in this climate where there is so much xenophobia, so much anti-immigrant sentiment, so much distrust of people with brown skins, seems like an important pushback to that.
LK: These are stories about immigrants. Yes, it is about humanizing immigrants, particularly Palestinian immigrants, and telling their stories in a way that is accessible to people. So much of the rhetoric and the language that gets used to talk about political issues has been co-opted by one side or the other, or both sides.
So you talk about immigration, even the word “immigration.” You talk about the word “Palestine” or “Palestinian,” you talk about things like “from the river to the sea,” or “Free Palestine” or apartheid or genocide or oppression or any of that stuff, and there is an immediate reaction from your audience, whether it be a left-leaning audience or a right-leaning audience. There is an immediate kneejerk response to those words.
“We have boxed in all of that language such that there’s no more nuance.”
We have boxed in all of that language such that there’s no more nuance. People no longer have an ability to actually hear because they have this whole construct already built about what that word means.
What storytelling does is get totally beneath and beyond and around, and it breaks those walls down. And people don’t even realize you are talking about a topic that in any other situation they would think they already know where they stand on it. But when you tell a story, it allows them to hear, and it allows them access to greater understanding than if you are doing it using the rhetoric.
I often say writing this book and doing this work around Palestine that was really focused on education through storytelling gives me such a great appreciation for Jesus’ parables. Exactly what Jesus is doing in his parables is that he’s taking all these debates of the day, religious, political, all of that stuff. And instead of, not that he never uses the language and rhetoric of those topics, but he tells a story, and all of a sudden people can hear in a way they couldn’t before.
There’s an opportunity for connection that the constant polarization has really taken away from us.
GG: What should American Christians be doing about Palestine?
LK: That’s a great question. First and foremost, American Christians need to learn about Palestinian Christians. Again, because it’s a way in, not that Palestinian Muslims are all that different or don’t count or don’t have their story to tell, but understanding there are human beings who are Palestinian Christians is just something that most Western Christians still to this day don’t get. I mean, even progressive Christians.
The Episcopal Church has a relationship with the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem. We take up a Good Friday collection every year for the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem. And yet, when I go to Episcopal churches and talk to people, it’s like the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem is something over there. But people there go to church every Sunday who worship and have relationships and live lives and face particular unique challenges. It’s almost like a different planet.
And so hearing those stories, seeking out those voices, trying to understand the Palestinian Christian perspective from the early 20th century to today, what is it like? What was it? What are their hopes? What are we imagining for the future?
That’s the No. 1 thing Western Christians have to do because the Zionist narrative up until this point (and still today), is so strong and so silencing of other stories that are out there, that it is our responsibility, I think, as Christians, to seek out those other voices, those silenced voices.
GG: One of the things your book does is it gives a sense of the richness of that history. But I told you I wrote in the corner of your title page, “So much heartbreak.” There’s been so much tragedy, so much conflict, and most of that has been invisible to American Christians, Western Christians. An amazing service your book gives us is just the sense there is this long history of all of these peoples in that place, that it’s not simply that single Zionist narrative.
LK: I am Palestinian. I grew up around my Palestinian family, and when I watched this video about Anne Frank, I thought the creation of the state of Israel was a good thing because there’s just no other option out there for what that might mean. What might have happened in that moment.
But I have a good friend who’s a bishop, we had a long conversation on the phone, and he thanked me for being gracious. And he was apologetic for not having spoken out before and speaking up about what’s happening in Gaza right now. And then he said, “How do you manage? Why are you not more angry at me?”
“I have endless amounts of grace for people who are waking up, who are beginning to understand.”
And I said, look, I get it. I was 15 years old before I knew my own story, and I grew up around my own family. So it is not surprising to me that your average white person doesn’t know, because I mean, you’re not in control of that. You don’t know what you don’t know.
I have endless amounts of grace for people who are waking up, who are beginning to understand, who are seeking out that story now. I’m really appreciative of that because even getting to that point is difficult in the culture we live in.
GG: What is giving you grace and joy right now?
LK: I feel really blessed that there are a lot of sources for that in my life. One of them is this book and the knowledge these stories are finally out in the world, that my grandmother’s voice is speaking in a way she could have never imagined in her lifetime. So that gives me a lot of hope, I think. And that persistence, that faith, that hope is part of the legacy she has handed down to me. So I really am clinging to that.
I have a number of communities of people who also give me that, my own family, but also the the Palestinian Anglicans and Clergy Allies group I co-founded, the Small Churches group I co-founded. These mostly women are people who really support and fill me up and buoy me up.
The last thing I’ll say is I absolutely insist on finding joy in this life because for me, it is the ultimate act of resistance. I refuse to give up my sense of joy and goodness and beauty in that this is God’s world. It’s not Donald Trump’s world. It’s not Vladimir Putin’s world, it’s not Benjamin Netanyahu’s world. This is God’s world.
I absolutely refuse to not remember that. I am clinging to that, and to have hope and faith in the capacity of each of us as individuals to do good in our corner of the world and trust in God to make that have its effect.
I have to stop and say it’s not easy. It is very hard. It’s very hard work to do that. And there are days that I wake up and the amount of grief and anger and fury that I carry in my body on a daily basis and anxiety is very real. Right? Very real. So I don’t say that blithely, I just do it. We have to insist on joy.
Greg Garrett
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.