Olive Harvest, Naur, 2024
Photography and writing documentating Palestinian heritage practices in exile, with my friend and teacher, Umm Omar.
Umm Omar in her 80th year and 70th olive harvest, Novemeber 2024
The 2024 harvest was compressed in Jordan because the rains came late a nd Gaza was sitting in our throats. After the Harvest Moon, the closest full moon to the Fall Equinox, you wait for the first rain to wash summer’s dust off the fruits before starting your harvest. We picked olives without the rain this time.
This farm belongs to Khalil, a family friend that inherited it from his father. Umm Omar, my friend and teacher, is 80 years old and left Hebron when she was six. The moment I greeted her, she raised her hands to the sky asking for rain to finally come. In Gaza, their November rains had already arrived, leaking through tents, knocking muscles with cold and gumming soaked blankets to the ground. It started sprinkling on us within an hour.
Umm Omar named her eldest son Omar, like my mom did, so they both have the same moniker - “mother of Omar”. She has caretaken for olive trees for 70 years, alongside her twin sister, their children, and now their grandchildren. She asks me multiple times if I’ve eaten yet before we start on the harvest, interrogating the quality of my breakfast to decide if she needed to make me another one. It takes 10 minutes to convince her I’ve eaten enough, but she calls her son over to start a cooking fire for her anyway. On that same day, the israeli-manufactured siege continued starving Gaza, and the United States vetoed another U.N. Security Council ceasefire resolution.
We start together on a younger tree, short at around 6 feet tall, but still bent over with the season’s fruit. There’s a few tools you can use for harvesting: quick hands, thin poles for shaking branches, or small musheyts (rakes, brushes). Umm Omar and her son joke that I’m the barber, because I use the rake while they use their hands. While Umm Omar starts work, I gather a bundle of slender branches securely in one palm and pull the rake through them. Bundles of olives jump off the branch and over my arms. You can feel them releasing their hold on the tree more than you can see them, and this sensation settles my jetlagged body immediately. Harvesting olives this way feels like brushing long hair free of its knots, like preparing it for braiding. On this young tree, this fills me with a vivid memory of combing my little cousin’s hair out after she had woken up with bedhead, loaded olive branches taking the place of sleep-jumbled ponytails.
Olives coming off the tree in bunches make an incredible sound on the tarp set beneath to catch them - each individual tiny “thunk” builds a rhythm, like rain. I hum, and Umm Omar sings a few lines, and when I ask her to teach me the song she says the only thing to know is to say “bismillah” with every olive I pick.
Thunk, bismillah, thunk, bismillah, thunk, bismillah.
I don’t know it that day, but three months later it will start to rain in Los Angeles, and I’ll hear the thunking olive rhythm exactly replicated on a plastic awning over the sidewalk. I’ll stop in place and stand in the cold to listen until it stops, each beat breathing the name of God back to me. After finishing with the branches, the tarp is covered in rivulets of olives that roll towards our every step like wild marbles. They hunker into the natural low points of the sheet, where the ground dips beneath it. We collect the plastic by its corners and bring the tarp into a bundle. It gets set aside, and we sit at the base of the tree to pick any remaining olives out of the soil. This takes twice as long as the branches, but we sit near each other to talk.
Umm Omar married her late husband for love. She has goats and wants to teach me about cheesemaking and birthing them in the spring, then how to make paper-thin bread on her saj. We share with each other our grief about Gaza, then we’re silent together for a long time. In the quiet, we hear everyone else - her grandchildren rustling the trees, her son pruning branches, the diesel humming in their tractor, calls and responses between them all. Umm Omar tells me not to leave a single seed behind in the dirt, and I don’t, turning over bits of gravel, dried olive leaves, and clumps of soil. The fruit are shriveled solid after falling to the ground earlier in the season and drying in the sun, but they’ll be rehydrated and pressed with the rest. Next to me, Umm Omar starts murmuring dhikr - remembrance of Allah - in sync with our motions, breathing the name of God onto every recovered olive. This process of picking the hardened olives out of the dirt with my fingers becomes distinctly like tasbih, the Islamic practice of counting prayer beads with the tip of your thumb. I join her dhikr, and we speak in overlap and echo, “bismillah-millah, bismillah-llah, bismillah-ah”. We uncover every tiny black and purple fruit.
Hend Salama Abo Helow, a Gazan writer and medical student, wrote about her family’s experience in the 2024 harvest, one of the only accounts I could find. Airstrikes on neighboring homes knocked her brothers out of olive trees, facturing one’s nose and wounding another badly. Constant bombing in their residential neighborhood had shaken many olives loose from their branches. The harvest season, usually a time of communal joy and skilled help, was truncated with terror, the martyrdom of neighbors, and the sound of drones. Without the usual helping hands and under the urgency of genocidal bombing, many of the olives on the ground were left behind.
Another day, I convinced my mom to come with me, promising she would just observe and drink tea. Umm Omar put her to work immediately. Mom didn’t mind too much - they joked about their shared name, chatting about marriages and children. Each time we finish a tree, Umm Omar’s son follows behind us and prunes it. When it’s time for lunch, we pile the cut olive branches with some straw and light them; their smoke smells like coriander seeds and chestnuts. He places a kettle into the fire and boils tea for us. We gather in the shade for a shared lunch with the other women, splitting falafel, hummus, bread, and the tea brewed on olive branches.
Khalil and I take the olives to the press. It starts raining properly on us, and this surfaces all the oil seeped into the asphalt, making the walkway as slick as ice. Massive nylon bags of olives are stacked outside the building, coming in from all the farms in the neighborhood, covering every inch of the asphalt lot. Olives cannot be stored fresh for more than a few days, and the end of the season is looming, so everyone has come to the press today. The backup is so long that they tell us not to bother waiting for our turn, but we want to watch the current press. As soon as someone hears that it’s my first time seeing the process, they walk me through every machine and intricacy, step by step; three different men in a row give me the same enthusiastic tour, taking me from the end and restarting with me at the beginning. Bags of olives are emptied into a grated well, then raised onto a conveyor belt and rinsed. This wash also separates the leaves and stems from the fruit. The lack of rain is showing in the rinsewater, which has gone thick as mud. The olives are ground up whole, warmed, and pumped as a river of rich paste through agitators, presses, and filters. The machines have operable windows in them, hinged top panels you can lift to peek down onto the stream of processing fruit. Each person showing me the machines holds one open for me, releasing olive perfume up into the air. It’s such a gorgeous smell that my jaw drops a little.
Khalil takes me to the back of the press, down slippery stairs, where filtered olive fiber is being jetted out of the building into a pile three stories high, steaming in the rain. Back inside, at the end of all these machines, is a faucet pouring out an endless flow of thick, finished oil into green-gold tanks. We chat with an elder couple in white plastic chairs, and Khalil greets his cousins, friends, and neighbors. Hend Salama Abo Helow’s brother Mahmoud, the only one of their family to go to the press in Gaza, was met by “an eerie quietness”.
Anyone who has done the work of a harvest will feel that there is knowing within olive trees, a tangible spirit that imparts onto you. I have never raised them from saplings, have never had my blood spilled for them, have never been shot at for picking them, so I defer to the words of the people that have.
“Their gnarled trunks, nurtured by generations and watered with the blood of innocents, mirror the Palestinian spirit: resilient, rooted, unwavering. Their branches reach outward, offering peace and a legacy of love, passed from one generation to the next. Their leaves bear silent witness to suffering and, one day, will carry the stories of liberation to those who come after us.” - Hend Salama Abo Helow
Black tea boiled over burning pruned olive branches
Tree prepared for harvest with a spread tarp to catch fruit
Olives sifted and brushed with hands to remove branches
Dried olives from the ground combined with fresh olives from trees, mixed to combine with green, purple olives. This year, the balance was off, and extra green olives were purchased from another farmer and added before pressing.