The Land in Our Bones

Plantcestral Herbalism and Healing Cultures from Syria to the Sinai--Earth-based pathways to ancestral stewardship and belonging in diaspora

by Layla K. Feghali

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Pub Date 13 Feb 2024 | Archive Date 1 Feb 2024

North Atlantic Books

Health, Mind & Body | Multicultural Interest | Outdoors & Nature

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Description

*Instant USA Today Best Seller*

A profound and searching exploration of the herbs and land-based medicines of Lebanon and Cana’an—a vital invitation to re-member our roots and deepen relationship with the lands where we live in diaspora

Tying cultural survival to earth-based knowledge, Lebanese ethnobotanist, sovereignty steward, and cultural worker Layla K. Feghali offers a layered history of the healing plants of Cana’an (the Levant) and the Crossroads (“Middle East”) and asks into the ways we become free from the wounds of colonization and displacement.

Feghali remaps Cana’an and its crossroads, exploring the complexities, systemic impacts, and yearnings of diaspora. She shows how ancestral healing practices connect land and kin—calling back and forth across geographies and generations and providing an embodied lifeline for regenerative healing and repair.

Anchored in a praxis she calls Plantcestral Re-Membrance, Feghali asks how we find our way home amid displacement: How do we embody what binds us together while holding the ways we’ve been wrested apart? What does it mean to be of a place when extraction and empire destroy its geographies? What can we restore when we reach beyond what’sbeen lost and tend to what remains? How do we cultivate kinship with the lands where we live, especially when migration has led us to other colonized territories?

Recounting vivid stories of people and places across Cana’an, Feghali shares lineages of folk healing and eco-cultural stewardship: those passed down by matriarchs; plants and practices of prenatal and postpartum care; mystical traditions for spiritual healing; earth-based practices for emotional wellness; plant tending for bioregional regeneration; medicinal plants and herbal protocols; cultural remedies and recipes; and more.

The Land in Our Bones asks us to reclaim the integrity of our worlds, interrogating colonization and defying its “cultures of severance” through the guidance of land, lineage, and love. It is an urgent companion for our times, a beckoning call towards belonging, healing, and freedom through tending the land in your own bones.

*Instant USA Today Best Seller*

A profound and searching exploration of the herbs and land-based medicines of Lebanon and Cana’an—a vital invitation to re-member our roots and deepen relationship...

A Note From the Publisher

For more information or for a physical copy, please email publicity@northatlanticbooks.com

Advance Praise

“The Land in Our Bones momentously affirms forgotten legacies of herbal and ancestral healing while potentiating urgent life affirming visions for the future. By replacing dominant European approaches to Middle East/North African histories with restorative generational wisdoms, this book will transform our knowledge systems and the ways we reckon with land, life, and each other.”

—DR. NADINE NABER, author and professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois

“As a clinical herbalist and member of the American Herbalist Guild, I have been waiting my entire life for an herbal book like this; a book in which the information shared about medicinal plants is firmly rooted in their historical, cultural, ecological, and mythological context. Feghali invites us to be in relationship with the plants, places and stories which shape the culture of SWANA herbalism. Although this book is centered on the herbal traditions of Canaan, this book will inspire people of all backgrounds to recognize our own plantcestors.. . . This book is a masterpiece and an essential contribution to the canon of books on herbal medicine. It is a gift first and foremost to the people of the SWANA region, especially to those living in diaspora. Yet this book also is a tremendous gift to all herbalists, gardeners, and plant lovers of all cultural backgrounds.”

—ATAVA GARCIA SWIECICKI, MA, RH (AHG), author of The Curanderx Toolkit

“The Land in Our Bones momentously affirms forgotten legacies of herbal and ancestral healing while potentiating urgent life affirming visions for the future. By replacing dominant European...