The Sabr

Sabr — the Arabic name for the prickly pear, Opuntia ficus-indica — is also the word for patience. The plant is not native to Palestine; it arrived from the Americas by way of the Mediterranean and was taken up by Palestinian farmers as a living fence. Planted in dense rows it made a barrier that needed no maintenance, marked the edge of a plot or a garden or an olive grove, and produced fruit in high summer as a by-product. Photographs from Ottoman and Mandate Palestine show roads running between hedges of it.

That agricultural function is why it matters now. Cactus does not colonise a landscape in straight lines; as one man standing in the ruins of Bayt Nabala put it, cacti do not grow by themselves — somebody has to cultivate them. Where villages were emptied and demolished after 1948, the built fabric could be cleared and planted over, but the cactus hedges that had marked field boundaries and house plots kept growing, and kept the geometry. Researchers and returning families use them, with the surviving olive and fig trees, to locate the outline of a village on ground that has been re-covered by forest or park. The cemetery of Bayt Nabala — one of hundreds of villages depopulated in 1948 — is still ringed by cactus.

The plant’s second life is symbolic. It survives drought, roots in poor ground, is hard to remove, and grows back from a single cut pad; since 1948 it has served Palestinians as an emblem of endurance and of dispossession at once, appearing constantly in painting, poetry, and design. The pun is exact and everybody uses it. The fruit is sweet, the plant is armed, and its name means patience.

Sources

• Recreating a Palestinian village 75 years after the Nakba — Al Jazeera
• Olive tree, za’atar, cactus: Palestine’s symbolic plants — Middle East Eye