“Speak, Bird, Speak: Seeds, Birds, and Memory”
When artist Areej Huniti visited Umeå as part of the IASPIS residency, I attended her talk at the artist-run gallery Verkligheten and spent time in conversation with her during her stay. We spoke about the militarisation of birds, the destruction of the Palestinian seed bank, and how stories and seeds travel under conditions of control. Her reflections stayed with me and became one of the starting points for Speak Bird Speak.
“Speak, bird, speak again,” begins an old Palestinian folktale — a phrase that feels like both invocation and endurance, a way of saying: keep going, even when the story is broken.
I live in northern Sweden, surrounded by birch, pine, and spruce, where magpies, jays, and nutcrackers cache seeds through the winter. I’ve never seen Palestine in person, only through what others record and share. The conflict may seem distant, yet war is no longer far from here — technology, media, and climate make its effects immediate. Food systems, migration, and ecological loss are all connected; what happens to a seed bank in Hebron links to broader patterns of control and survival that shape landscapes everywhere.
In the summer of 2025, Israeli forces demolished the Palestinian Seed Multiplication Unit in Hebron, the country’s only national seed bank. It had safeguarded more than seventy native crop varieties — grains, legumes, herbs, vegetables — all adapted to the dry soil and long memory of the West Bank. For decades, it stood as Palestine’s only national seed bank, a living archive of continuity. Its destruction was not only the loss of a building, but the interruption of a cycle: the destruction of what allowed people to feed themselves on their own terms.
Seeds are not inert. They carry adaptation, stories, and instructions written through generations of care and observation. When a seed bank is destroyed, what is lost is not just food security but a living record of how to inhabit a place — how to belong through cultivation rather than control.
Across the same hills where that seed bank once stood, Eurasian Jays (Garrulus glandarius atricapillus), Hooded Crows (Corvus cornix), Rock Nuthatches (Sitta neumayer), and Nutcrackers (Nucifraga caryocatactes) bury acorns and pine nuts for winter. Most will never be retrieved. Forgotten caches sprout new trees: oak, pine, almond. This process, known as scatter-hoarding, unfolds through caching and shifting ground. Some caches are never recovered as the landscape changes, and from those buried seeds, new forests grow.
Through the act of caching, their scattered hoards create future forests. They act without map or plan, trusting the land to remember what they forget. The forest grows from loss — a model of resilience grounded not in control but in participation.
For humans, this kind of living-with is harder to accept. We tend to read error as failure, forgetting as weakness. But the more-than-human world functions otherwise. In the context of Palestine — where destruction, displacement, and restriction fragment life — this ecological truth becomes political. What if error itself could be a form of resistance? What if scattering were a way to endure?
To remain in damaged worlds is to work within uncertainty — to keep tending when there is no guarantee of return. The seed bank and the jay both hold this logic: the knowledge that regeneration depends on care distributed across space and time, on a network of small, persistent acts.
In Palestinian folk tradition, the pomegranate is a symbol of memory and abundance. In one story, each seed holds an ancestor’s soul — a piece of the land’s remembering. (From Ibrahim Muhawi & Sharif Kanaana, Speak, Bird, Speak Again, 1989.) The tale reminds us that to scatter is not to lose, but to multiply presence.
So when the Hebron seed bank was reduced to rubble, the memory it held did not end; it dispersed — into farmers’ pockets, into diaspora collections, into fragments of soil that may still germinate. Like the forgotten acorns of the jay, some of those seeds will rise again.
To stay with such a world is not an act of optimism but of entanglement. It means acknowledging that life continues through cracks, that persistence often looks like error, and that resistance can take the form of quiet replanting.
The bird’s scattered memory, the farmer’s saved seed, the folk story told and retold — all are gestures of continuity within interruption.
To speak, to scatter, to stay — this is how the land remembers. And how resistance takes root.
“Speak, bird, speak again — for the land remembers what we bury.”
Notes & Sources
- Hebron seed bank destruction: Friends of the Earth International, Aug 2025; The New Arab, “Israel Destroys Palestinian Seed Bank Facilities in West Bank,” July 2025.
- Scatter-hoarding ecology: Garrulus glandarius atricapillus, Corvus cornix, and Nucifraga caryocatactes documented as key seed dispersers in Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Europe (Bossema 1979; Haidar & Walid 2018).
- Folktales: Ibrahim Muhawi & Sharif Kanaana, Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales (University of California Press, 1989); “Hab al-Rumman / Pomegranate Seeds.”
- Conceptual frame: ecological persistence and multispecies continuity — seeing error, dispersal, and persistence as active forms of resistance.