Waste

By Shumin Tan

The Rind

Most mornings, I peel ginger. It’s become a kind of ritual—not quite sacred, but familiar in the way certain acts are when they repeat across time without fanfare. My fingers, still groggy with sleep, curl around the crooked root, its skin knobbly and flaking like sun-scorched bark. The blade glides gently under the surface, scraping away a thin layer to reveal sturdy, golden flesh beneath. The peel curls back on itself, loose and delicate. I used to throw it straight into the bin without thinking.

Lately, I’ve been saving the peels. Laying them out on a small plate by the sink to dry, letting them wrinkle a little in the sun. It felt wrong to discard them, another needless waste when everything already feels so precarious. Of course, I could skip peeling entirely—the skin is edible, a fact that makes the very act of peeling feel like waste. But habit insists otherwise: the hand reaching for the knife, the clean slice, the inheritance of how I was taught to prepare ginger.

And once the peels are there, I want to account for them—steep them in hot water, coax a second life: warming, medicinal. A cup of ginger tea made from the edges, from what almost didn’t make it. I like the simplicity: hot water, scraps. The taste is sharper than you’d expect. Spicy. Cleansing. Bitter if you’re not careful. There’s something stubborn about ginger—how even the refuse holds heat.

I admit I don’t always know what to do with the rest. The dregs left behind after boiling. The fibrous remains that no longer seemed useful, just spent. I hesitate again. I try saving them anyway. Wrote notes: Add to broth? Ferment, maybe? Most of the time, the mushy remnants rot in the back of my fridge or go, you guessed it, straight into the bin. I hate the ease with which my hands perform the throw.

Yet, ginger stays to haunt me. It reappears—in my kitchen, in my writing, sometimes, in the margins of my thoughts. In the gingerbread that scorches the tongue beneath the sweetness of molasses; in the gingersnaps that crack sharp between my teeth; in the hair-growth shampoo my mother massages into her scalp as if coaxing roots from roots; in the pickled slices that blush beside sushi on takeout dinners; and in the way it gathers at altars, rhizomes heaped like offerings, a shrine to its own persistence.

I first encountered Khaled Hourani’s Watermelon Flag late at night, scrolling—a practice that so often feels like waste, suddenly offering a kind of intellectual nourishment. The red slice glowed on my screen like a wound. After the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israeli military banned the Palestinian flag and the use of its colours—red, green, black, and white—in any combination. In art, clothing, books. Any type of imagery. In 1980, three Palestinian artists were arrested for exhibiting work that used these colours together. When an Israeli officer reportedly said that even a painting of a watermelon could be grounds for confiscation, the fruit—red flesh, green rind, black seed, white pith—became more than food. 

Khaled Hourani’s Watermelon Flag, created in 2007, draws from this story.[1] It reclaims the fruit as a symbol of everyday resistance—rooted not in the spectacle of armed struggle, but in survival. In Palestine, watermelon is cracked open on the hottest days, eaten with hands, passed around. In my own family, watermelon seeds—high in magnesium, iron, and protein—usually spit out, swept aside—are saved for their nutritional and medicinal value. My grandmother would crush them into a fine powder and press a thumbful against the ulcers in our mouth. By turning watermelon into a symbol of protest, Hourani captured something essential about defiance as a way of life: when you are stripped of language, of country, of even colour, you speak with whatever you still have, what remains. You speak with what you grow. What you eat. What some may well call waste.

Though I didn’t eat its pulp that day, I still tasted the watermelon through the screen. Consumed it not as fruit, but as image. I began to wonder if ginger could be that too—not a flag, maybe, but a method of redirecting attention. A method of practicing care. In Southeast Asian cultures and many others, ginger is a symbol of healing and resilience. It’s boiled to treat fever, chewed to calm nausea, rubbed raw onto bruises. Ginger may also have something to say about memory, presences that last. My mother recalls her grandmother collecting ginger peels and reincorporating them into fiery sambal and zhu cha vegetables, Malaysian curries and marinades. Peels that add extra flavour to her dishes and a scent that lingers on her fingertips long after she had finished eating. Perhaps like watermelon, ginger can be consumed in multiple ways, and if we let it, it could teach us something deeper about how to live in times of crisis.

So I let ginger morph, take form, give shape to my thinking—ginger not as food, not as waste, but a point of research, memory, and writing. Writing with ginger means writing with what burns. It asks us to look closer. To find connections. It’s an act of tending—returning to scraps with care, refusing to throw out what still carries heat.

Sometimes, the scale of it all—climate change, genocide, waste—can feel incredibly overwhelming. But a cup of ginger tea and some paper helps. To remain present in the discomfort. To stay with the trouble.[2] 

Yasmine Nasser Diaz, The Fire This Time (2), 2022. Collage, spray paint and glitter on paper, 40 x 30 inches.
Image description: Collaged elements that include flowers, a bright pink portrait bust, and a car with passengers burst outward in a firey explosion against a calm gold gradient ground.

 The Rot

There is nothing novel about a pile of leaves. No sunlight reaches this portion of the Nagarahole forest. I’d come here out of curiosity about conservation, about what it means to preserve life in a time of so much loss. I sit and stare: a collage of roast brown, moss green, and indigo burn. Leaves crumpled, holed, creased. A few still cling stubbornly to pigment, most have surrendered to muted brown. Bent twigs tangled in disarray. Decomposition is relentless. The final step of transformation—from scraps to soil—slips past the gaze of those who have been taught to see dead leaves as waste, not wonder.

Naturalists call this “plant litter,” the dead organic materials that have fallen to the ground. Litter, like the junk that piles up in construction sites and landfills. Like the plastic wrapping I rip from a fresh new book, which falls into the bin like bark, severed from a trunk. Or leaves finally giving in to gravity. Litter, as in the graveyard of gnawed straws, flimsy shopping bags, crushed plastic bottles—the unwanted waste of our daily lives lies. Litter, as in the clutter I carry inside—thoughts that rot before they cohere, instincts that die before action. The headlines, the heat, the haze. Gaza under siege. Carpet bombing. Emissions in megatonnes, numbers I CAN’T REFUSE TO HOLD. Gaza is gasping for air under white phosphorous. Oh Litter, how can I write, go on trips, go on with my life, live while homes are turned to dust? Microplastic in lungs, in fish, in placentas. Still I write polish sentences, while grief heaps like landfill in my chest. Boiling oceans. I cannot compost this guilt into use, I cannot recycle this despair into productivity. Pesticides in rice fields. Again and again, language fails me, and even that feels like a loss luxury.

The air is thick with damp and mildew. A lone red ant crawls across the ridged terrain, its body flexing with each precise step. It weaves past fallen twigs, mandibles gripping a leaf shard, tireless in its pursuit of minerals. Nothing in its path is discarded, only gathered, repurposed. To them, everything has use—everything feeds the future.

In watching the ant, in looking at the leaf litter, I begin to see: there is no concept of waste in the nonhuman world. Everything transforms. The leaf litter beneath is not debris. It is a living archive, soil in the making, mulch for new roots. Nothing is excess.

And yet, I’ve only accepted “waste” into my vocabulary because it has become an inherent part of my existence, evidenced by the ripped bag of Lays chips in my kitchen, the leftover food growing cold on my plate, the convenience of flushing toilets, the steady hum of garbage trucks disappearing my household refuse. Over the course of my life so far, the idea—that waste is a natural byproduct of human activity, a residue of productivity—has been etched deeply into my languages, my thinking, and thus my doing. When we use things, there is waste. When we throw things, there is waste. It is a cycle that feels as natural as breath—but it is not.

By learning from the forest floor, it becomes possible to question this inheritance. Waste is not inevitable. So, how can I change my relationship to what has been knowingly or unknowingly treated as waste? What violence have I carried out or allowed in my blind acceptance of disposal? If a single root can escape erasure, what possibilities open up for the rest? I return leftover ginger to the soil of my potted plants—a quiet undoing of what I would have thrown away without thought.

Waste is not just personal; it is the collective sum of human actions, marked by market failures, design flaws, by convenience made habitual. It rusts along highway railings, seeps through forgotten tracts of landfills, drifts in oceans to suffocate turtles. Waste renders erasure permissible, destruction routine. We discard what slows us down, what we don’t like, or what we tire of, and then proceed to say, we don’t have enough. We need more. Waste justifies extraction. Forests flattened into ‘wastelands,’ made way for industry. Rivers dammed. Mountains gutted. Oceans imagined as empty, so we feel entitled to fill them with all the things we don’t want to deal with. Greenhouse gases released as byproducts of energy production, industrial processes, deforestation. Waste from livestock farming. Emissions and pollutants from planes transporting weapons. Waste is convenience turned ideology, entitlement in material form. Out of sight, out of consequence.

This logic of disposability operates not just at the level of individuals, but of entire communities. The gradual seepages, accumulations, and forgetting of waste embody what Rob Nixon calls slow violence.[3] Unlike conventional violence, which one may expect to be immediate and horrific, slow violence unfolds over time and space: through toxic drifts, deforestation, carcinogenic exposure, radioactive contamination. It is violence that is often denied the status of violence altogether. As Nixon argues, this violence disproportionately targets the poor—those least responsible for environmental harm and least equipped to resist it—yet resist they do. Landfills, incinerators, and chemical plants are rarely built near the wealthy. They are sited where land is cheap, voices are ignored, and lives have been labelled expendable.

People, too, can be made waste. Their labour invisibilised. Their voices buried beneath rubble. And if they are seen, they are dehumanised—called animals, parasites, terrorists, collateral damage, so that the act of murdering them becomes not only justifiable, but necessary. Entire populations sacrificed to the logics of profit and resource extraction—where their health, safety, and dignity are systemically subordinated to industrial interests. They are stripped of their history and assigned no future.

Nowhere is this more immediately visible than in Gaza. The livestreamed violence—the mutilated bodies, explosions, burials, and everyday struggle for survival—circulates in real time across social media, and has been for the past two years, a visibility rarely afforded to other regions facing similar logics of violence (but one constantly undermined and besieged by the tech companies in collusion with the Zionist entity, who shadow-ban, blacklist, censor, and block the content of Palestinians and their allies). Palestinians are not just displaced but annihilated—made disposable by Israel’s settler-colonial project, a project backed by countries and entities with interests in Palestine’s land and resources, in sustaining the military-industrial complex, and shoring up geopolitical control in the wider region. As Noura Erakat stated at the UN on the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, “Genocide is the logical outcome of any project to conquer and settle the land upon which another people live, unless it is checked.”[4] The genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza is not a tragedy of fate; it is the result of deliberate conquest, resource control, and dehumanisation—processes that, however impersonal they seem, are comprised of and carried out by individuals operating within global systems of power.

Since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed genocidal violence upon Gaza’s entire population under the pretext of fighting terrorism. US and Israeli officials continue to treat the events of this operation as a license for industrial-scale killing. Homes, hospitals, and schools lie in ruin. Millions of tons of rubble from Israeli bombs now blanket the Strip; the air is thick with dust and ash. Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water infrastructure, its flooding of Gaza’s neighbourhoods with raw sewage, its salination of Gaza’s groundwater, and its targeting of Gaza’s farmland are part of its strategy to make life impossible in Gaza. Gaza is being made uninhabitable.

This is what Nixon terms “displacement without moving,” where people remain on their land but are systematically stripped of the means to live. Palestinians in Gaza are not only enduring bombardment—alongside raids and abductions, sniper fire, and AI targeting systems—but the long, slow violence of infrastructural degradation: hospitals deprived of electricity, families drinking contaminated waters, farmers unable to tend poisoned land. These forms of control are not enacted by Israel alone. The weapons and logistics enabling them are manufactured, financed, and coordinated by a network of countries, corporations, and organisations, all complicit in creating and maintaining conditions that make life unlivable. Palestinians are being suffocated—bodily, socially, and ecologically—trapped within a system designed to stifle their capacity to live.

To center Gaza in this essay is not to reduce it to an example, but to confront the violent systems I inhabit that have allowed an entire people to be deliberately erased. Stopping Israel from continuing to commit genocide is most urgent, yet dismantling the global machinery of destruction that empowers this regime requires extensive mapping—tracing actors, networks, motivations—akin to the way ginger calls for looking closely, noticing connections. In Gaza, disposability is not a side effect—it is a system built into the very design of life. 

Yasmine Nasser Diaz, The Fire This Time (3), 2022. Collage, spray paint and glitter on paper, 40 x 30 inches.
Image description: Centrally positioned colllaged elements show the back of a female figure obscured by tropical foliage and flowers gazing at a suspension bridge that dispappears into the horizon at sunset, all against a calm gold gradient ground.

The Refusal

Ginger is banned in Gaza. Alongside cardamom, nutmeg, and sage, it appeared on Israel’s list of restricted items from 2007 to 2010 as part of its ongoing blockade of Gaza.[5] The reasoning for this specific restriction is not entirely clear, which makes me wonder how something as ordinary as a spice becomes marked as a threat. The absurdity feels deliberate: to limit not just weapons, but food. What is denied is not only sustenance but culture and memory. Ginger, cardamom, and cumin—spices that carry Gaza’s recipes and remedies—enriches daily life, affirms identity, renews historical bonds. A root is made terror. The kitchen becomes a battlefield. 

In October 2023, Israel escalated its decades-long blockade—which fluctuated in severity over the years—into a total siege, cutting access to food, water, electricity, fuel, and humanitarian aid. For two weeks, as the Israeli army began relentlessly bombing Gaza, Palestinians were left to survive with what they had. The limited aid Israel allowed in from October 21 onwards was insufficient to meet the needs of everyone in Gaza. A year later, from 6 October 2024 until the ceasefire in January 2025, Palestinians in northern Gaza faced renewed siege by the occupation’s army, with aid again being deliberately restricted.[6] The easing and tightening of the blockade in Gaza are not spontaneous decisions but calculated moves within a broader Zionist project of expansionism and extermination.

Starvation is not a consequence of war; it is policy and weapon. Israel reimposed a total blockade on 2 March 2025, while a ceasefire was still in effect, then escalated with heavy bombardment and airstrikes, driving Gaza toward famine.[7] The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—backed by Israel and the US—opened its “aid distribution” sites on May 26 2025, yet these sites functioned as death traps, where GHF contractors have opened fire on Palestinians who gathered to get basic supplies. Intended to bypass the UN as the main supplier of aid, the GHF forced millions to rely on only a handful of locations to try and obtain food, most near Gaza’s southern border.[8] Humanitarian relief has been transformed into a mechanism of control, coercion, and collective punishment—a tool for genocide. Communities in Northern Gaza faced severely restricted aid due to Israel's repeated efforts in blocking the Zikim crossing, which, at the time of writing, it has yet to halt.[9] [10] In the south, where Palestinians were told to flee, Israeli airstrikes and drone attacks devastated overcrowded shelters and so-called safe zones.[11] Despite the announcement of a supposed ceasefire in October 2025, conditions on the ground remain dire. Reports from humanitarian organizations describe widespread hunger, disease, and displacement—symptoms of siege that persist beyond the language of truce.[12] A ceasefire, even a true one, cannot restore safety when the right to nourishment itself remains under assault.

“What is the recipe against starvation? What is the antidote to violence, death, deprivation?” Lila Sharif asks.[13] How does the world not only hold Israel accountable to the terms of a ceasefire, but also end all of its efforts to exterminate the Palestinian people and colonize Palestinian land? Noura Erakat makes it clear: military intervention—not words or resolutions—can stop and prevent genocide. States must impose an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel, sever all diplomatic support, and withdraw every form of complicity while it continues to wage genocidal violence against the Palestinian people—violence that persists even during so-called ceasefires, through the policing of Gaza’s borders and the deliberate strangling of aid. Coercive force, combined with economic and political pressure, must be sustained until the machinery of settler colonialism is dismantled and the Palestinian people have full sovereignty over their land. Anything less is the continuation of genocide by another name.

And yet, even as these systemic levers exist, I sit with a stubborn weight. I chew, I swallow, I spit out the black seed of a watermelon and watch it land like a pellet. It’s obscene, really. To taste sweetness while someone else’s mouth dries. The guilt is not only about the distance that protects me—it is about complicity. It is living insulated in systems that I benefit from: the plastic I toss, the scrolling, the forgetting. I want to believe guilt means I care, but sometimes it feels like just another indulgence. A performance of awareness that changes nothing. I’m not exempt. I’m implicated. And no amount of ginger tea will cleanse that.

Acknowledging my complicity is necessary, but it is not sufficient. While I sit with guilt and reflection, Palestinians in Gaza cook—not only because food will keep them alive in between airstrikes, but because cooking insists: we have not yielded. Speaking, writing, planting, humming—these are acts through which life asserts itself in a space designed for erasure. The people of Gaza refuse to give in and die, many refuse to evacuate even when offered a way out, as Al-Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif did before Israel murdered him,[14] they refuse to surrender to oppression or accept Gaza as ruin, insisting on making it habitable as long as they remain. Palestinians improvise under severe scarcity, stretching rationed oil, powdered milk, and limited water, baking bread in tabun ovens. These acts echo Alaa Alqaisi's testimony, “I persist. I speak. I write. Because silence would be a deeper form of defeat.”[15]

In Alia Yunis’ “Recipe for Being Palestinian,” the kitchen becomes a site of refusal. “Rise like our bread to speak for those who have no food,” she writes, “Experiment with maqluba until it stands upside down perfectly.”[16] This is not domestic nostalgia being described—it is defiance. Maqluba, flipped dramatically before serving, becomes a metaphor for survival: the hope that a dish, like people, can emerge whole. That it can stand, intact, after total inversion, imagines a people who—despite being upended—still refuse to collapse. To stand is not just to endure, but to assert presence, to hold form.

The poem offers no healing for the readers outside of Gaza, but it returns to the bodily labour of cooking as resistance. Each instruction—“rise like our bread,” “use olive oil many times a day” —functions as an imperative. These are not merely culinary steps but acts of cultural transmission and defiance. In a world where the Palestinian identity is criminalised, such instructions demand to be followed. The repeated use of olive oil—a native staple—becomes a method of refusing erasure. To eat is to remain. To season food is to season memory. When Yunis writes, “soak knafa cheese until is sweet enough to counter the aftertaste of tears,” she is pointing to sweetness as a way to hold grief without being undone by it. By the end of the poem, Yunis offers no comforting sense that the grief is resolved. Instead, the poem is powerful because it doesn’t offer false closure. It teaches us how to live with the sharpness of loss, namely by taking action and sustaining life where hunger threatens.

Amidst escalating genocidal violence, culinary practices resist the occupation’s ecological and political violence. Recipes made from native herbs and foraged fruits root people to land and history. To cook is to assert belonging. In Gaza today, communal kitchens like the Gaza Soup Kitchen emerge not from scarcity, but from a fierce ethics of care. What begins with a single pot feeds hundreds. In Beit Lahia, the now-martyred Mahmoud Almadhoun and his friends started with just four pots and a fire. That first day, they served 120 families.[17] Alia Yunis’ poem speaks to the same collective resilience: “Hummus and humanity sound similar in English,” she writes, “And they are better shared.” The line collapses the space between food and feeling, nourishment and kinship. Hummus, like humanity, is plural by nature—meant for many hands, not hoarded but heaped. To feed and forest is to hold onto each other. An act of sharing defies the systems that try to isolate and starve. To cook under siege is to resist genocide—bowl by bowl, together.

“We are all Palestinians,” is a common call repeated across the world since this phase of the genocide started. Mohammed El-Kurd warns, however, that the phrase must “manifest materially”—in how we live, who we align with, what we refuse. “Gaza cannot stand alone in sacrifice.”[18] For those of us outside Gaza, especially non-Palestinians, one way to begin embodying our commitment to Palestine is to, as Yunis writes, “Fold into conversation with those who only know us as terrorists or hummus experts.” We can shoulder the responsibility of this engagement in order to confront complicity, that of ours and others, and challenge the propaganda that continues to manufacture consent for the slaughter of the Palestinian people, and with them, our collective humanity. 

Ginger grows back from scraps. A stub, a shard—discarded by most, but enough to begin again. The piece you almost threw away. Ginger insists that waste isn’t the end. It multiplies from what’s left behind. Like writing, it may not cure—but it heats from inside. So does resistance. Colonial violence discards: land, people, history. It calls them waste. In Gaza, where even rubble is repurposed and tended to, where meals are made from little and shared with many, care refuses the logic of disposal. Palestinian kitchens know this well. Under siege, nothing is thrown out. This care is insurgent—rhizomatic, stubborn, and spreading. From fragments, futures are made.

Ginger may not be the reason someone turns their attention to Gaza, but it shows how the everyday—especially what we usually call waste—can become a way to question what we value, to reconceptualise what we care for. The personal becomes political when multiplied across millions. Thus, to stand with Palestine is to multiply refusal: to compose what the empire would discard, and grow from it, and to ensure nothing, and no one, is discarded.

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Notes

[1] “Subjective Atlas of Palestine & Watermelon Flag.” Kunsthal Gent, 3 Feb.-1 Jun. 2024, https://kunsthal.gent/agenda/subjective-atlas-of-palestine-watermelon-flag.

[2] Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Cthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

[3] Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.

[4] Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Statement by Professor Noura Al Shraydeh, Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied Since 1967, 15 May 2025.” United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 15 May 2025, www.un.org/unispal/document/statement-professor-noura-15may25.

[5] Bayoumi, Moustafa, and Mona Chalabi. “Toys, Spices, Sewing Machines: The Items Israel Banned From Entering Gaza.” The Guardian, 24 June 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/24/gaza-blockade-israel-banned-items. 

[6] “A Timeline of Israel’s Weaponisation of Aid to Gaza.” Al Jazeera, 25 Mar. 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/25/a-timeline-of-israels-weaponisation-of-aid-to-gaza.

[7] World Health Organization. “Famine Confirmed for First Time in Gaza.” World Health Organization, 22 Aug. 2025, www.who.int/news/item/22-08-2025-famine-confirmed-for-first-time-in-gaza.

[8] Asi, Yara., Kenney-Shawa, Tariq. “The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation: Aid as a Weapon.” Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, 5 Aug. 2025, https://al-shabaka.org/policy-labs/the-gaza-humanitarian-foundation-aid-as-a-weapon/.

[9] Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). “IPC Alert: Worst-case Scenario of Famine Unfolding in the Gaza Strip.” Countries in Focus Archive—Issue 133, 30 Sep. 2025,  www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/countries-in-focus-archive/issue-133/en/.

[10] United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “Gaza Humanitarian Response | Situation Report No. 16.” Situation Reports, 7 Nov. 2025, https://www.ochaopt.org/content/gaza-humanitarian-response-situation-report-no-16. 

[11] United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “Humanitarian Situation Update #307 | Gaza strip [EN/HE].” Publications, 23 Jul. 2025, https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/humanitarian-situation-update-307-gaza-strip.

[12] Humanti Project. “Israel Has Violated the Ceasefire 36 Times in 5 Days.” Instagram, 17 Oct. 2025, https://www.instagram.com/p/DP4OMF6grU8.

[13] Sharif, Lila. “Gaza Used to Be a Thriving Spice Capital. Now There is Neither Bread Nor Safety.” Truthout, 20 Nov. 2023, truthout.org/articles/gaza-used-to-be-a-thriving-spice-capital-now-there-is-neither-bread-nor-safety/.

[14] Rezeq, Habi A. “Anas al-Sharif’s Mother: My Son Was Invited to Qatar, but He Refused to Leave Gaza’.” Middle East Eye, 14 Aug. 2025, www.middleeasteye.net/news/anas-al-sharifs-mother-my-son-was-invited-qatar-he-refused-leave-gaza.

[15] Alqaisi, Alaa. “Beneath the Howl of Hunger.” ArabLit, 23 Jul. 2025, arablit.org/2025/07/23/beneath-the-howl-of-hunger/.

[16] Yunis, Alia. “Recipe for Being Palestinian.” ADI Magazine, Oct. 2023, adimagazine.com/articles/recipe-for-being-palestinian/.

[17] Gupta, Nilanjana, and Abdel El Rahman, Rakan. “GoFundMe‑backed Gaza Soup Kitchen Struggles to Feed Starving Palestinians as Supplies Run Out.” The National, 26 July 2025, www.thenationalnews.com/news/us/2025/07/25/gaza-soup-kitchen-famine-supplies-gofundme/.

[18] El-Kurd, Mohammed. Perfect Victims and The Politics of Appeal. Haymarket Books, 2025.

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Shumin Tan is an educator who enjoys writing on the side. She writes personal essays and poetry that wander through questions of home, language, and identity. A third-culture kid at heart, she studied Literature and Theater at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her work has found homes in Singapore Unbound, Jom Magazine, and at the European Cultural Center.

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