The project:

They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful is a memoir about the inheritance of exile, the burden of memory, and the slow, unrelenting work of returning to a place you’ve never been. Born to Palestinian-Syrian-American parents, Elena Dudum was raised on stories that felt more like warnings—her father’s voice always pressing against forgetting, always insisting they remember. She tried, for years, to escape that weight. But when she finally travels to Palestine—the land her grandparents fled in 1948—the emotional distance she built collapses. This book follows Dudum’s journey from silence to speech, from assimilation to self-recognition, as she navigates growing up in Zionist spaces, confronting institutional gaslighting in academia, and reconciling fear with pride. Told across four acts with interludes grounded in her father’s personal archive, the memoir becomes an act of survival—not just of memory, but of language and lineage. A record that insists: we were always here.
 

From They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful:

My father would prefer I let it go. In fact, he would prefer I not write about Palestine. I tell him that I’m not the first Palestinian to write about Palestine and its colonialist history, the way it’s been stomped over by first the Ottomans and then the British, only to be served up, yet again, to another imperial power, Zionism.

“Yes,” he’ll say, “like a piece of Swiss cheese––cut up over and over again by new Israeli settlements!” He’s used this image before; I nod as I always do. I tell him that other writers, writers with accolades and titles behind their names, have written about Palestine. Others before me have already unveiled the truths of Zionism’s history and the fabricated, propaganda-filled narratives that fill textbooks and Wikipedia pages. I tell him that people are changing and that they know better now—that globalization has helped connect human experience and thus fostered empathy.

Sometimes, this feels true.

But perhaps he would prefer I not write about Palestine because, if I write about Palestine, I’ll learn more about Palestine, and if I learn more about Palestine I’ll be even angrier than I already am. Family and friends tell me anger can only take me so far—I already know no one wants to listen, let alone trust someone when they’re angry.

My father tells me that, when he finds himself awake in the middle of the night, he prays for all of us. I think he mostly just talks to himself; he does this during waking hours as well. I’m beginning to talk to myself, too. I do it when I walk down the street. I hold imaginary conversations with students who turn in their papers late, roommates who request I take out the trash when I’m not home, or friends who ask me to plan their baby shower when I have no interest in doing such a thing. Sometimes I’ll even make up problems with people just to talk myself through what I might say. Most often, I talk to myself about Palestine. I prepare for conversations that have since passed, opportunities where I could have brought forth truths and facts and histories instead of the stumbling confusion that I typically resort to. “Is history not constructed and defined by political attitudes and agendas?” I ask to the air, my invisible opponent who sits on the stand. Like a lawyer, I prepare my case, the questions that may be asked, and what rebuttal I’ll have to make—it’s become my own version of prayer.

My father would prefer I not write about Palestine. I tell him no one will hurt me, I’m not writing anything new. What I don’t tell him is that, even when I’m not writing about Palestine, I’m still writing about Palestine and around Palestine and for Palestine, trying to make sense of what its erased coordinates are supposed to mean to someone like me––two generations removed. Does it count if the physical removal was not my choice or didn’t happen to me? Can it hurt all the same?"

I can’t stop writing about Palestine because even though Palestine lost its place on maps, it never lost its place in me.