Remembering Home
Eid, a holiday that takes place twice a year, is accompanied, in my family, by the ritual of making the Palestinian baked good known as maamoul. My grandmother leads the process of making maamoul, inviting her daughters and granddaughters to her house, and passing this learned skill down to us. When she does, she preserves the Palestinian-ness of our family and ensures the longevity of this shared ritual and its associated memories.
My grandmother prepares all of the ingredients, including her signature spice, which gives the maamoul its flavour and scent. She stores the spices in one of many generic plastic containers, which has a ripped piece of paper for a label. Once the maamoul is baked, the scent of the spice fills the house and draws my entire extended family together. When this ritual is performed, Palestine exists for my multi-generational family. We are connected to both our individual and our collective Palestinian-ness through the performance of the ritual.
Despite the importance of this ritual, the tools that my grandmother and I use when we make maamoul lack specificity and value. The only specific tools that we have are the molds used for pressing the dough into its distinctive maamoul form. The molds are typically made of wood and are not considered valuable.
To monumentalize this important ritual, I designed new maamoul molds, made from Carrera Marble. Similar to Yasmeen’s story from the Palestinian designers’ workshop, my grandmother’s hand is her unit of measurement. The size of the large mold corresponds to the size of her hand. A scaled down mold is designed to fit the hand of her six-year-old granddaughter, who is being taught to use her own hand as a unit of measurement. The pair of molds—one large and one small—facilitate my grandmother’s need to pass this Palestinian ritual on to future generations, to instill a sense of Palestinian identity in us.
To accompany the molds, I also designed a spice jar. Like family members reuniting at Eid, it is made from interlocking rings, each layer dependent on the others. The rings recall the pattern of concentric rings, within the mold, which form the distinctive pattern of maamoul.
The designed artifacts reference the materiality of traditional monuments. Marble is historically used for monuments due to its endurance, precision, luxuriousness and ability to elevate the content of the monument itself. Likewise, the two molds and the spice jar I designed, are made from Carrera Marble to monumentalize my grandmother’s ritual. The durability of the material allows the tools to be passed down to future generations, ensuring the endurance of her Palestinian ritual and legacy.
