Non-fiction / Memoir
Missoula, MT
October 2013, four weeks
In December of 2007, after 2 1/2 years of living in the Palestinian Territories, Beth Baker was denied entry to Israel. Since there is no way to travel to Palestine except through Israel, her life in that region was effectively over. She was not allowed to return to pack up her apartment, kiss her boyfriend goodbye, or look once more at the steep hills north of Ramallah.
After she returned to the U.S., she thought and wrote about her experiences in Palestine, and began to consider other stories from her life. Baker’s maternal family’s early history in the Minnesota Territory seemed to roughly parallel the Palestinian experience of unsettlement and exile, except her ancestors were the unsettlers. The narrative she understood was one of hard work, tenacity, and rootedness, now seemed to have a dark understory. Palestinian diaspora and occupation still echoed inside her, but now it resonated with new meaning. It was closer to her own identity. It was closer to home. But she had inhabited both sides now. The descendant of settlers, Baker also lived under occupation and been exiled.
Questions swelled and subsided as she tried to make sense of that intense time. What does it mean to belong to place, and how is identity linked to land? What is owed to peoples who have been subject to historic injustices? Her memoir investigates these questions, and attempts to reconciled conflicting identities. the manuscript is composed of seventeen essays in various stages of completion. She used the residency to complete 4 essays.