Herstory.

"Where are all the women?"
I asked my father, as I looked at the family tree he had just helped me complete for my college assignment.

"We don't put their names on here"
He answered casually.

"Why not?"

"Because they leave the house and get married, they don't carry the family name. They join another family."

I looked at the tree of my ancestors, the women erased from history, knowing that following this custom, I too would be erased someday too, forgotten.

This same man who bragged to the world that my name would be written in books one day, the same man who corrected people when they called him "Abu Nader" & told them, no, " I am Abu Noura, she is my first born child"…
Even as much as he respected and loved me, my mother, his nieces and his sisters... even he was not immune to all of the customs that had been passed down to him.

When my father died, my uncle (his brother) wrote out an obituary to send out to our neighborhood in Lebanon. He sent it to me on Facebook and as I read it I felt pain come into my body

"Ghassan Abdullatif, son of Muhieddine, brother of Nazih and Rabih. Father of Nader, Nour, and Ahmed."

No mention of his mother, or his eight sisters, his wife, or me, his daughter.

Erased.

I asked my uncle why he didn't include our names and he said “That's just how it is, you wouldn't understand it.”

He's right, I didn't understand it.

And also, in a world riddled with subtle and not so subtle ways of erasing the feminine legacy, I understand it.

For She has been calling me since childhood
To follow her sweet breadcrumbs, to hear her stories, to sing her songs. To keep her legacy alive.

In a world of His-story She has called to me over and over again.

I have traveled the world in search of Her stories, the stories of our grandmothers, the customs, the wisdom. The brilliance that was not guarded in textbooks but rather in our wombs.
To know the feminine legacy deep within me that weaves all of existence together.

Follow Her stories and you will know the whole truth of the people & the culture.

You will not only know His-story but Her-story too.
You will know Our story.