I’ve never been much of a fruit eater. So, to arrive in Palestine with little interest in fruit and leave with a reverence for it, feels significant. I hadn’t even tasted a fig until I lived there. One night, in an apartment full of friends, I mentioned I’d never had one. One of my friends gasped, disappeared into the kitchen, and returned with a fig in her hand. I let her feed it to me.
It tasted like soft, fleshy honey. A texture both fibrous and melt-in-your-mouth. The skin was tender and edible, the center a dusky pink. A fig is an inverted flower, pollinated by a wasp that squeezes through a tiny opening at its base, sometimes leaving parts of itself behind. There is a chapter of the Quran—Surah at-Teen,