Sarah Abu-Sharar with Cassie Norton from Sarah’s collective, Music Story Studio. Photo courtesy of Sarah Abu-Sharar.
Emma Cieslik profiles storyteller Sarah Abu-Sharar, who uses traditional Palestinian fairytales and humour as a vital act of cultural survival against erasure and destruction.
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In the first week of November 2023, almost a month after the destruction of Gaza began, storyteller Sarah Abu-Sharar gathered in a small room. There were no windows, and the paint was chipping off the gray walls. The room was a rectangle, barely fitting the 19 children who had gathered for the Palestinian storytelling session. Although the session ended with each child rebuilding Gaza out of clay, Abu-Sharar walked away deeply sad. The room itself reminded her of Gaza, of children standing on a cracking foundation.
In “Palestine as a whole but especially Gaza,” Abu-Sharar said, ”people are trapped in a small, rectangular, overcrowded room with no windows, and we hear bombs coming from outside. We can’t see them because there are no windows.” What is missing is the beauty of Palestinian culture, the rich smells of its food, the colors of traditional garments and art, and the humor of Palestinian folk and fairytales.
Therefore, Abu-Sharar, a Palestinian and Croatian storyteller based in Toronto, Canada, takes her role seriously. Often wearing colorfully embroidered dresses and weaving Palestinian fairytales with her voice, Abu-Sharar has witnessed the power of storytelling first-hand. In the past three years, many of her planned storytelling gigs have been cancelled because of anti-Palestinian hate. She has lost commissioned events she earned, but she continues on, knowing the importance of her work.
A Palestinian and Croatian beginning in Libya
Like many Palestinians, Abu-Sharar grew up in the Diaspora. Her father was born in the West Bank on January 31, 1948, shortly after the occupation of Palestine, also called the Nakba.
“My father didn’t tell us fairy tales,” Abu-Sharar said. Instead, he told us stories about living inside occupied Palestine. “His belief in magic was diminished by the occupation and by the hardships of his childhood that was really far from being a fairytale life.” While he did not experience the Nakba personally–he is from the West Bank, he did interact with those who lived through it at the nearby Al-Faawar refugee camp.
He left to study in Yugoslavia a year before the Naksa, the 1967 Palestinian exodus. At the time, he didn’t know that he would only be able to return to Jordan, not his home country, because of the British Mandate. Once in Yugoslavia, he learned the language fluently, and despite studying to be an engineer, he moved to work as a translator in a Libyan hospital as part of an exchange program. Her father met her aunt–and later her mother–while they were both working at the hospital.
Sarah was born in Libya and then moved to Jordan with her parents and brother because they could not return to Palestine. It was in Jordan that she learned to walk, before they moved to Yugoslavia and then back to Libya, where she and her family survived the 1986 bombing by the Americans.
Threatened by mounting violence, she, her mother, and her brother moved back to Yugoslavia, leaving behind her father, who visited them every summer. As her father sensed a surmounting war in the Balkans, he applied to immigrate with his family to Canada. Sarah has lived there ever since she was nine years old, one of millions of Palestinians living in Diaspora around the world.
“As a child, as a teenager,” she explained, “I always felt that as a mixed person I was a genocide attempted but unsurrendered. I have to make the decision not to allow myself to be surrendered to the genocide, not necessarily by having Palestinian kids with a Palestinian,” but by using her voice to advocate for Palestinian survival and resistance. She first started doing activism at the age of 15, incorporating popular theater into protests.
Years later, she pursued social work, earning a feminist counseling diploma and Bachelor of Social Work all the while continuing popular theater as a form of resistance. After the Balkan War, she earned her Social Work University practicum at the Center for Women Victims of War.
Returning to storytelling, professionally and generationally
Ten years passed, and as she reminisces, “You can get out of the arts, but you can’t really take the art out of an artist.” So she decided to pursue a master’s degree in expressive art therapy at a university in Switzerland. At 30, she re-enrolled in school and took her first official course in storytelling—a diploma requirement. In the course, she told the story of the 1986 bombing of Libya and fell in love with creating worlds out of words.
Someone in her class, also from Toronto, introduced her to the parent-child Mother Goose program that teaches folktales and traditional stories to parents with small children, mostly babies, as a form of parent-child bonding. Abu-Sharar completed her practicum at the program, learning from Lynda Howes. Howes, a woman in her 70s, introduced Sarah to the storytelling community in Toronto.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Abu-Sharar.
“At the start, I was really afraid to tell Palestinian stories because nobody was telling them, so I did not think they would be received,” Abu-Sharar said. “I felt I needed to first get into the storytelling community before offering them those stories.”
She began telling Croatian and Balkan stories in their native language at the Balkan storytelling festival, but slowly and surely shifted to telling her father’s stories from living in Palestine during the Nakba.
Although he only told true stories from his childhood, magic began to seep in after years and years of retelling, as is the case with many stories, Abu-Sharar explains.
She was surprised to learn that she actually descends from a long matrilineal line of Palestinian storytellers who preserved their own oral traditions for generations. “It’s interesting because your grandmother was a storyteller, your grandmother, whom you were named after, and your great-grandmother was a storyteller,” her father had told her. “You come from a long line of storytellers on my side.” Traditionally, only women told folk and fairytales because men told epic and religious tales, and as her father explained, none of his cousins or sisters carried on the role.
For this reason, “I need to continue telling stories, because it’s in my blood,” Abu-Sharar asserted, “and it’s a way of preserving that culture that is rapidly being diminished.”
She is not alone, at least not globally, as Abu-Sharar remains the only professional traditional Palestinian storyteller in Canada and one of the only in North America. There is a larger movement of Diasporic Palestinians in fact seeking out these stories, which were often not told after the occupation. People were hungry for the stories of their grandmothers, and to share these same stories with their children.
Palestinian storytelling revival
“Perhaps it is because these folktales are really of the land and of the people of that land, and if the land has been deprived from the people, the stories are also silenced, but now there is a real revival of Palestinian traditional stories, not just by myself in Diaspora,” Abu-Sharar said, “but in Palestine, there’s a huge revival.”
The push to record Palestinian stories dates back to folklife preservation initiated in the 1980s, such as the Speak Again collection, which wrote down and translated stories told by elders in villages. Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana published 45 of the two hundred tales in their 2013 book, Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was an even greater push for hosting Palestinian storytellers.
The International Palestinian Storytelling Festival, hosted by the Seraj Storytelling Center in 2022, brought together a few Palestinian storytellers from around the world, along with the Palestine Festival of Literature and public and private events featuring storytellers inside of Palestine. The International Palestinian Storytelling Festival was scheduled for the first week of November, but because of the destruction, it is being rescheduled.
Palestinian storytelling is especially charged, Abu-Sharar explains, because of the politics of Palestinian soil and existence. Ever since she began creating art, everything she performs or hosts is deeply political. Abu-Sharar explains: “With Palestine, it’s something unique because I don’t have to add that political element necessarily. I don’t have to force that element because, unfortunately, worldwide, just simply saying the word Palestine is political, and simply just trying to preserve our culture is political.”
For her to simply to tell a Palestinian fairy tale, one that grounds itself on Middle Eastern soil is decidedly political. In her tradition, she connects the Palestinian occupation to the colonization of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island (North America), who were also systematically deprived of their culture through residential schools. These systems are a form of cultural genocide, she explains, just like the oppression today in Palestine.
Thus, by telling any Palestinian stories, she is resisting cultural erasure and destruction. These stories have been and are today told in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and even within Palestine, but also in diasporic communities in Toronto, Canada and around the world.
“My Palestinian stories are really a way of me holding onto that identity and not allowing the full cultural genocide in descent and of offering something back to the community,” she said. This is something unique that she can offer the Palestinian community in Toronto.
Storytelling as resistance
“I don’t fight for Palestine because I’m a nationalist. I’m not. I would like to see all borders erased. But I come to it from the perspective of land rights, and of a people not being uprooted from their land and their culture,” she said. “The people should be able to have their traditions. I am an anti-Imperialist.” In fact, as Sarah explained, stories have for centuries been used to fight against colonial, imperialist, and feudal systems of power.
She teaches a course called Storytelling as a Tool for Social Transformation using Kalila wa Dimna fables, sharing one of the earliest collections of stories used to fight tyrannical power and inequality.
As Abu-Sharar explained, Kalila wa Dimna fables originate from India as far back as the time of Buddha, although many South and Southeast Asian individuals believe the fables are much older. According to legend, the Castilian King Ferdinand III heard rumors of an herb that could give those who eat it eternal life, so he sent his trusted doctor to India. The doctor was unable to find it but returned to the king with a treasure trove of stories.
Upon hearing them retold to him, the King decided that these stories should be told to his son, Alfonso X of Castile, so he would rule justly, and later upon the Prince Alfonso’s orders, the stories were translated by Ibn al-Muqaffa’ into Arabic and sent into the Arab world, where they were used to organize against and rebut unjust kings.
“I often tell Kalila wa Dimna stories at protests because that is their playground,” Abu-Sharar said. “That’s the root of these stories.” One of her favorites is “The Rabbits and the Elephants,” which she told at the Toronto International Storytelling Festival in 2022. Its story is deeply connected to modern networks of Palestinian resistance and liberation in and beyond Palestine.
The Rabbits and the Elephants
“There was once a group of elephants, who lived in a land where it hadn’t rained in years,” she began at the Festival. “They were hungry,” she shakes her head in sadness, “and they were thirsty, and one day the king of the elephants asked a pigeon to fly all around the world to find a place that might have water.”
“The pigeon flew all over the world,” Abu-Sharar raised her arms out beside her, “and when it returned, it spoke of many lands that have water in it, but there was one land,” her index finger raised, “belonging to the rabbits that had a spring that was so beautiful that the rabbits called it the spring of the moon.”
“Hungry and thirsty, the elephants ran towards that spring, trampling upon many rabbit holes and killing and wounding many rabbits.” As a result, “the rabbits gathered together. Fairuz was a witty rabbit,” her pitch raised with excitement.
“Fairuz asked if he may go and speak to the king of the elephants himself,” Abu-Sharar puffed her chest out in confidence. “They all agreed.”
“And he waited until the full moon,” Abu-Sharar raised her arms in a crescent beside her head as if cradling it. “Then he climbed to the very top of the mountain and he called out,” Abu-Sharar cupped her hand around her mouth as she declared loudly, “I have a message for you from the Moon God.”
“What’s your message?” Abu-Sharar replied as the elephant king, rolling her eyes.
“The Moon God says that you’re selfish and arrogant and just because you are large and mighty,” she raised her arms out defiantly at her sides, “you think that you can trample upon those who are smaller, and if you don’t believe me, come with me to the spring of the Moon yourself and see how angry the Moon God is.”
“And the rabbit hopped, hopped, hopped, hopped” she raised her clasped fingers higher and higher with each bounce, “all the way to the spring, and the elephant thumped, thumped, thumped, thumped all the way to the spring,” she smacked the air with her hands for each footstep.
“And the full moon reflected so brightly upon the water.” She swiftly changed her tone saying, “Show your respect for the spring of the Moon, dip your trunk inside of the water.” Instinctively, Abu-Sharar bowed her nose quickly towards the stage.
“And the elephant dipped his trunk inside the water, and when he did, the water began to shake and the reflection of the Moon began to shake as well,” Abu-Shrar’s voice growing louder as her body swayed back and forth.
“And the king of the elephants took that as indeed,” she nodded, “the moon God is angry with him, and he took all the elephants and they left the spring of the Moon to those whom it belonged to–the rabbits,” she concluded, smiling.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Abu-Sharar.
Strength through humor
Largely because she knows their power, she herself struggled to tell stories for a while. She would begin but then feel like she was suffocating, overwhelmed by the grief of destruction, but something changed when she travelled to Bosnia for a fairy tale festival and had a chance to tell humorous Palestinian stories again.
“When I was in the Balkans, I was not on my Palestinian land, but I was on my mother’s land and somehow that made a difference,” she said. “The stories were able to flow right out of me. For the first time, a year into genocide, I was able to tell those stories, and they flowed out of me. For the first time, I understood why my aunts, why the women in my family stopped telling those stories, because how do you tell stories of the land–folk tales are deeply rooted in the land–when your land has been stolen from underneath your feet?”
Today, the Palestinians telling their stories in camps are on their own land but are refugees in their own homes, on their own territories, yet they continue to tell stories of magic and humor amidst starvation and death. Humor was also the key for Abu-Sharar. “Even through 47 years of oppression,” she said, “we have never stopped singing. We have never stopped dancing. We have never stopped telling our stories, and most of all, we have never stopped laughing. It’s a people that celebrates life, and humor is a very important part of Palestinian culture because humor is the power of the oppressed. That is how we have continued to resist.”
After losing many storytelling gigs, Abu-Sharar has found many new ones, often in activist spaces where she is well known and loved by Palestinian children living in diaspora. “All of that was worth it because I would rather be known by children whose family is being killed in Gaza, rather than autocrats,” she said. But it’s not just for Palestinian children. It’s about changing the perception of the Palestinian people.
The best example–at one of her recent storytelling gigs in a school as part of the Sarajevo International Fairytale Festival in Bosnia a little girl in third grade came up to her and said that her mother cries every night because of Palestinians, seeing starving mothers and dying children each night on the news.
Abu-Sharar looked down at the girl and replied: “Well, today, you’re not going to cry with the Palestinians, you’re going to laugh with the Palestinians.” In due course, Abu-Sharar spotted the girl rolling with laughter during one of her stories and considered it a job well done. “As long as we are laughing, we are still human. Once we stop laughing, we stop existing as a people.”
Speaking privilege into organizing power
As of November 2025, she has told stories for over 13 years and recognizes her privilege as a storyteller in Diaspora who holds a Canadian passport. Unlike other storytellers, she is able to travel almost anywhere in the world, almost entirely without a visa, and for places where she requires a visa, it’s an easier process. Storytellers in Palestine have to get visas to travel to almost any country, and most of the time they are denied.
“So when I’m invited outside of Toronto for festivals, and outside of Canada for festivals, I realize that I need to tell Palestinian stories” because there aren’t many Palestinian storytellers in Diaspora. She is one of the few with a platform and space to counter dehumanizing Palestinian narratives. Her storytelling rebuffs media narratives about Palestine that are often racist and Islamophobic, and enforce the dichotomy of non-human beings or as victims and survivors who are superhuman.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Abu-Sharar.
“We have to resist to exist,” she explained, but there is so much more to Palestine than politics, occupation, and violence, and by telling stories, she helps herself and others to preserve Palestinian heritage and imagine a better Palestine or Palestine existing as a state, as a people who are connected to their ancestral land. Retelling Palestinian folk and fairy tales, she believes, is an act of cultural reconciliation.
Abu-Shrar reflected on her show “Stories My Grandmother Told,” featuring folktales from Palestine framed within the story of the Nakba and her grandmothers who were also storytellers.
“The fairytales I chose were the most vibrant, the most fun, the most colorful fairy tales that I tell that are Palestinian. I purposefully chose those, because then I knew that if I show that extreme Beauty and the fun of this culture, they will see the loss of that being deprived, and so because I started off with this real sadness, and then went into this amazing, magical world, when I brought them back down to the end of the frame, and back to the occupation, and back into a land that I cannot touch, half of the audience was in tears because they saw that beauty lost.”
This is why it is so important to beautify resistance, not by making it pleasing to look at or non-confrontational, but to showcase the rich culture of Palestine, through the clothes like a keffiyeh, or checkered black and white headscarf, food, songs, and stories that occupation and oppression destroy and erase. Her activism is central to Palestinian resistance and survival, by opening up those gray, paint-chipped walls through stories of magic, wonder, and beauty.
About Emma Cieslik
Emma Cieslik (she/her) is a queer, disabled public historian and writer based in Washington, DC. She is passionate about museum work that fosters intercultural discovery, community collecting, and accessible histories. Visit. emmacieslik.wordpress.com
