“Tender” is a column about all of the beautiful, delicious, and liberating ways that LGBTQ+ people work with food. From production to preparation, local farms to reimaginings of the restaurant, our community is at the forefront of what it means to nourish and be nourished today. Read more from the series here.
Marcelle G Afram has a knack for preservation. Their prep kitchen doubles as a lab with rows of sauces and condiments at different stages of lacto-fermentation: slender green okra floating in brine, cauliflower florets tinted with a golden hue from turmeric root, miniature eggplant sliced and tossed in shatta (fermented Palestinian hot pepper relish), plump dates suspended in a honey and orange blossom syrup. Afram saves time without taking shortcuts by using lacto-bacteria that work around the clock to develop complexity and preserve raw produce to be enjoyed long after the season has ended — all while harmoniously melding the Palestinian and U.S. foodways that shape their culinary imagination.
“The fermentation process goes into practically everything I do,” Afram explains. “And I think that there's really something beautiful about watching who it becomes, you know?”
The 39-year-old trans Palestinian American chef has worked in restaurant kitchens for nearly two decades in the heart of Washington, D.C. In 2021, they launched Shababi, a pop-up catering business that has allowed them to share the Palestinian cuisine and Arab-American hospitality they have been steeped in since childhood. “Everybody in the family made their own chili peppers, hot sauces, and pickles. It was such a natural part of growing up,” Afram recalls. Their lacto-fermented paste of caramelized sumac onions forms the base of French onion labneh and topping for taboon, a savory flatbread served with their take on musakhan roasted chicken, Palestine’s national dish. “I try to utilize the resources that are around us to give us the flavors of home,” the chef tells me. “And in respect of the Palestinian relationship to the land, I try to source as locally as possible and be super veg forward, highlighting what the season has to offer.”
Afram grew up in the D.C. metro area within a large extended family. His dad is the second youngest of eight and his mom is the youngest of nine; both are restaurateurs and avid home cooks who inherited the cuisine of a place they have never been. Living in the diaspora, Afram carries a responsibility to preserve the culinary and cultural knowledge his family brought with them across thousands of miles and seven decades.“My grandparents were exiled [from Palestine] in 1948, so I’m three generations removed from the homeland,” Afram says, noting, “I'm cooking based on the recipes of memories and my translation of them.”
Shababi was always meant to be more than a food venture. The word translates to “my youthful people,” a term of endearment that elder family members would call out to Afram and their cousins when the food was ready to eat. From the outset, he oriented the pop-up and its platform around the celebration of Palestinian cuisine and advocating for Palestinian liberation from Israeli occupation. Through collaboration dinners, Afram has channeled humanitarian relief for refugees in Gaza, raising funds for UNRWA USA.
Shortly after Israel’s catastrophic bombardment of Gaza began in early October, Afram and fellow Palestinian chefs Reem Assil, Omar Anani, and Abeer Najjar launched Hospitality for Humanity with community organizers Ora Wise and Kimberly Chou Tsun An of FIG, a Brooklyn-based food equity collective. Together, they co-authored a pledge for food and hospitality industry workers to publicly demand a ceasefire and to support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. The pledge has garnered 1,177 signatures as of this writing. They also created a digital toolkit to compile action items and provide education on Israel’s weaponization of food and hunger against Palestinians.
Following on the heels of the pledge, the activists organized a month-long dinner series in Brooklyn called Tadhamon! (meaning “solidarity” in Arabic) to bolster support for Palestinian chefs. Through each dinner, the chefs contextualized the food they served in relation to BDS, broader resistance to imperialism internationally, and Palestinian food sovereignty. In preparing and serving Palestinian food, Afram calls attention to the harsh reality that Palestinians in Gaza are being starved to death by the Israeli blockade and violently cut off from access to food that sustains them.
Though Palestine is known for its agricultural abundance, the land’s sustenance for Palestinians is the target of settler and state violence. Palestine’s agricultural sector is regularly attacked by settlers and the Israeli Occupation Forces, who have intentionally burned ancient olive trees, shot farmers, sprayed chemicals on crops, and bulldozed orchards. Not only does the Israeli government restrict Palestinian movement such that farmers need travel permits to work on their own land, but the Israeli government has gone so far as to ban the foraging of wild herbs including za’atar and akkoub.
Illegal settlements in the West Bank are increasingly populated by U.S. citizens, whereas U.S.-born Palestinians with direct ties to their familial homes are lucky if they get to visit, let alone relocate. When Afram’s grandfather tried to take him to Palestine at 16 years old, they were both denied entry. Afram has still never seen the city of Bethlehem, where their grandmother was born, never taken part in an olive harvest or eaten from street vendors like the ones that animated their grandfather’s stories of life before the “Nakba.” “My grandfather was born there, his parents were born there,” says Afram. “There’s a lineage of my people who were born there, and yet we have no right of return.”
Afram is cognizant of what it means to speak up for Palestine at a moment when so many people globally are being silenced with bullets, assault and arrests, firings and censorship. “I found this community because I was able to say these things out loud,” they explain. “Being able to build relationships with other Palestinian chefs in the diaspora has been so amazing. Hospitality for Humanity was born from us leaning on each other — myself, Reem Assil, Omar Anani. We were desperate to hold each other close and to figure out, what the hell do we do?”
“The food industry, in all the different sectors of this country, is over 15 million people,” Afram continues.“Hospitality for Humanity is about finding our collective power…We have three demands which are very clear cut: a permanent ceasefire, ending U.S. aid to Israel, and BDS, because we have to hit them where their money is.”
Hospitality for Humanity is a continuation of solidarity work that long precedes the current crisis of war. Assil explains how their work had to “move beyond just ‘understanding’ who Palestinians are” and use their platforms as a call to action. “Because the food sector is a pillar of our culture here in the United States. And policy follows the culture.”
For Palestinians living under occupation, their biggest struggle right now is to survive. For those displaced abroad, they are fighting to disrupt the status quo. “Even in the midst of genocide, in which almost 30,000 of our people have been killed brutally by Israeli forces, the calls for Palestinian freedom are still criminalized, gaslit, punished, making us vulnerable,” Assil asserts. “Solidarity is about normalizing our right to a free Palestine and our allies not being scared to call for that and make it the popular thing.”
In early November, Afram stood alongside Hospitality for Humanity organizers and 300,000 other protesters at the National March on Washington: Free Palestine in D.C. Their shoulders were draped in keffiyehs and each one held up part of a banner that read, “Food, farm, hospitality workers for a free Palestine. Ceasefire now! No more U.S. aid for genocide.” Afram’s redoubled boldness to stand out as Palestinian and to speak up with a chorus of other Arab Americans is a change they credit to embracing their transness and no longer defaulting to assimilation — even if it means risking rejection.
“My self-expression as Palestinian came about because I found myself as a trans person,” they share. “I was so far removed from my identity even as an Arab person, so this evolution has a lot to do with me unlearning the biases that were impressed on me as I am reclaiming my narrative.”
Afram came of age in the ‘90s, when many Arab Americans sought the safety of cultural assimilation. Both sets of their grandparents were forcibly displaced to Lebanon and Syria, then immigrated to the U.S. where their parents met and opened a pizzeria in Takoma Park. Afram’s mom worked up until the day she went into labor, so he was almost literally born into the restaurant industry. From age 10, he helped out in the family food businesses.
Growing up, Afram noticed a stark difference between the lavish Palestinian cuisine shared at home and the family’s caution in serving anything that identified them as such in their pizzeria, diner, and sandwich shops. Being Arab was an economic liability, and Afram’s parents tried hard to blend in, including with their food, which was often labeled Lebanese or Greek — never Palestinian — to avoid pinging anyone’s political radar. “My parents were careful about the way they put themselves out there. Describing oneself as Lebanese seemed like the safer route; that's what they told us to say,” Afram explains. “After 9/11, we didn’t talk about being Arab at all.”
At 17, Afram wrote a letter to their mom coming out as queer. Their dad found the letter first and issued an ultimatum. “‘You can be that way out there, but not here,’” Afram remembers. “And I was like, ‘Okay, bye.’”
With nowhere to go, they slept in their car and couch surfed with friends. “I didn't really have a home for about 10 years,” they tell me.
Afram missed their high school graduation and assumed they didn’t have a diploma (they did), so they studied for their GED while working as a food runner. They describe their 18-year-old self as “a little jackass with a major ego” who barked orders from the expediting station. When the fry cook walked out during a Friday night shift, the chef turned to Afram and said, “‘You think you're hot shit. You're working that station now.’ And so I did. That's how I ended up cooking,” they chuckle.
Without plans for the future, Afram lived life in the moment. Cooking took his mind off everything else, and he was quickly consumed in the industry, eager to learn as much as he could, at times offering his labor for free. He saved up enough money to travel and work on a fishing boat in Majorca and at a farming cooperative in Wisconsin. At 22, he returned to the D.C. area where his Capricorn work ethic thrust him back in the restaurant industry. Within a few years, he was running a 300-seat restaurant, yet scraping by on a $30,000 salary. “I had a lot of responsibility for all the wrong reasons,” he sighs.
As Afram worked up the cook’s line, they avoided openly talking about being Palestinian. The few times they did bring up their family’s cuisine, “it was discouraged, politely,” they explain.
Eventually, he was offered the chance at menu creation. “It was the first time that I did anything Arab — I put falafel on the menu, which my wife will tell you is probably why she fell in love with me,” he says. Afram leaned into his grandmother’s recipe, passed down to his mother who taught it to him, which stirred up feelings of connection with food that had been dormant since childhood.
It had been over a decade since they were estranged from their family. Reconnecting with them took their wife Joyce picking up the phone and calling Afram’s mom herself. When she handed the phone to them and said simply, “your mom wants to speak to you,” Afram fell apart, crumbling under the compounded weight of the years that separated them. The eldest of four, they missed watching their siblings grow up, the youngest of whom was 4-years-old when Afram was kicked out. Now, she was a teenager.
“We slowly started to rebuild,” the chef says.
Afram’s healing has multiplied in ways that they could have never foreseen. In early 2020, they heard their stepson refer to friends who used they/them pronouns and were transitioning. A feeling stirred in them that they couldn’t shake. “I always knew that transgender folks exist, but I never encountered the transmasculine space,” he tells me. At the time, he was still living life as a woman, but never felt right about it. “Up to that point, I just accepted that there's nothing that I can do about it — this is just what my life is.”
When they came to the realization that they were trans during the lockdown of 2020, old fears of their family's rejection resurfaced. “At that point, I don't think I really cared if they would accept it or not, I just never wanted to present anything as a burden to them,” he shares. “But they have been so supportive. I don't think that in my wildest dreams, especially as a younger person, I could ever imagine that. And you know, I don't think I allow them the grace for evolution either.”
Afram looks back on the past with kinder eyes and a tinge of regret. The Western villainization of immigrant parents as backward or closed-minded led him to fault them for cultural differences that, as an adult, he has been able to explore with greater understanding. “I have no idea what they went through, the traumas they endured and their feverish need to protect their kin,” he explains. “I think I was really duped by this Western theory of how things should be, that I needed to rebel towards independence instead of giving them the chance to hear me out.”
As lockdown continued, Afram finally had an internal conversation that was long overdue. “I was like, ‘Dude, you're a dude,’” they exclaim.
They started testosterone treatment in August and received top surgery by November of the same year. The changes they felt prompted deeper reflection on being a closeted Palestinian: “There's just no more time to waste. How much less pain would I have been in my life if I saw anybody like me, trans or Palestinian, who wasn’t villainized? The two just go hand in hand for me — transition became about reclamation and no more lies.”
In the movement for a free Palestine, Afram has found community with others who organize not in spite of being queer but because of it. This point is especially significant in light of propaganda campaigns that aim to leverage allegations of homophobia to undermine solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Since Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began in the wake of the October 7 attacks, Afram has seen these talking points proliferate online as zionists and liberals ignore the experiences of queer and trans Palestinians living under occupation.
“So much of [the argument] is like, ‘Oh, go try to be that way there.’ Well, that's actually the whole point. We all want to go back,” says Afram. “My grandfather passed away with the key to his house in his hand.”
The footage emerging from Gaza today parallels the stories inherited from older generations — only now, the world is watching a Nakba unfold in real time. Afram finds hope in the determination of their people to survive and the dedication to keep showing the world the truth. “The resilience of the Palestinian people is so real, and I think the world is learning from us,” he says. “If that person who just lost everything still has a fight in them, then I can pick myself up and be a part of this fight for greater liberation, too.”
As our video conversation comes to a close, Afram’s eyes glisten with emotion. The feelings surrounding these unimaginably bleak times are gnarled with pain passed down across generations. Yet for Marcelle G Afram, the road ahead couldn’t be clearer: “For me, it's just everything for Palestine. Everything for Palestine.”
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