I remember the scent of jasmine oil. Being propped up on my father’s shoulder and a keffiyeh being placed around my head. I remember a crowd smiling up at me and the men singing “Falasteen Arabiya, Falasteen Arabiya.” It was in Norman, Okla., and I was 5 or 6 years old. Somewhere in my grandfather’s video catalogs in Lebanon, the footage still exists.

There can be no claim that at such early childhood I grasped what was happening, what lay beneath the crooning, what sharp sentiment overwhelmed these men as they clapped around me repeating; “Falasteen, falasteen.” But that particular memory never left me, and I find that I hold on to it with a kind of stubbornness. It is an obduracy that characterizes many Palestinians living in the diaspora, as though they are clinging to every inch of land lost to our families, land that many of us have yet to revisit.

It may feel wrong to spend time discussing the experiences of those of us living comfortably in the diaspora, especially when our suffering so shamefully pales in comparison to that of our of brothers and sisters living the hell of a refugee camp or occupation or imprisonment. But we do ourselves a disservice by neglecting to see it as what it is: a trauma. Nostalgia for Palestinians who live abroad almost takes the form of a disease, a preoccupation with symbols and loss and histories inherited. To be born in the diaspora can mean to hold memory above location and even, at times, people. It instills in the exiled an acute sense of how ephemeral things can be. The idea that once something has passed, it cannot return is so strongly felt because there is a pre-existing understanding about what happens when things are left behind.

There are moments when I have wondered if our memory is not more like a cancer condemning us, as a people, to constantly walk with our heads turned slightly to the side, straining to see something that was once there. At times, I even consider whether we might be better off one day deciding to simply shed these histories. But I always conclude that the forfeiture of our claim to these remembrances, whether collective or personal, would only mean further dispossession. And what could be worse than that final departure, to be exiled from our memory?