Since October 7 2023, Palestinian t-shirts and kuffiya have become common for people in New Zealand to wear, to express solidarity. Yet very few of these products were actually made in Palestine; Shanti Mathias talks to a couple trying to change that.

“Our house just became a lot more Palestinian,” says Matt Hayes. He and his wife, Noor Alshawa, are the founders of Bayyāra, a business selling Palestinian ceramics, olive oil, spices and accessories in New Zealand. After months and months of delays, a truck pulled up their driveway on the Kāpiti Coast the day I spoke to them, containing their first order of goods. They’ve had to take their car out of the garage to make space for everything, and the other rooms in their house are filled with bars of olive oil soap and vibrant ceramics.

While the past year and a half of war in Gaza, now paused in a fragile ceasefire, has brought the Palestinian cause to millions of people’s attention, it’s remarkably hard to get things that are actually from Palestine in New Zealand. “There’s lots of stuff that is Palestinian themed, but made elsewhere,” says Alshawa. It’s possible, for example, to buy polyester kuffiya (titled “Sun-Proof Arabian Tactical Kerchief for Outdoor Activities”) for $4 from Temu, while Bayyāra sells more expensive $69 kuffiya woven in Palestine.

Her family is from Gaza, and Bayyāra is named for an orange grove owned by Alshawa’s father. Before 1948, the orange trees blossomed, and their oranges were exported around the world. But after several years of Israeli control, the business was no longer possible. 

Alshawa grew up in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, hearing stories of the bayyāra and life in Gaza from her Gaza-born parents. Before 2006, when Hamas was elected, they would spend holidays with her family in Gaza. “It was a big part of our life, not just a historical thing – there are so many memories of my family there,” she says. While she lives in New Zealand now, her Palestinian identity remains vital to her. “Even if you’re born elsewhere, you don’t shut up about being Palestinian. When I was growing up we had hand stitched cushions, books, encyclopedias of Palestine that my dad would read to us,” Alshawa says. Behind her and Hayes, on the video call, is another reminder of where they come from: a map of Palestine, and a map of New Zealand.

The war has been devastating for Alshawa and her family. “It feels like someone slapped me on the face [on October 7 2023] and it hasn’t stopped until now – I don’t fully get what has happened.” Her uncle, aunty – an accountant – and at least five of their cousins have been killed by Israeli forces. Another uncle has been injured, and everyone has lost their home – including a family apartment building that had been built on top of her grandfather’s house, intended to have space for all the family members to live or visit. It had just been finished when the war and bombing started. 

Alshawa, who married Hayes in 2023, has watched this from afar, feeling shattered. Initially, when she and Hayes had the idea for Bayyāra, they framed it as a way to help Palestinian businesses – but then they realised that didn’t capture the mutual relationship. “Palestinian businesses are supplying something people want, good olive oil and ceramics – you’re not just doing them a favour in purchasing from them,” Hayes says. Over the video call, I see that their cat has jumped on the table; he picks her up, and keeps talking. “People are willing to pay a premium for something from Palestine.” Palestinian olive oil is famous – the olive groves are among the world’s oldest – and soap made from the oil in a traditional process has been one of the most popular items in Bayyāra’s preorders, which the couple will now be able to ship out. 

So how do you import goods from one of the world’s most surveilled, controlled, contested borders? Around July last year, Alshawa and Hayes found their suppliers. “No one thought our orders were too small – I would get Whatsapp voicenotes from our ceramics supplier at midnight saying ‘I just finished your order’,” Alshawa says. Their food supplier, providing Palestinian olive oil and spices, helpfully offered to pick up the orders from the other companies so everything could be shipped in one go. For now, everything Bayyāra sells comes from the West Bank, not Gaza, but Hayes and Alshawa would love that to be an option in the future – and they hired a Gazan illustrator to create images for their website. 

“I’ve worked for companies importing from China, Vietnam, the EU, Mexico – in all those situations it has been harder dealing with suppliers than the Palestinian ones,” Hayes says. “If it wasn’t for the Israeli government, it would have been the easiest e-commerce business I’ve ever done.” Getting everything out of Palestine was the source of the months of delays. At first, they tried to get the shipment out through Jordan and the Red Sea, but that border was closed by Israel. Eventually, they had to pay the Israeli government to go through the Haifa border. “I remind myself that if we had never got it out of Palestine, it would be another victory for Israel,” Hayes says. Given how long it took the first time, they’re already wondering if it’s time to start another order. 

While Hayes and Alshawa acknowledge the urgent need for humanitarian aid in Palestine, they see working with Palestinian businesses as vital, too. “People migrate because they can’t find work opportunities. If you want to support the cause, you can support people to stay where they are,” Alshawa says. “There are a lot of established and trusted charities around, but we felt this was something we as individuals could start, that’s more sustainable for us and everyone.” 

The couple are running Bayyāra alongside their full time jobs. They’ve been surprised by the demand for Palestinian products, receiving hundreds of preorders despite the shipping delays. “There’s definitely a gap in the market,” Alshawa says. The Auckland-based Palestinian shop Preserved Identity, one of the few other options for buying Palestinian goods in New Zealand, has medjool dates, and lots of Palestinian cookbooks, for example, but no olive oil. Alshawa and Hayes hope that Bayyāra can show that “being from Palestine isn’t just about war, throwing stones – there’s a long history.”

“Palestinians have the tools and talent and resources – they’re just being suffocated by the occupation,” Alshawa says. “Why not bring that opportunity here?”   

The highs, lows and silver linings of single-parenting a toddler.

He lay there prone, unmoving, his dark eyes glassy and fixed on the ceiling above. 

My daughter looked at him, then at me. “Is that… Daddy?” 

I sighed. “No, darling, that’s not Daddy.” I grabbed the man to whom her question was directed and returned him to the kitchen where he belonged.

No, he wasn’t Daddy. This bloke did, however, fit the paternal stereotype of being handy around the home – I’d just used him to open my beer, in fact. Yes, my toddler had asked if a bottle opener – a quirky bottle opener made from a table football player – was her father.

You couldn’t blame her for inquiring. She doesn’t have one, you see – just me, her mum. To the Bob McCoskries of the world, the scene I’ve just set is probably one of dysfunction. A single mother, her fatherless child so deprived of male influence that the poor thing clutches desperately at the only father figure she can find… a bottle opener. A tragic sign of societal decay.

But to me, and to everyone with whom I’ve shared this anecdote, it was pretty funny.

It’s not that I don’t take my child’s non-traditional upbringing seriously. I don’t want her to be confused, or feel like she’s missing out. But what she was really asking was if the bottle opener guy was a daddy, not her daddy. As her language skills have developed, these queries have become more frequent, eventually morphing from questions into statements of fact. “That’s the daddy,” she’ll inform me, pointing to a male figure in the background of a busy scene in a book. “Well, it could be,” I’ll counter. “Or an uncle, or a friend… or just a man.” For the most part, she remains unconvinced. “That’s Mummy,” she recently declared, gesturing to Toby Morris’s drawing of Alex Casey on our threadbare Spinoff tea towel hanging off the oven door. “And that’s Daddy,” she added, pointing her grubby finger at Clarke Gayford brandishing a fishing rod. I could only agree.

It wasn’t until I became a single mum that I realised how pervasive the traditional nuclear family model is. In pretty much every form of media she consumes, from Peepo to Peppa Pig, Bluey to Baby-bloody-Shark, there’s a mummy and a daddy and a kid or two. So she’s begun to see them everywhere, these nuclear families. It’s progressed to giving familial labels to inanimate objects based on size: a big stone found in the garden is Daddy, a medium one Mummy and a little one baby, a process that has escalated through all manner of items to such an extent that she’s now labelling her own farts (“Daddy one!” she exclaimed proudly after letting rip a whopper the other day – which, to be fair, does track with my experience of fathers.)

It’s not all a barrel of laughs, of course. The first time she said “I want Daddy”, I felt a bit sad. For a few seconds, anyway, until she followed up with: “I want blue daddy! I want pink daddy! I want green daddy!” Toddlers are cute, but they do talk a lot of nonsense. Without giving it too much weight  – really, she could have been asking for a kitten or a unicorn – I explained to her that we don’t have a daddy at our house, but she is very lucky to have her grandad and uncles and aunties and cousins close by. And Christ, child, you’ve got a bloody good mother, I added (not in so many words, and in a more toddler-friendly cadence, I hasten to add). 

She seemed to take it on board, and anyway, it shouldn’t have been total news to her: we have picture books aimed at kids of single mothers who had them with the help of sperm donors. I always planned to be open with her about the whole situation from the get-go, so there won’t be any “big reveal”, but as her understanding of the world develops, her questions will no doubt become not so easy to laugh off – and trickier to answer. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In the meantime, I trot out the “families come in all shapes and sizes!” line fairly regularly. But aside from my good friends, a lesbian couple with a baby whom we see regularly, she’s very much surrounded by bog-standard mum-dad families. Perhaps I should make more of an effort to broaden her horizons as she gets older, or at least to seek out more “diverse” media so the burden isn’t shouldered entirely by Suzy Sheep’s single mum.

But while same-sex parents have the trump card of having something “extra” – two mums, who wouldn’t want that? – to make up for the dad hole, we just have me, which is a bit harder to dress up as a positive. Truth be told, in an ideal world, she would have a dad. And a lot of the time, I do wish she did, but not nearly as much as I wish she still had a grandmother. We lost my mum last year and Nana was a real person, so the hole is real. The dad is a hypothetical, and, perhaps selfishly, I think more about what I’m missing out on than what my daughter is. Mainly, it’s help with the mind-numbing stuff like swimming lessons, negotiating the tantrums, and going to the playground. 

And even if I had found one, who’s to say that my hypothetical baby daddy would’ve been any good? Of course I know many amazing fathers, but it’s hard not to get a general impression that in most cases, mothers still carry the lion’s share of the parenting.

While it would be nice to share her upbringing with someone else – to have a person who cared about the minutiae of every quirk and every milestone as much as I do – through candid conversations with other parents, I’ve learned that there are upsides to going it alone. Trying to co-parent with a former partner with whom you don’t get along sounds bloody hard. And even if my hypothetical baby daddy and I had stayed together, there’s a good chance our relationship would have been punctuated to a greater or lesser degree by simmering resentment over who’s pulling their weight and who’s not, who let the child eat four mallowpuffs for dinner, who sent it to daycare on the coldest day of the year without a coat, etc. I do see an upside in having someone else to blame, but there’s also a simplicity to my situation: every decision is mine, and that includes every fuck-up. 

But really, the worst thing about the no-dad situation is the awkward conversations stemming from people’s incorrect assumptions – and as far as “worst things” go, that’s pretty mild. It began while she was still in utero and often, I’ll have a micro second to decide whether I can be bothered explaining the truth. If someone who’s come into our orbit for a brief period – a medical professional or a tradie, for example – makes reference to my daughter’s presumed dad, I’ll brush it off and quickly change the subject. On the rare instances I decide to “come out” about my daughter’s biological beginnings, they inevitably feel bad and the stumbling attempt to apologise – you don’t need to, I don’t care, honestly! – is excruciating.

Next time it happens (and it will, as sure as night follows day), perhaps I’ll introduce them to the bottle opener.