Tending the Family Tree

There’s wisdom in the language we use to talk about our ancestry: our desire to trace our family tree, our longing to return to roots. Our relationship to the land has long helped us make sense of our identities and place within the world. For Sarah Ben Romdane, that became clear six years ago, after returning to her family’s ancestral olive groves in Tunisia.

“For a long time I tried to figure out where I belonged, where I felt grounded,” Sarah tells me after I’ve had the joy of joining her for the first days of harvest. As we sip tea in Mahdia’s town square on an unseasonably warm November evening, she explains that coming back to the town on Tunisia’s Mediterranean coast, where she spent her childhood summers, far from her life in Paris, she felt a shift.

Born to a Syrian mother and a Tunisian father, and raised between Paris and London, Sarah’s idea of home has always been somewhere in between. “I am trying to build my own geography,” she tells me, acknowledging the duality of her life between East and West. Starting her olive oil brand, KAÏA, from the centennial olive trees her family has cultivated for five generations has become integral to that process.

It was Sarah’s father Chafik who first returned to Tunisia in 2014. After four decades in Europe, his father’s death and his own retirement drew him back to the family business. In their quintessentially Tunisian blue-and-white home perched just by the sea, he proudly shows me a wall adorned with photos of his family through the generations, right up to Mohamed Romdane, who started the business in 1868. Ultimately, Chafik tells me, his care for the trees comes from his desire to keep the family together.

Running their businesses alongside one another has certainly brought Sarah and Chafik closer. “I am learning from my dad,” she says, “but if I’m allowed to say, I think he is also learning from me!”

On my first day in Mahdia, Sarah and I arrive at the farm just after sunrise to meet the local women who harvest the olives, which, for KAÏA, is when they begin to blush from green to purple. The olives are Chemlali, an indigenous variety that has likely been in Tunisia for thousands of years, since the Phoenicians introduced olive trees to the land.

Many of these women and their families have tended the same soil for generations. “Most of them will tell me ‘I was born on the estate!’ or ‘My grandfather was in charge of this parcel!’,” says Sarah. For the workers, and for Sarah and Chafik, the land has shaped them just as much as they have shaped it.

Amidst the arduous labour of harvesting, the sense of community and conviviality is palpable. The women and men laugh and joke, they take turns to brew and share tea. Each individual dedicates themselves to a portion of the tree, knowing that harvest only succeeds collectively.

Under the shade of an olive tree, the women share their lunch with me, the earth beneath us as our table. We pour the fresh, unfiltered green oil pressed at the mill the night before into a dish to eat with taboon bread, and they insist that I try Tunisian mulukhiya, a jute mallow stew. It’s deeper and thicker than the one I am used to, but still has that unmistakably earthy taste. These women welcome me as though I am anything but a stranger, just as Chafik and Sarah welcome me into their home. It’s a familiar kindness, where family feels more like a verb, a way of life.

As Sarah and I pack up to head to the second grove, Tunis, one of the women I've bonded most with, cleans the plate that was pooled with olive oil for us to take back. She scoops up a fistful of soil and rubs the dish, lifting any trace of oil straight off. I’m suddenly reminded of something I recently learned: the Qur’an specifies that when water is unavailable, one can cleanse oneself in preparation for prayer with clean earth – soil, sand or a clean stone – known as tayammum. The symbolism of the earth’s cleansing properties ties these two rituals together in my mind, and in that moment I feel the power of living in symbiosis with the land we inhabit.

These women have long recognised what I am only just realising: that the trees we tend will outlive us, we are simply their guardians for one lifetime. Whilst harvest marks a kind of rebirth, each year carries the imprint of the many hands that have tended the trees over generations to allow them to keep producing fruit today and into the future.

During my short trip, Sarah, Chafik and I discuss Tunisia’s changing olive oil industry, and the growing number of women-led businesses. In an attempt to move away from the commodity system that has defined the industry for decades, these women are leading with an ecological and equitable point of view, a nurturing rather than extractive goal.

Tunisia is one of the world’s largest producers of olive oil, and the vast majority of its olives are harvested for yield, sold in bulk, blended and stripped of traceability in the global olive oil market. Sarah is determined to create a new model that removes exploitation, ensures a living wage, increases representation and creates better quality, extra-virgin, single-origin oil that honours its terroir.

“It’s about telling the stories that get lost, the culture that gets erased,” she says of her goal with KAÏA internationally. “But the mission within Tunisia is the deep structural work of building a supply chain that brings more fairness.” Mirroring the ritual of harvest, honouring her family’s legacy means looking towards the future with a rootedness in the past.

Having grown up in the diaspora, Sarah says starting KAÏA didn’t come from a place of romanticising Tunisia, but from having witnessed the damage caused by a Western-centric capitalist system and knowing there was an opportunity for change with her access to family land. “I feel we have a responsibility in service of our country and community, the place we come from and our land.”

What may have started as Sarah’s individual pursuit for meaning led her to something far greater. We often think of roots as belonging to one tree, but in reality roots spread outwards and intertwine with others. Above ground a tree appears to stand alone, but beneath the surface, it relies on a living network to keep it alive – shared soil, water, nutrients. The language is apt; tracing our family tree and rediscovering our roots does help us make sense of who we are, for ultimately, who we are is what we are connected to.