People and Places You don’t know how to know

This body of work was created through a confluence of personal and world events that sent Eassa down a path of exploration, beginning in Baltimore and ending in the Middle East, specifically Jordan and Lebanon. Eassa’s ancestors immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island from Syria, Palestine and Lebanon, eventually establishing families up and down the East Coast. However, the anti-Arab sentiment that proliferated in the United States in the early 2000s discouraged many diasporic families from outward expressions of their heritage. As a result, the transfer of rich oral histories and cultural celebrations often languished from one generation to the next. For Eassa, the magnitude of that loss is an ongoing journey, realizing now as an adult charting his own life story that as a child he didn’t get to know what was written in his Sito’s hands.