This conversation aired in the April 09, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
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April is Arab American Heritage Month. It’s also Middle Eastern and North African Heritage Month. AND in some places - it’s Southwest Asian and North African Month, or ‘SWANA.'
That’s a term activists and scholars started using in the early 2000s/ wanting to move towards language that was more inclusive, less political. Language that decolonizes the traditional term MENA- Middle East and North Africa. Many Bay Area colleges, universities and libraries have taken it up.
Like the San Francisco Public Library. This month, they’re honoring SWANA Heritage month with programs including art, film, ballet- and a henna workshop taught by San Francisco henna artist Renda Dabit.
She’s a born and raised San Franciscan, Palestinian American and grew up with family wedding celebrations that involved bridal rituals with henna. Henna is a natural dye from a bush native to eastern and Northern Africa. People have used it for thousands of years for many purposes. In Sudan for instance I know it’s a staple of a woman’s beauty routine, and used as a natural hair pigment. My grandmother had a henna bush in her yard. Its leaves are ground, mixed with water, and made into a paste, then used to decorate the hands, feet, or dye the hair.
For Renda, the love of henna stayed with her, and later on in life, when she was studying film at SF city college in the 90s, a visit to Cairo started her on a path to a career in henna design. For the past 30 years, she’s been not only a henna artist, but she says she is a cultural educator- teaching her clients about the history behind this art.
