The Palestinian Therapist, Teacher and Music Lover Who Built Cultural Bridges

When beloved San Francisco drag artist Mama Ganuush first arrived in the Bay Area from Egypt in 2009, they were unemployed, unhoused and recovering from years of homophobic persecution. Ganuush sought support at the Tenderloin Health Clinic and quickly happened upon the woman they would come to call their “chosen mother.”

Nabila Mango was then 65 years old, a former librarian and teacher who had pivoted into working as a therapist. The change of profession came about after a spike in anti-Arab hatred that followed Sept. 11, 2001. While Mango specifically started her job to assist at-risk people of Middle Eastern descent, her door was open to everyone in need.

“Nabila, she saved my life when I came here,” Ganuush told KQED in 2023. After Mango offered Ganuush a room in her home, Ganuush said it was a direct path to getting their life on track. “I got a job, I settled down, and I became an executive in tech almost 10 years later.”

By the time of Mango and Ganuush’s first meeting, it was second nature for Mango to forge these kinds of bonds and create paths for healing. In particular, her focus was on building bridges between different ethnicities and cultures. Mango changed professions repeatedly throughout her life in order to make that a reality.

Prior to becoming a therapist, Mango taught Arabic at schools, including San Francisco City College and San Mateo’s Skyline College. Her lessons did not stop with language. Mango’s students were regularly invited to her San Mateo home to learn about Arabic music, literature and food, and to mingle with people for whom Arabic was a first language. Needless to say, this made her an enormously popular faculty member at all her schools.

The first half of Mango’s life was largely structured around academic institutions. It was the desire to study library science that first brought her to the United States at the age of 21. She came to the country from Jordan, where she had lived since the age of four. Though Mango was born in Jaffa, her family was forced out of her homeland in 1948 during the Nakba: the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians after Israel was established. Mango’s family made their way to Jordan on foot in search of refuge. Mango’s daughter Bisan Shehadeh later noted, “Displacement was one of the greatest pains my mother carried.”

The only time Mango was ever able to return to her homeland was during a period of study at the West Bank’s Birzeit University, where she completed her associate degree.

Mango adapted to American life quickly after arriving in 1965, despite some initial culture shocks. (“I was shocked at the dancing here,” Mango told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1966. “This is forbidden in Jordan. And we don’t date as they do here.”) Her goals around connection were clear from the moment she arrived. While still a student at Glassboro State College in New Jersey, Mango even visited a local ninth grade class to answer questions about life in the Middle East.

After graduation, Mango was employed in libraries at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. She worked as a translator and contributed to the book Kahlil Gibran: His Life and World. (The book itself notes that she retrieved and translated “all the voluminous Arabic material consulted.” Those translations were also consulted for Jean Gibran’s 2017 book, Kahlil Gibran: Beyond Borders.)

In the mid-1970s, Mango returned to her studies, completing a PhD in Persian literary history at the University of Pennsylvania. While there, Mango acted as an officer of the Arab-American Federation of Pennsylvania. She also served as president of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates. In those roles, Mango made regular public speaking appearances and took part in roundtables to discuss and highlight Palestinian issues to diverse audiences.

Mango headed to California happened after completing her studies. By 1982, she and her then-husband Saber Shehadeh welcomed their only daughter, and Mango successfully mingled motherhood with her ongoing activism. In the ’80s, seeking a role that would enable her to stay at home with her daughter, but also continue with her mission, Mango started a company to distribute Arabic books. By the ’90s, the business, which had a variety of names over the years, had expanded to also export computer products to Arab countries.

1997’s Women’s Ventures, Women’s Visions by Shoshana Alexander noted at the time that the business allowed Mango “the flexibility to devote time to teaching and promoting Arabic culture and heritage.”

It was in 2000 that Mango co-founded the project that she was ultimately most widely recognized for: a musical collective named the Aswat Ensemble, which is still active today. Mango, who is said to have owned one of the largest collections of Arabic music in North America, initially wanted to ensure that old Palestinian folk songs were preserved and stayed in the cultural zeitgeist. But the longer Aswat continued, the more the group expanded both its philosophy and musical style.

By 2011, Aswat included musicians and singers from the Palestinian territories, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, France, Morocco, Mexico, India, Jordan, Iran, Iraq and, yes, the United States. Many of the instruments utilized were traditional ones from the Middle East, including the ney (a sort of cane flute), qanun (a style of zither), riqat (small tambourine), kamancheh (a string instrument) and tabla (hand drums).

In October 2012, Mango told the San Francisco Bay Guardian that the group’s songs “represent our feelings towards occupation [of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem], the beauty of the land, our civil rights in this country, the Arab American experience and fighting hate and misinformation.”

Five years later, during an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Mango described the Aswat ethos in a way that also solidly reflected her own. “We are convinced that once one has experienced the artistic richness of another culture,” she said, “they are much less likely to dehumanize them by seeing them through media-propagated stereotypes.”

Mango’s work with Aswat led to other important projects, including Ayadi, a nonprofit that Mango founded to provide aid and support to low income Bay Area Arab and Muslim families. The organization’s activities included a communal dinner to feed scores of underprivileged families every Sunday. In 2012, she received a grant to develop Doorway to Islamic Civilization, a series of arts and culture workshops.

Today, Aswat Ensemble and offshoots including Aswat Youth and Aswat Women’s Ensemble are all programs within Zawaya, a nonprofit that Mango served as executive director. Zawaya remains focused on preserving, producing, and promoting Arabic arts in the Bay Area, presenting regular art shows, theatrical productions and other opportunities for community gatherings, in addition to its focus on music.

On Nov. 13, 2023, after a long, fiercely fought battle against cancer, Mango finally left the Earth that she wanted so badly to unite. In her lifetime, she was honored with several awards. She was the very first person to receive the Middle East Children’s Alliance’s lifetime achievement award. At the American Muslims for Palestine annual dinner in 2014, she was applauded for her work making “art as a form of resistance.” There was the Yuri Kochiyama Lifetime Achievement Award for Bravery and Activism from the Asian Law Caucus in 2011. But it’s not awards that Mango will be most remembered for.

Nabila Mango was a beautiful example of what happens when resistance is also rooted in an overriding sense of unity. Her focus was always on community — local and global. One of her most powerful forms of protest was preserving Palestinian culture for generations to come. (The very act of doing so speaks to the danger the culture is in of being erased.) Mango also had a special way of imparting to everybody who crossed her path a sense of pride and dignity.

One Aswat member, Rana Mroue, once noted, “Nabila gives you this chance to express your identity and to feel proud of sharing your identity as something beautiful and worthy.”

In the end, shortly after Mango’s death, it was her daughter who summed up Mango’s magical powers best of all.

“She planted seeds, she watered them, she tended them and they grew into beautiful things,” Bisan Shehadeh told the Chronicle. “She made most people feel like they had a special relationship with her. That was the size of her heart.”

To learn about other Rebel Girls from Bay Area History, visit the Rebel Girls homepage.