What does it mean to inherit a homeland you’ve never been able to live in?
That’s the question at the heart of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate – a groundbreaking piece of work by poet, scholar and Palestinian writer Micaela Sahhar. It’s part memoir, part archive, part historical exploration. Eagle-eyed Missing Perspectives readers and book-lovers may recall that we’ve included Sahhar’s book on a number of lists (and was one of our recommendations for Mother’s Day this year, and also featured in Soaliha’s picks too!).
For those who haven’t read the book, Sahhar explores identity and belonging in this emotional and thought-provoking read. As the official synopsis asks, “What does the daughter of a Nakba survivor inherit?” The answer? “It is not property or tangible heirlooms, nor the streets and neighbourhoods of a father’s childhood and the deep roots of family who have lived in one place, Jerusalem, for generation upon generation. Fixing her gaze on moments, places and objects – from the streets of Bethlehem to the Palestinian neighbourhoods of the New Jerusalem, Micaela Sahhar assembles a story of Palestinian diaspora, and the importance of memory to reclaim a place called home.”
We’re not surprised by Randa Abdel-Fattah’s endorsement of the book, describing it as one of the most “inventive, thought-provoking and captivating chronicles of Palestinian diasporic life I’ve had the pleasure of reading.” If that doesn’t sell it, then what will? After a year like 2025, we can’t think of a more important read or gift for the people in your life these holidays.
We were lucky enough to be able to interview Sahhar, and you can read our interview below. Enjoy!
Find Me at the Jaffa Gate blends memoir, history, and poetry. What freedoms and challenges did that hybrid form offer when writing the book and writing about Palestine and diaspora?
I think the work is hybrid, but perhaps not in the ways the question suggests. The content is, of course, historical, the small histories of the personal and the big histories of a national catastrophe. And then there is the thread of the narrator, the I, who ties together disparate places and characters with travel and archives. But then there is the question of form, and it was precisely and only because I understood the form that would suit the materials I urgently needed to work with that I could write this book. That is the form of the poetic, the playful, the multi-registered, the contrapuntal and the oral above all, since the entirety of the first draft was read aloud to my dear dad on the phone as I wrote it. So in a sense, the challenge was to understand the relationship between form and content. Once I had, what followed at the level of the project was a joy in the process, if not in the material facts of the history.
You explore “what does the daughter of a Nakba survivor inherit?” — what did you discover about inheritance as you wrote this book, beyond the tangible?
I have spent a lot of time thinking about the inheritance of the diaspora; there are a range of forces that make that experience a fractured one, but none more so than the violent disruption of Zionism and settler-colonialism. It is painful, beyond the idea of something that is personally traumatic – it affected the fabric of an entire people, and it continues to do so.
But we spend a lot of time – academically, politically – talking about this problem. It is still a problem, but I think cultural sustenance or survivance requires us to record the rich culture and the value of our lives as people in diaspora, because that is also an inheritance. And the particularities of that experience have not often been written about, the humour of it mixed in with the grief. I can say that I think the Palestinian diaspora has understood this project beautifully; many people have contacted me since Find Me at the Jaffa Gate was published to let me know that they have finally seen themselves in literature.
You’ve said before that narrative work is a form of resistance. What does literary resistance look like to you as an author writing in 2025?
We have seen across the last two years a very strange situation where the expression of anger, of rage, of frustration by members of the Palestinian community in written or verbal form, has been considered by some, and often by those in power, as more problematic than Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people from their home over seventy-seven years. So, I think we need to be attentive to what civility actually means. Western societies seem ok to look away from the murder of Palestinian people, but are outraged when Palestinian people turn their focus towards the perpetrators. If that is, in fact, what civility means, then we need to dispense with it as a matter of ethical urgency. And as a Palestinian person, to me, literary resistance in 2025 looks like mutual amplification and care for Indigenous and racialised communities everywhere, because what has happened to Palestinian people, and is happening in Palestine now, is happening elsewhere, whether it is in the public consciousness or not.
What progress or steps still need to be taken to truly make space for Palestinian voices in the Australian publishing industry?
In fact, the problem is not just for the Palestinian people. There is a kind of white-stream literature that handles all manner of life experiences in all manner of genres, and then there is “ethnic” literature about which expectations and attitudes are remarkably consistent. I don’t think literature of this kind is appropriately recognised for its mastery of form or for its inventiveness as a matter of craft. I am pained to hear of really beautiful texts which are, however, outside the white-stream, being described as “accessible”, for example. It reinforces an idea that literature promotes the empathy and humanity of a particular group of people – the same group that has done a lot of the colonising and killing in the modern era. Surely we’re not still here auditioning for our humanity in 2025, but if we are, then the problem and the work that needs to be done is systemic and mainstream.
Your academic work and creative work are deeply entwined. How do scholarship and storytelling feed one another in your practice?
In a sense, that is just a reflection of the way I was trained concurrently across history, law and creative writing. The first and last of these disciplines are inventive and capacious, while the middle one is fascinating in terms of how we understand what orders our world, and also incredibly good at, in ways that aren’t acknowledged often enough, fiction.
The writing I love best has the precision of poetry and the acuity of a researcher’s eye. And the best stories I can think of are ones that engage with the world around us –the social, political, historic, and class contexts they are derived from. But of course, there is a great deal of research that goes into really informed story, whether the reader can see it or not; I think in Find Me at the Jaffa Gate, part of my work was to intertwine the two, to show the sources and to work in different ways with their authority. After all, the Palestinian Nakba was internationally ratified in a way, but on what authority? And why should we accept that? These are questions I wanted to firmly ground within the sphere of facts. But the way I do it, that’s the creative part.
This feature was sponsored by NewSouth Publishing.