Find Me at the Jaffa Gate

‘If we were different people, to write down these words might be to leave them behind us. But words are our artifacts, and I am seeding a trail for the journey, home.’

What does the daughter of a Nakba survivor inherit? 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. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is a book about the gaps and blank spaces that cannot be easily recounted, but which insists on the vibrant reality of chance, fragments and memory to reclaim a place called home.

‘Micaela Sahhar’s Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is one of the most inventive, thought-provoking and captivating chronicles of Palestinian diasporic life I’ve had the pleasure of reading. It is a memoir written by a poet, poetry written by a novelist, literature written by an academic – it is all these things at once, insisting with a gentle yet unwavering confidence in the power of its unique, brilliantly evocative and genre-defying voice. Sahhar’s love for her family, homeland, the details and intimacies of everyday life; for language, history, archives, photographs and the treasured ephemera of a life in diaspora, shine through every line. The result is a book in which every word is deliberate, each line commands attention, each chapter is a world within a world.’ – Randa Abdel-Fattah, academic and writer, author of 11 Words for Love

‘Micaela Sahhar’s family history has everything that makes any Palestinian family history worth telling and reading about. On the one hand, a rich culture that ranges from distinctive culinary practices to a distinctive sense of humour, and on the other hand, a tragic settler-colonial history of dispossession and oppression leading to a transnational diasporic existence, and that makes for a characteristic sense of space and place. But this is not any book about Palestine. Sahhar is a superior storyteller with a knack for highlighting evocative details. Storytelling, like any craft, embodies in different degrees the labour of the many people who have told stories about one’s subject matter in the past. The more a writer is well-read the more this shows in the historical density and the social complexity of their storytelling. Sahhar’s book is definitely dense and socially complex in this way. This could make for ‘heavy’ reading if it wasn’t for Sahhar’s superior writing skills. Indeed, I would say that more than anything else, this is a book for people who enjoy good writing, regardless of what the story is about. But of course, it matters what this story is about. This is a book about Palestine and Palestinians, and in the way the book is grounded in both the Palestinian tragedy and the Palestinian unlimited capacity to affirm life, the spirit of anti-colonial resistance animates every one of its pages. Sahhar finishes the book saying that like Mahmoud Darwish’s father she hopes that one day she will be able to go to Palestine, to the streets where her family originates from, and shout I am I. And I am here. But in a way, by writing this book, she already does that, if not from Palestine at least from the position she occupies within the transnational space of western colonialism.’ – Ghassan Hage, professor of anthropology at the University of Melbourne and author of The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World

‘Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is an aching and tender study of diaspora, grief, memory and history. Sahhar has a masterful voice, playing subtly with tense and form to give agency to a beautifully layered narrative, interwoven with fragments, records and intimate moments of lives permanently changed by Nakba. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate tells an unmissable story of Palestinian survival and resistance across space and time.’ – Evelyn Araluen, Bundjalung poet and author of Dropbear

‘Sahhar chronicles the essential truths of Palestine with intricacy and finesse and in doing so, has crafted a mighty text that demands unbroken attention. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is a book that will be read, re-read, dog-eared, underlined and recited.’ – Hasib Hourani, author of rock flight

‘Find Me at the Jaffa Gate opens with a recollection of the five-year-old Micaela bobbing off to preparatory school with pigtails, glasses and missing teeth. As she enters the classroom, her sense of self is shattered – in a nation that is home but not home, when a teacher butchers her family name and is visibly appalled when told the name is Palestinian. As the child of diaspora, born on the unceded lands of Australia, Micaela is ever conscious of the tension between being in exile on homelands now occupied; and living, working and writing on the occupied lands of Naarm – in colonial Australia – a site of invasion, and genocide. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate writes of and to dispossession, displacement, trauma, loss, resilience and is testimony to the power of intergenerational story and memory that survives, and lives on so that all those who remain, and their children and children’s children remember. In this polyphonic narrative, we hear many voices – some still living, others passed, now scattered across nations and continents, yet still connected through home – Palestine.’ – Jeanine Leane, Wiradjuri writer, critic, poet and author of Gawimarra: Gathering

‘At a time when Israel is literally trying to wipe Palestinians off the map, this book lands with a powerful thud of fury, beauty and resistance. Weaving personal stories with history in all its unvarnished details, Micaela Sahhar delivers a deeply affecting story that articulates one of the great outrages of our time.’ – Antony Loewenstein, independent journalist, film-maker and author of The Palestine Laboratory