Find Me at the Jaffa Gate
An encyclopaedia of a Palestinian family
‘What is the task but to find my way back to the unfragmentation of the world as we knew it; to collect the uncollected, to make the unmade. To refuse victimhood even when annihilation seems to insist on it. To make a thing out of nothing, to make a diaspora into something, real enough to share.’
What does the daughter of a Nakba survivor inherit? It is not property or tangible heirlooms, none of which can crisscross the globe with their refugee owners. It is not 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, returning to the origins of violence in the Nakba. 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 is an Australian-Palestinian writer and educator. She holds a doctorate focusing on national narrative and media coverage during Israeli assaults on Palestine in the 21st century and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Murdoch University. Her essays, poetry and commentary have appeared in Meanjin, Sydney Review of Books, The Conversation, Overland and the Griffith Review among others. She is a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellow (2021).
