5 Questions with Micaela Sahhar
Micaela Sahhar is an Australian–Palestinian writer and educator living on Wurundjeri Country. Her essays, poetry and commentary have appeared in Cordite, Meanjin, Overland, Rabbit and Sydney Review of Books, among others.
She is a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellow (2021), a grant recipient from the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund (2022), and was commended for the Peter Blazey Fellowship (2024).
No.1
Micaela, I’d first like to ask you about Find Me at the Jaffa Gate’s structure. It’s structured such that you can begin the book from any chapter out of the 48 chapters—which to me feels very deliberate especially thinking about ‘48 and indigenous/Palestinian dispossession, your family’s story being one of many. At what point did you realise that to be the structure of the book?
It makes me happy you would read like this, Cher, because the most influential texts for me when I studied writing could be read in this way: like Anne Carson’s Plainwater: Essays & Poetry or Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence. And these texts leave space for reflection within and beyond their pages. But I’m also not convinced that you can read the chapters in any order although it is for each reader to interpret the work.
For me, finding the structure made it possible to tell a diaspora story that has been occluded by not one but two settler-colonial states and their demographic dreams of expulsion (Israel) and assimilation (Australia). The device of the encyclopaedia became a way of comprising an atemporal and non-linear story that was held by an overarching structure—returning from diaspora to Jerusalem; and returning also to the Nakba as not only an origin point but an ongoing experience. In that sense I see the work as aligned with how First Nations writers I admire are thinking about time, place, and the power of speculation.
The penultimate chapter evokes Jerusalem as both a past and future vision of the city—which I think a reader will best understand if they have already encountered the big questions and small experiences that lead me to that point.
No.2
It’s evident that you’re also a poet through the rich prose that suffuses Find Me at the Jaffa Gate. While it may be generally categorised as a “memoir”, I find it to be a lot more than that. How and when did you find poetry as a vehicle for sharing your identity or words with the world?
As a young writer, poetry was always the form that held me. My favourite work of poetry at that time was A Fool’s Life by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. It was the first autobiographical longform poetry I can remember reading, so it had an impact because I’m not sure I’d considered that poetry could do that before.
But poetry is also a very precise and economic form, at least the kind I like best. By the time I sat down to write what became Find Me at the Jaffa Gate, I had already accumulated quite a lot of material that I felt compelled to braid into the narrative and it seemed too excessive for what I think poetry does best.
But then you can see the poetry in the way each chapter is structured, in the epigraphs for the images, and the intertextual resonances which is a thing I think poets are most skilled at. Randa Abdel-Fattah, who generously provided me with an endorsement, writes ‘each chapter is a world within a world’. And I like to think that each chapter can stand alone as a kind of poetic essay within a whole more complex work.
No.3
In turn, how does being a poet influence the prose you write, particularly for this book?
I realised, perhaps 10,000 words into the first draft, that I was writing a book. And this was also the moment when I realised how the artifice of the encyclopaedia would serve me. At this time, I started calling my father when I finished drafting a section—or entry as we called them, in the spirit of the encyclopaedia.
So this book was written to be enjoyed on the page as one project of complex precision, and also read aloud in another project of rhythmic care. For people who find the prose and interwoven narratives dense, reading the work aloud is a way of disrupting that difficulty because the logic can also be heard.
And then I went through the many edited versions by reading the work aloud also—and it was how I picked up on the removal of words by well-meaning proofreaders, who thought certain words were redundancies, but to me they were integral to both musical cadence and precision. And perhaps what I have learnt from this is that for me, the relationship between poetry and meaning is indivisible.
No.4
In your acknowledgements, you thank publications such as Overland, Cordite and Rabbit for your “return to creative practice”. What made you leave in the first instance?
I have always had encouraging writing mentors. But I was also, always, writing about Palestine, which was integral to my writing practice, and there wasn’t a lot of publishing interest.
I remember one particular rejection letter for a sequence of poems that Dorothy Porter had praised—simply, in a handwritten scrawl, ‘Sorry’. I understood that this was a political response and not an aesthetic one; I managed to get those poems published 15 years later.
So, I really stopped writing creatively (although I was still writing) for quite a long time; and then, by chance, I was offered several writing commissions all at once. All the editors of the journals you’ve mentioned placed a particular faith in both my capacity to write and its content, and their generosity reminded me that writing, for me, is urgent and necessary and indispensable.
But it has also made me reflect that writing isn’t just about talent, it’s about platform. And increasingly I realise that platforms are about bravery. So I’m particularly indebted to these three journals and four editors for their radical publishing choices that helped me find a way back into writing.
No.5
You are an academic as well, with your doctorate focusing on national narrative and media coverage during Israeli assaults on Palestine in the twenty-first century. How do you understand the link between art and academia, and do you see yourself doing the same kind of work in each sphere?
I remember being very influenced by Hayden White’s Tropics of Discourse, which looks at how genres are intertwined (to unforgivably reduce that thesis). But this question of narrative and how we tell stories has been with me for a long time. For me, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is primarily a creative work in the art of telling stories that do not lend themselves to typical narrative forms (such as the epic), but it is also a work that is the result of a considerable amount of indirect and then, when I was writing, direct research. So my academic interests are strongly aligned with the questions I am engaging in this book.
I am interested in the preservation of Palestinian narrative, memory and history, in any genre. Narrative work is resistance—we know that words and stories matter because even now, these stories are being suppressed. A recent illustration is a leaked Meta directive to erase reference to Ghassan Kanafani on its platforms—he was assassinated by Mossad in 1972, and he wrote about Al-Adab Al-Muqawama (the Literature of the Resistance). What more proof do we need that the last defence of a powerful but crumbling hegemony is censorship?
‘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.
Get it from UNSW Press here.