Find Me at the Jaffa Gate

‘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,’ Micaela Sahhar writes. Her task is even greater than she states. In this family history, Sahhar collects her inheritances, her family stories, her time in Palestine, her culture and history and life, to ask: how does a Palestinian ever go home?

In a loose collection of essays, Sahhar details her two trips to Palestine – birthright trips – and the conflict she finds at the borders, along with the love in the interior. Her grandfather fled Palestine after the Nakba, but she traces her family, other Sahhars who remain. She finds records of long-dead relatives in Palestine and meets distant relatives now alive. This work is an assertion: we have always been in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the West Bank, Gaza, Palestine, and we always will be.

Sahhar does not turn her sole focus onto Palestine, the place, though. Most of the essays are about Australia, and Palestinians in Australia, who are determined to keep their history and culture alive. They practise religion, they make food, and they mould the world with their hands. They feel a tentative relationship with First Nations Australians, who also know what it is to have your land and people taken away. They hope, and they create a better future.

With this tender, loving, and sometimes angry story about the Palestinian diaspora, Sahhar demands we pay attention. She weaves the fragments she finds of family and national history into a narrative from which we cannot look away. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is a story that traverses time and place, love and hate; it’s a story of ongoing and unforgettable Palestinian survival.