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'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.' Randa Abdel-Fattah, academic and writer, author of 11 Words for Love

'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. ' 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