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).

In this interview, I chatted to Micaela about family history, the threads of memory, the ongoing effects of Nakba and acts of cultural resilience and resistance.

Author image by: Tim Herbert

Alex Creece: Hey Micaela! Thank you so much for speaking with me today. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is stunning, urgent and heart-wrenching. As I read it, there were many quotes that I underlined and highlighted to revisit.

Firstly, the book is subtitled, “An encyclopaedia of a Palestinian family.” Your writing – blending personal narrative, poetry, academia and history – strikes me as incredibly encyclopaedic in its intimate detail, breadth and generosity, as well as in its fact-finding through family records, tapes, diaries, conversations and personal experiences.

Can you tell me about how you gathered everything that went into this book?

Micaela Sahhar: Well, I have to start by thanking you, Alex, for your careful and generous reading of my book. And thank you for such a thoughtful question, as well. I like that you’ve picked up on the subtitle, and that it’s resonated with your reading of the book. In fact, the subtitle was my working title for a lot of the time.

It was a bit of an anti-Enlightenment idea that I was deploying here – what I mean by that is, in the 18th and 19th century, you have this consolidation of Western and colonial knowledge, projects where particular kinds of knowledge were placed in books like encyclopaedias. In doing so, particular lines were drawn around what is worth knowing and what is not worth knowing.

Much of what is in my book is not the stuff that would have made it into a traditional encyclopaedia, or been considered the kind of material worth knowing. But I’m making a claim that what is in this encyclopedia – of a Palestinian family – is something that should be engaged with, and known more broadly than it is.

So, in terms of gathering the materials – and this multi-genre technique at play – the collation of this book has been a very long project, much longer than the drafting process. In some ways the work for this book goes back to reading a lot of scholarly materials for my doctoral work, but also the lifelong project of being in family, being in [a Palestinian] community and listening to these stories.

Because both of my grandparents died when I was reasonably young, I’ve been listening to the stories of my father and my aunts in particular. Then there was this experience of travelling with my father to meet family who were displaced to the USA, and they remembered my grandparents so very vividly. Through this process, I began to understand a rupture that I knew in an intellectual sense – which is Nakba.

And there’s also archival work – I think archival work is so important in the Palestinian context. The revisiting of archives by colonised peoples is such an important project that is being undertaken at this time.

I was working with very fragmentary archives that my family has, particularly from one of my aunts. [She has been sharing these documents with me over many years] and when we would look at a document [together] it would provoke particular memories for her.

The process of writing the book actually started during the lockdowns in Naarm. I would call my father every time I finished a chapter, or what he called an “entry”, in that encyclopaediac form.

I would read him what I’d written, and it was quite enlivening for him, so he’d quite often text me a couple of days later or call me back to tell me about something that it had triggered for him. Although this didn’t always get blended back into the narrative, there was negotiated collective process in some ways to forming a collective narrative.

Abdullah [Micaela’s Pa] with an ibrik beside one of his cars. Palestine, c. late 1920s. Courtesy of the Sahhar family collection (shared with permission for one-time use).

AC: This reminds me a lot of the work of First Nations writers from this continent, in decolonial truth-telling and examining what kinds of knowledge and narratives are legitimised by colonial powers, and what is scrubbed away and undermined.

MS: Yes, I think that’s absolutely a relationship between this work and the archives of resistance and liberation, and the practices of First Nations people here and abroad.

When thinking about archival records, it’s also worth thinking about the volume of information. That is, what’s absent and why? Or when there’s a lot of information, what kind of information is it? How does the colonial state record and interpolate particular kinds of bodies through their relations to the state?

AC: As I’ve just recently worked with you over at Cordite Poetry Review, it was interesting to see memory, fragmentation, mapping and re-mapping as through lines of both your longform book and your poetic sites of interest and inquiry. This of course makes a lot of sense – you are truth-telling about lived experiences that have been violently erased, obfuscated and appropriated in colonial archives.

I think of this quote from your book:

“Hadeel says the maps are technical drawings that capture a definitive colonial arrogance. Maps, we agree, open out a chasm between the documentation and reality of Palestine.”

Can you speak to the strengths and limits of memory in personal, familial and cultural storytelling? And what is the role of forgetting (or trying to forget) in colonialism, particularly with regard to the Zionist project?

MS: That’s such a big question, Alex. I might start with Cordite actually, as it was my beautiful co-editor Anne-Marie Te Whiu who suggested REMEMBER as the issue theme [and] it was really resonant for both of us.

There are these common lineages of experiencing cataclysmic events of colonisation, which are also important pathways into the future. So, the act of remembering is an important bridge for those whose personhood, identity and relationship to place has endured attempted annihilation through [ongoing] colonial [projects].

In the issue, we also highlighted [themes] like colonial forgetting and erasure, and refusing colonial amnesia in some of the poems we’ve brought together. Ani and I didn’t explicitly discuss it, but all the commissioned poets (that we invited directly) ended up being Indigenous poets and poets of colour. Remembering beyond coloniality is a really rich vein for people to engage with.

In the callout for Cordite‘s REMEMBER issue, I used a little quote by Alessandro Portelli, [who] says that [oral testimonies and memory work] are not always fully reliable, and actually, this doesn’t undermine their value; it’s the errors and the inventions that lead us beyond facts to their meaning.

That sort of idea, of leading us beyond facts to their meaning, was in some ways how I approached Find Me at The Jaffa Gate – with this capacious understanding of what memory can do. I think memory is quite vital for Palestinians because of the incomplete nature of our archives. In both personal and structural ways, I think archives are very powerful.

It’s also well known that Israel has made archives disappear in the Palestinian context; it’s done so by re-organising them, by closing them, by removing them, by keeping them hidden.

Some things were actually declassified, about 40 years ago, in the 1980s, when a group called the Israeli New Historians were doing some research. They were then reclassified and resealed, and so they’re not available now. You might ask why: it’s because the archives are generally on the side of the Palestinians, and Israel doesn’t want to damage its image.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has written about this closing of archives as being a state policy decision led by the Defense Ministry. They removed huge numbers of historic documents with the explicit aim of concealing proof of the Nakba. [This has to do with] an anxiety about legitimacy, which I think haunts all colonial states, because it’s difficult to face the myths on which your state was built.

The other thing about memory, and I say this now in a more intimate sense, is that we’re on the brink of losing a lot of really valuable memory within the Palestinian story at this moment.

I guess that’s true of memory in general, but the survivors of the original Nakba, who are still living, were reasonably young when it occurred, and are now old.

I had the good fortune to meet my great aunt in the USA about 10 years ago, and her memory was excellent. She was well over 90.

Meeting her offered me this trove of memories, and then she died not long after I first met her. So, her death sort of tore away this repository of knowledge that I’d felt might be able to answer questions that had been raised by the archives.

In some way, sitting down to write this book also felt like a way of stitching what I had. All these little gifts and treasures – ones that had become quite dislocated from their context. By putting them into a book, I could work to recontextualise these things, so they can have another life, beyond me and my memory.

Ajia, Ellen & Yousra [L-R: Micaela’s great grandmother, grandmother and great aunt], studio portrait. Jerusalem, c. 1932. Courtesy of the Sahhar family collection (shared with permission for one-time web use).

AC: Thank you for answering that huge question so thoroughly and thoughtfully! The way you’ve weaved narratives and archives together in this book is masterful. And when you spoke about colonial amnesia, it reminded me of a quote you included (from Israeli historian Benny Morris) about Israel’s former prime minister, Ehud Barak:

[Barak] seems to think in terms of generations and hesitantly predicts that only ‘80 years’ after 1948 will the Palestinians be historically ready for a compromise. By then, most of the generation that experienced the catastrophe of 1948 at first hand will have died; there will be ‘very few “salmons” around who still want to return to their birthplaces to die’.

I think this really speaks to the way in which colonial states rely on the loss of memory, to time and death, as a way to dominate and rewrite the narrative, and to assert their ‘legitimacy’.

MS: That’s hovered over a lot of my life – this idea that Palestinian people would be resettled, and their Palestinian identity would be bred out of them.

I mean, I think [for] those sorts of comments, we really do have to see them in context with the policies … in this country. I’m often reminded of a photograph made famous by A. O. Neville [who served as the so-called Chief Protector of Aborigines and Commissioner of Native Affairs in Western Australia] that showed how in three generations, First Nations people could be ‘bred out’ or made to disappear. This image illustrated the so-called biological absorption theory, closely tied to eugenicist ideas.

And I think there’s very much this idea in the Israeli state: that you can disappear Palestinian people [when they are absorbed elsewhere]. Or the idea that Palestinian identity is quite insubstantial, which is really odd, because they’re also convincing their own population of a narrative that after 2000 years, they’re making this historic return.

So, you know, there are a lot of logical flaws in the mythologies of a settler narrative.

AC: You describe Nakba as a sense of ‘missing’, of loss and dispersion. You write:

“Nakba is not an event, but a structure.”

“I have never grown tired of examining for this or that vital clue about who we all were before Nakba.”

“There isn’t a Palestinian living who hasn’t considered this question, of what they would take in the night if a Nakba should ever befall us twice, and we could grab only this one small suitcase before we took flight.”

“We carry Palestine in our hearts and Israel on our backs.”

This sense of ‘missing’, this structure of Nakba, is palpable in the book, as you pull story threads together, tracking your family history scattered through displacement, exile, borders and walls (both physically and psychologically imposed).

What impact has writing this book had on your understanding of your family, of who they were and who they are now?

MS: Regarding the quote about Nakba as a structure, I should actually flag that it’s an adaptation of Patrick Wolfe’s famous work, where he says that “invasion is a structure, not an event.”

Not just the settler acts, but the consequences of the settler acts continuing to operate in ongoing ways. So, I see Wolfe’s work as a tool for explaining why, for colonised people, it’s actually impossible to ‘move on’ when what’s happened to you – and what is still happening to you – is not acknowledged.

We’re seeing that right now with what’s happening to Palestinian people. I mean, it’s impossible for [the] Australian [government] to acknowledge what is happening as a genocide, much less that what happened 77 years ago was criminal.

The acknowledgments for Indigenous people here, even 200 years later, have been really inadequate and partial. And that’s in a state where it’s much easier for me to say what I think, and say where my knowledge and my narratives lead me, than it would be in other places. But there’s still these real structural failures.

I grew up with people who lived through the literal violence of the original Nakba. And, for many years, their identity was occluded and expunged from history in that broader frenzy to legitimise Israel by denying that Palestinian people were Palestinian, or that Palestine had ever existed.

Two of the central people in the book are my grandparents. My Pa died when I was quite young, but he left a significant presence in my life … through the traces of him that I was given in stories, particularly from my father. And then my grandmother died in my early 20s. So I was lucky to have more time with her, but it wasn’t enough time.

And so, in writing this book, I really came to think about and ask myself questions that I wasn’t old enough to ask them when my grandparents were still living.

And I think that’s why the book is structured around a research process, but also trying to recreate time and place [and] to arrest that process, that passage of time, and make it more accessible to people.

As I was saying before, I do think that the book itself has a sort of archival function as a repository of how I’ve investigated some of these questions, but [it has] to be sort of speculative and incomplete because I am asking the questions too late in many places. I think that’s true of the past, and especially a disrupted past where people have been displaced.

Writing the book gave me an opportunity to think through the lives of people who have had their lives quite far from me, including cousins around the world that [in part through the writing process] I’ve been able to restore some contact with. It helped me … reformulate some of the disrupted relationships that Nakba had affected.

I hope the book allows people to see the amazing resilience of not just my family, but of Palestinian people in the face of catastrophic events, and the ongoing nature and effects of those events. There’s a quiet heroism in ordinary people, and I think that’s one of the beautiful realisations I had about my own family while I was writing the book.

Car laden with the Sahhar family’s cases, on the journey to Australia, figures unknown. Beirut, c. 1952. Courtesy of the Sahhar family collection (shared with permission for one-time web use).

AC: That’s really lovely. Thank you, Micaela. Shifting gears to my next question: there’s a chapter where you talk about revenge fantasies as a colonised person. Is anger or vengeance something that helps to fuel you creatively? How do you personally harness your anger into action, into revenge?

MS: Mmm, yeah, it’s interesting you picked up on that chapter. I’m going to answer your question, but I want to say a few other things about that chapter first. One of them is that it was actually my father’s favourite chapter when I was reading him the book! For people who haven’t read the book, that chapter is drawing on a poem by a Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammad Ali, who was from the Galilee and died earlier this century.

I think both that poem and my chapter speak to an important dissonance in the Western rulebook of civility. And by that, I’m talking about Israel specifically, but also the USA and the Western consensus that you can do terrible things to Palestinian people, and yet, if we imagine doing terrible things in response, this is considered far more horrifying and shocking than the actual violence that Palestinian people, or indeed other colonised and oppressed people, have experienced.

We’re seeing this play out in a particular way in this country right now – that Palestinian people and their allies are being persecuted for the use of various slogans that speak about liberation, that speak out against the rapacious violence of genocide. And yet, we are the people being told that some people’s feelings are more important than other people’s lives.

I’ve performed the ‘Revenge’ chapter a couple of times. Once was with these two beautiful performers, Yorta Yorta musician Allara Briggs-Pattison, and Ukrainian artist Olenka Toroshenko. In that context, I’ve heard that reading ‘Revenge’ moved people to tears.

And then I also read it in another context, at a local reading that wasn’t specifically about colonial resistance, and an audience member approached me [at the end] and said he felt really worried when I began my reading [and] I used the word revenge, and it was like he didn’t think I was allowed to engage with the idea – that it was sort of unspeakable. He was anxious for me, and anxious for the performance that I was sort of teetering on the brink of all these unacceptable and unpalatable ideas. And then he said he felt relieved about where that particular chapter actually goes.

It made me quite sad. I felt that for him there was this idea that Palestinians had to accept what has happened to them. In a sense, it’s true that Palestinians do have to live with it. But I don’t think we do have to accept it. This is the heart and soul of resistance.

Many Palestinians are feeling this at the moment. Mohammed el-Kurd has just published a book called Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal. He discussed the book on a radio show, and he [says] that settlers stole his house, and it’s not his fault that they were Jewish. The rightful anger Palestinian people feel against their coloniser is quite lost and obscured when places like Australia get caught up in a false definition of antisemitism. It’s so important that we preserve this space between Zionism on one hand and Jewishness on the other.

Zionism is this brutal political ideology that has made the ethnic cleansing of Palestine possible since 1948, and which makes a genocide in 2025 able to continue after 19 months. This should be shocking, and yet, at an institutional level, it doesn’t seem to be.

And so then to come full circle to your question, Alex. I must admit I’m not actually driven at all in my writing by personal feelings of anger or vengeance. I think they’re important to express and I would also ask the question: Why shouldn’t I, as a Palestinian person, be entitled to have those feelings about the violence that’s been enacted on my family and people like us?

But I also don’t think anger is what gets you out of bed in the morning. My work is much more driven by representation for community and the necessity of that, much more than anger.

AC: I really appreciate you sharing your perspective from so many angles here. I loved that chapter, and was reminded of Blackie Blackie Brown, a fantastic play by Nakkiah Lui that I saw a few years ago, which similarly deals with revenge. I’m really interested in the function of emotions in storytelling, and how certain emotions are shunned as too uncomfortable or positioned as dangerous – particularly from multiply marginalised people under the brunt of Western respectability politics, as you mentioned.

Another topic switch for my next question: food is quite prominent in the book – for example, family scenes in the kitchen at Mirls Street, the ma’amoul cakes, Ellen’s Best Cake, and the Palestine Restaurants.

What do you think about food legacies as an inheritance, a resistance and a form of cultural survival, especially in context with starvation as a weapon of Israel’s genocide?

MS: You’ve brought some interesting things together in this question. I think I might start with talking about the genocide.

If you want to know what resistance and resilience looks like today, you don’t need to look any further than Gaza. [Palestinian] people in Gaza are really facing starvation, and yet you see these incredible communal cooking projects and this enormous generosity of people sharing the very little that they have with others.

When you and I started chatting today, we spoke about our respective cats – and there are just so many videos of starving Palestinian people and children sharing the very little bit of food they have with their cats, making sure their cats get fed. This is incredibly humbling and moving. It’s really the epitome of resistance.

I think when it comes to questions of food in Gaza, it’s worth noting that the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, said on the wonderful Makdisi Street podcast that famine is never actually a natural occurrence.

So, we have to remember that the starvation of Palestinian people in Gaza is entirely engineered and intended by Israel.

I mean, not enough humanitarian trucks are getting through, but when they do, they’re getting through with all kinds of useless goods. I remember one report saying that what had come through on a particular humanitarian convoy were shrouds for the bodies of the dead, but no food provisions at all.

Linking back to my book, which is, you know, much less vital than considering the question of food in Gaza: I don’t have a lot of Arabic language; it’s something that I’ve lost through the process of my family coming to this country. It’s quite common, especially as my mother isn’t Palestinian … So, I’ve learnt a little bit, but what I did have growing up was a vocabulary of food.

I spent a lot of time with Dad’s family, here in Naarm, and food was an important language of identity.

Many of the things my family made required special tools, but you couldn’t buy the tools in Australia when my family arrived. And so, my Pa, who was a really expert craftsman and could make something out of anything, he made a variety of sort of very specialised Palestinian or Arab kitchen items, like little serrated tongs to decorate cakes with, or specialised coring tools [manakra] for hollowing out vegetables for stuffing.

My grandmother [Ellen] also modified her recipes. It was after she died that I realised that she’d modified her recipe for Best Cake to perfectly fit an old lamington tin. I think these are examples of not just resistance, but also of adaptation and practices of cultural resilience in new places.

And then of course, Alex, food and memory is so important – the way that cooking or being in the kitchen evokes memory for people. I think of cooking with my dad, checking recipes with him, and having him teach me how to do things. He would tell me about what his mother did when he was small – another important site of storytelling because of that connection between memory and food.

These kinds of things are passed down through hands and through people more than they are through externalised archives like recipe books.

I like learning about what foods are broadly Levantine – so, you know, shared with Lebanese and Syrian people especially – and what is particular to Palestinian people. I think those histories of both commonality and particularity are significant to learn about.

Irene & Joey (in his amazing “technicolour dream vest”) [Micaela’s aunt and father]. Newport, c. mid-1950s. Courtesy of the Sahhar family collection (shared with permission for one-time web use).

AC: You write early in the book: “…in truth it is a story that is not mine nor hers; I am searching for the shape of what is ours.”

Can you speak to the role of literature in collective liberation?

MS: Ghassan Kanafani, who was a leading Palestinian writer of the first generation after the Nakba, was assassinated by Mossad, Israel’s secret service. He wrote about what he called in Arabic, “al-Adab al-Muqawama”, which means the literature of the resistance.

Kanafani thought a lot about how literature was used as propaganda in Zionism, and how that propaganda had a role in the colonisation of Palestine.

In my book, I write a little bit about Leon Uris’ Exodus – a historical novel about the establishment of the state of Israel – which was later made into a Hollywood film in the 1960s. Exodus has this idea that Israel is a great return for Zionists. This popular narrative conceals both the appalling violence and the great injustices that are done to Palestinian people.

I mention this context because [Kanafani’s] ideas remain, and are recognised by Israel as very relevant. In the news cycle of the last 24 hours or so, I saw that a Meta policy to suppress and censor content referring to Kanafani was leaked … So, this idea of the literature of resistance matters – in a very present way – when Kanafani is being suppressed so many decades after he died.

I think we’re at a moment where we’re seeing a renaissance in the writing of the Palestinian diaspora. I don’t want to say that hasn’t been there before … But you know, in Australia at the moment, over the last three years, there’s been at least four or five Palestinian-Australian texts across poetry, fiction and non-fiction.

I think it’s been made possible by collective solidarities in this country. The Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, has made it more possible for Palestinians to tell their stories.

This literary outpouring from Palestinians offers the next generation literary visions of themselves, which I certainly didn’t have as a young person. I was at Ani’s book launch last night for her poetry debut, Mettle, and she dedicated it to her younger self. That was really resonant for me.

I’ve written the book that I wanted to read as a young diaspora Palestinian person who didn’t really know how or where they fitted.

As a person of the diaspora as a result of colonial displacement, I want the diasporic experience to be represented. I want diaspora to feel like they are part of the collective Palestinian experience.

We, the diaspora, are an important part of the work of liberation, alongside Palestinian people who remained.

AC: That makes a lot of sense. The book strikes me as incredibly community-minded – to me, it felt like both a love letter to Palestinian diaspora and your family, and a rallying call-to-action in strengthening solidarity for allies and non-Palestinians.

To my next question: There are many searing questions you pose within the book, such as:

“What does it mean to be exiled and how do we take our revenge? What intimacies lie in these wreckages and may we lay our burdens down?”

“Do you ask the question – do you live inside this plot or step outside of it? Is it possible to step out of a plot when you are a plot point arriving?”

“Is it possible to wrestle the spear off a date and expertly work its tip through the armoury? Can you poke a date in the eye and hope to vanquish it?”

I’m aware that these questions are rhetorical, but did writing this book answer anything for you?

MS: In a big sense, the book helped me understand [how I am] part of a struggle for justice that started before I was born and that will most likely continue after I die.

In naming these things in literature, I perhaps provoked a bigger question about what justice and restitution and historical reckoning can and does look like, both on a personal scale and a community scale.

I’ve spent a lot of my life teaching – and in teaching people to think, I’m not really invested in answering questions, or if I am, they’re not the main part I’m interested in.

I did have some little revelations while I was writing, thinking about the logic of certain facts or documents that I had, and how they actually fitted together or made sense. This helped me to ask questions or learn new things in a way that I maybe hadn’t examined before – in a way that family stories are not often closely examined in how they circulate.

But, I suppose that even in those moments of small resolutions or learnings, they would just have this way of unravelling something else. And so, I was really left with more questions.

On the dedication page of my book, there’s a photograph that I’ve had for most of my life [pictured below]. I don’t remember not having that photograph. It’s of my dad, and he’s standing in front of my grandfather’s Chevrolet and they’re in Amman, which is where they went as refugees.

I’ve looked at that photo over many, many years. I had it scanned for the book, saw it during typesetting and proofing, but then the first copy of the book arrived. Alex, for the first time, I noticed two new shadows in the photograph – probably my grandparents!

A book is kind of like saying to people, “I’m finished,” right? Like, it’s a finished package. But there are still things to find, even in the things that we claim are finished – especially when you’re dealing with the instability of documents, memory, archive and your relationship to the past. And even in your own capacity as a storyteller.

I’m the type of thinker that keeps worrying away at the logic of archive and its fragments. And then I actually I keep finding more things to think about!

Joey [Micaela’s dad] with Pa’s Chevrolet. Amman, c. 1949–1950. Courtesy of the Sahhar family collection (shared with permission for one-time use).

AC: I really get that. Sometimes I feel like seeing something in a new context reveals new details, even if it’s something you’ve seen so many other times in its original context.

MS: I was quite stunned. I know you recently published your wonderful first collection too, and I’d be interested to hear if you had a similar experience in receiving the first copy and it feeling a little bit alien? Like a sort of foreign object? I think that gave me those fresh eyes to see something new.

AC: Yes, I felt similarly – even if you proof something on a computer repeatedly, it’s not the same as getting the physical object and realising how it now exists outside of you for the first time. It becomes its own thing – I felt like it wasn’t really a part of me anymore, but was a part of the world in a way.

MS: That’s right. It’s a big letting go.

AC: Yeah, and an act of trust. Especially thinking about your book and how personal it is. You’re putting it out into the world, and you’re also kind of letting the world in.

MS: That’s such an interesting observation. I was at the Liminal Festival last year, and heard Evelyn Araluen, Hasib Hourani and Mykaela Saunders talking about writing on intimate subjects. They discussed how, as an author, you still decide about where the lines are.

What is available? What is unavailable? It’s nice if you feel invited in, but of course there are still decisions that go into how you can tell stories. Where are the limits of what’s right to share? At what point is the story yours and where is the collective?

AC: This passage towards the end was incredibly moving (I highlighted the page in its entirety!):

I will shout this at the intersection of Mamillah, and on the balcony of the house my Pa built, and I will give what voice I have to the most joyous euphonia of the Palestinians returning to our once and future home, with the dead on our shoulders and the living in our arms. We will burst through the gates of the Old City and roam the New Jerusalem from the Greek Colony to Talbiyeh, from Qatamon to Baq’a, sweeping south to Gaza and north to the Galilee, and to all the places we are indivisibly from and that are ours. And as I cross the threshold of my grandfather’s house, I will lay my burden down. And if it should not be me, then it will be another, when I will be an ancestor and those that I have loved will all be stars.

What does hope mean to you personally? And how does it inform your writing practice?

MS: That’s such a thoughtful question, Alex. I feel I should always start questions of hope by acknowledging Chelsea Watego’s work. In Another Day in the Colony, she has a chapter called ‘Fuck Hope’.

She’s talking about a particular way of treating hope as something that’s complacent, or that becomes a deferral for a remedy, or stands in place of real justice and restitution. And I do agree with that sentiment. Particular kinds of hope are like a colonial apology – you know, a very inept apology.

For example, in talking earlier about Western civility, and how it finds the resistance to genocide more confronting than a genocide itself. Some hope can fall into that space, which demands civility, and in which people lament regrettable things that have happened, but don’t actually take action to create a better future.

Now that I’ve said that, you’re pointing to a part of my book that challenged me.

I had a lot of trouble finding a way to end the narrative of my work … and I suppose the question for me was: how do you end an unfinished story?

There isn’t a conclusion or a resolution to any Palestinian story. I was thinking about all the voices that I had animated – and reanimated – in the pages of my book … My family, of course, people who experienced the Nakba and didn’t [get] to see [justice] in their lifetime.

Drawing on collective memory, and understanding myself as belonging to a collective, what I’ve come to realise is that all my work is part of a whole that’s much bigger, more powerful and more important than my singular experiences as an individual.

Palestinians say to one another, “In our lifetime.” Part of my energy comes from the knowledge that if it isn’t in my lifetime, I know it’s going to be in somebody’s, and I will have done what I can to make sure that Palestinian people get what my grandparents didn’t get, and what I may or may not get.

That is the labour of resistance, and the gift I can guarantee, as we all – allies and Palestinian people – continue to work towards some future justice.

Yousra & Issa [Micaela’s great aunt and great uncle], 8 Asa Street, Greek Colony. Jerusalem, c. mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Sahhar family collection (shared with permission for one-time web use).

AC: As a final question: What do you want readers to take away from the book? Specifically, what do you want your family and Palestinian diaspora to take away from this book? And thank you so much again for all your time and generosity today, Micaela.

MS: That’s a beautiful question. Thank you for reading with such insight and care – I’m grateful for it.

I think of the book in multiple registers, in terms of who it’s for. I want to say a bit about the general reader first. I had drafted this book before the current genocide began by quite a few years, but I do think that the genocide reminds us all of why ignorance about what happened to Palestinian people isn’t good enough.

I think a lot of people have been switched on by the extent of the atrocities in Gaza, and may be asking themselves how they didn’t know about the Palestinian experience over the last 77 years. So, I guess this book is making an argument – one that Palestinians often make at solidarity rallies – that the current genocide is part of the process of Nakba.

I want to inform readers how the violence of 2023, 2024 and 2025 has transpired, and how it links to a longer history.

And, of course, my dedication is to Palestinians everywhere. It was really intended as a book that could represent something that I didn’t see represented when I was growing up as a diasporic Palestinian.

Many tragic narratives take on epic proportions, if that’s not the story you’re telling, it’s harder to sort of know how to tell it. But there’s a line in my book about things that are mundane but also special … I think that sort of describes a diaspora – [it’s] different from a lot of other people’s experiences, and they’re underpinned by a sense of ‘missing’. The book asks: “How do people live in a diasporic identity?”

So, I guess in saying this, I think an important part of resistance for Palestinians is to refuse the idea that being born elsewhere, being born in Australia, being born in the USA, being born in diaspora, makes you any less of a Palestinian person. This is a colonial dream of naturalisation – I want the Palestinian diaspora to feel like they can assert their identity.

I take my cues here from First Nations people. I’ve learned a lot from First Nations friends about identity and colonial mythologies of eradicating identity. For example, I certainly grew up with the mythologies of the last Tasmanian Aboriginal people and I now know this to be an atrocious falsehood.

What is disquieting to the settler state is continuation and survivance, right? And so, I think the Palestinian diaspora must claim our Palestinian identity, and insist on it as something that can’t be taken away or vanished, even after Nakba or displacement.

Palestinian identity is an inheritance, and diaspora must cherish and hang onto it.

Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is out now. Purchase your copy via your local bookstore or online via NewSouth.