Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family
Title: Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family
Author: Micaela Sahhar
Publisher: NewSouth
Shortlist: Non-Fiction
'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.
Judges’ Report
One knows that Find Me at the Jaffa Gate has been percolating for a long time when they read it. Within 48 short chapters, Micaela Sahhar pieces fragments of memory, speculation, and archival research to tell a story of both the construction of her selfhood and Palestinian family: ‘not a story about wounds but about the preservation of something all its own’. It is a book full of brilliances even as occupation and exile cause history and geography to cut loose and spin around each other and as Sahhar herself asks, ‘What does it mean to be exiled and how do we take our revenge?’ Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is a gift, a remarkable debut memoir that is simultaneously a work of poetry in its lyricism and feeling; humour, anger, warmth, grief and love eddy in a whirlpool to form a work about sumud and survival.
Extract
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About the Author
Photo by Tim Herbert
Micaela Sahhar
VPLA book photography by Shannyn Higgins
The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards are proudly supported by the Victorian Government.
