“[Our works] archive a moment in time, I hope the darkest part of the night before the dawn.”
— Micaela Sahhar
Stories of Palestine at the Sydney Writers Festival was held on Sunday, 25th May. A deeply urgent and powerful event, the panel featured Micaela Sahhar, author of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate, as well as Samah Sabawi, author of Cactus Pear for My Beloved, Hasib Hourani, author of Rock Flight, and Sara Haddad, author of The Sunbird. I hung onto every word of this panel, sitting within a silent audience with my breath hitched. The panel was comprised of four writers, who spoke to their synergies and resonances with each other. The eloquence and brevity of each writer were truly astounding, and the passion for craft and story was vivid, always orbiting around Palestine as the heart.
The panel began by powerfully interrogating “not just the commonalities, but the particularities” of Palestinian writing across transnational borders, centred around the concepts of placehood, exile, and dislocation. As Sahhar grounded the topic: “It is false to assume there is a single story that constitutes the Palestinian story.” Sahhar spoke to her own ancestral story of urban dispossession, “[from] an area that today is subsumed by Israeli occupation,” before asking each writer to reflect on their personal connections to the places and subject matter of their works.
Samah Sabawi first spoke, tracing her roots back to the 12th century in Gaza, Palestine. She said, “I’ve known Gaza, not just from the outside, but in the way an Indigenous person would know their land, even though I’m outside.” She asked the audience to imagine Gaza today, facing ongoing genocide and sheer devastation: “You will not see beautiful sunsets, the old city, the great mosque, the Byzantine mosaics. There is so much beauty in Gaza. It was such a big secret that only Gazans knew.” Sabawi connected this to her writing, noting the desire to offer these scenes to readers and “to open my home, doors, windows, for people to see life in Gaza.”
Sabawi’s book, Cactus Pear for My Beloved, is an incredible read, centred around her father, and narrating generations of Sabawi’s family history. The book is full of heart and has recently been long-listed for the 2025 Stella Prize. At once heartbreaking and delicate, Cactus Pear is a powerful and lyrical reflection on family and exile, memory, and place. Sabawi spent over 60 hours interviewing her dad and years researching to create an extensive tapestry of literary resistance.
Sara Haddad spoke to her family history: “Palestine came to me through my family, who are not Palestinian but Lebanese. My uncle brought the question of Palestine into our house after the Six-Day War…he has been fighting for 58 years.” Sahhar, in response, noted that these borders are a product of the “colonial map-making that drew divisions between us.”
Haddad spoke to the migrant experience of her family, where her dad emigrated to Australia in his early 20s and “didn’t have any English, but he was passionate about the issue of justice for Palestine. Because he did not have the language, he couldn’t articulate his thoughts and feelings, so he would get angry. I felt powerless to help him.” Haddad powerfully reflected on her connection to Palestine: “I believe Kevin Rudd once said Israel is in his DNA… which is a really weird thing to say. If he can say that, I can say Palestine is in my DNA.”
Hasib Hourani, too, reflected on the colonial border as arbitrary: “The idea that the region is fractured by colonial superpowers and has nothing to do with us as people from the Levant [is] at the crux of my practice. The way I move through the world, through displacement and constant motion, is due to the fact that I am Palestinian.” Hourani grounded his work through this concept of movement, where “time is non-linear and place is transcendental. Moving through time and place, but remaining part of a people is so [important] to the movement for land back.”
Sahhar brought the discussion to the ethics of storytelling and perspective, and commented that “some get to circulate as apolitical writers, [while] other [POC] are inherently understood as political.” She situated “the publication of this sudden outpouring of Lebanese and Palestinian writing” as an argument for “making mainstream Palestinian rights and lives, not as something controversial, but as something vital.” Hourani discussed the ability of poetry to create multiple meanings, something he intentionally used because he kept hearing “horror stories of friends or peers coming up against… [the] unwriting of Palestinian narratives” in the publishing industry, including some who could not release their books. Poetry, for Hourani, became the mode by which the fear of censorship could be disregarded, wittily described as a “plausible deniability” integral to the craft. Hourani also notes the tradition of poetry as inherited from his great-grandfather, a poet whose legacy he wanted to embody and felt empowered by.
Sahhar discussed a dissimilar effect, where “the heaviness of history, for me, was the reason why I stepped out of that poetic space, and moved into the non-fiction spaces.” She described the process of writing and reading aloud each chapter to her father, where she could “hear the music and rhythms of the text.” She mentioned editors had pulled out words that they felt were redundant, though Sahhar pushed back: “It was all in the ear,” a powerful reminder of the tradition of oral storytelling and the collective, and generational, nature of creating art.
Samah Sabawi spoke to the experience of publishing within this particular moment, recalling a trip to Gaza in the summer of 2023: “I went to all the places I mentioned in the book, visited my grandfather’s home and walked my father’s school walk.” Her intention in writing the book was to celebrate Gaza, as a place that has survived centuries of “constant resurrections from the ashes.” Devastatingly, Sabawi described the experience of returning home. She said that “by the time I got to writing the author’s note, a lot of Gaza was fast turning into rubble.”
Hourani also described his resonance with this experience as he began writing Rock Flight in 2020. He had plans to travel to Palestine and work on final edits from Ramallah. He described a “strange intuitive feeling that it wasn’t the right time [to go]…so I flew back. Three days later, the landscape changed completely.” The Unity Intifada began in early 2021, in response to Israeli attempts to expel several Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. Protests erupted across the West Bank and Gaza. Over 250 Palestinians were murdered by the Zionist entity.
Sahhar is truly an incredible speaker and artist who commands the room with such lyrical speech. She concluded the panel, reflecting on the notion of outdatedness: “I long for a redundancy of voice.” A collective reflection, Sahhar said that the works of the four authors “archive a moment in time, I hope the darkest part of the night before the dawn.” Each author read an excerpt from their work, while the room was shrouded in silence.
As the panellists reminded us, continuing to engage with Palestinian voices and acting in solidarity is integral. Honi encourages readers to consume art by Palestinian artists. The works described here are an excellent place to start.
