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. 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