Find Me at the Jaffa Gate by Micaela Sahhar

Find Me at the Jaffa Gate by Micaela SahharFixing its gaze on moments, places and objects from the streets of Bethlehem to the Palestinian neighbourhoods of the New Jerusalem Find me at the Jaffa Gate assembles a story of Palestinian diaspora, returning to the origins of violence in the Nakba. '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

Fixing its gaze on moments, places and objects from the streets of Bethlehem to the Palestinian neighbourhoods of the New Jerusalem Find me at the Jaffa Gate assembles a story of Palestinian diaspora, returning to the origins of violence in the Nakba.

'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.

'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. Sahhar's love for her family, homeland, the details and intimacies of everyday life; for language, history, archives, photographs and the treasured ephemera of a life in diaspora, shine through every line. The result is a book in which every word is deliberate, each line commands attention, each chapter is a world within a world.' Randa Abdel-Fattah, academic and writer, author of 11 Words for Love