Writer & Human Rights Lawyer Sara M Saleh On Reflecting The Palestinian Experience 

In October this year, Service95 partnered with Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali to bring guests a series of events and conversations. The events featured some of the world’s most exciting authors and thinkers, sharing their expertise on topics from women’s rights in conflict to how to write a debut novel. Palestinian-Egyptian-Lebanese-Australian author and human rights lawyer Sara M Saleh appeared at the festival to discuss her work, including her first full-length poetry collection The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat. Here, she and Keshia Hannam discuss reimagining society, reflecting the Gazan experience and finding a sense of community in literature... 

Sara M Saleh has the kind of accent that betrays an adolescence lived ‘in between’. It’s a split of Australian, American and Arabic, the latter of which intensifies when the conversation invariably comes back to Gaza. The Palestinian-Egyptian-Lebanese-Australian spent her childhood between the Gulf and Sydney. Between these cultural contexts, as well as balancing her professional-personal life of advocate, writer and human rights lawyer, Saleh is anything but singular.  

As an author of the novel Songs For The Dead And The Living and, more recently, her first full-length poetry collection The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat, she was a featured speaker at this year’s Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. Her salons had titles including: ‘A Historical Perspective & The Future Outlook On The Israel-Gaza Conflict’; ‘Fearless Storytelling’; and ‘A Critical Dialogue on Migration, Human Rights & Compassion.’

They’re intense topics that Saleh has spent her life immersed in and educating around. This is in her blood, she attests; by way of her journalist grandfather and the lineage of Arabic poets, writers and musicians she comes from.

In this conversation, Saleh reflects on the importance of resilience amid adversity and emphasises the role of art in humanising experiences and advocating for justice, particularly for Palestinians and First Nations people. She is resolute that education, community support and the power of art will foster collective liberation and resistance. And for that we need honest, inclusive storytelling.

Keshia Hannam: There’s a poem in The Flirtation Of Girls that describes some of the Gazan experience. “Assault, escalation, retaliation, cage, murder”. What part of you, of history, did you tap into to write that?  
Sara M Saleh: I was thinking a lot about the portrayal of Palestinians – who are never afforded their full humanity, the multiplicity of their experiences, never afforded innocence or context. As Palestinians, at what point do we have permission to resist the inevitability of loss and grief?  

KH: What have been your favourite reactions from the community to your work?
SS: People have shown increasing interest in our stories given the current atrocities being committed against our people. I wanted to resist exploiting this moment, and considered the ethics of this and the responsibilities I have as a writer from a community whose people are being decimated. At the same time, it is heartening that people want to learn and amplify our stories – especially when we are facing cultural genocide that wants to disappear our histories, stories, memories. It has been most special when young readers tell me how much my work resonated with their own experiences and helped them connect with their own mothers.

KH: Can you tell us why you called it The Flirtation Of Girls / Ghazal el Banat?
SS: It’s a double (triple?) entendre – ‘Ghazal el-Banat’ is Arabic for ‘fairy floss’, and the literal meaning is ‘flirtation of girls’. Furthermore, it doubles up as Ghazal – one of my favourite forms of poetry, so ‘the girl’s ghazals’. The symbolism there reflects the tensions between innocence and experience, between the freedom young women crave and the limitations society imposes on them – the violence of borders, patriarchy, capitalism, etc. Lastly, it’s an homage to Arabic storytelling and culture (referencing an old movie of the same title).

KH: What do your coping mechanisms look like?
SS: Reading a lot. I’ve been revisiting literature from the Civil Rights Movement and other global movements [in] Algeria, Vietnam, and also writers at the forefront of pushing boundaries for their communities: Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. People who reminded me we aren’t alone in our pain. I am trying to remember this isn’t an exceptional liberation movement, in the sense that we aren’t the first or the last who are contending with colonialism and empire. Putting that in perspective and understanding this is the long arc does reinvigorate and re-energise me. And on the topic of abolitionists and solidarity: First Nations’ communities here [in Australia] have been paving the way and showing us how resistance is done.

KH: Something that I found so striking was the way that you spoke about yourself in your bio: ‘Dispossessed and currently a settler, complicit in the dispossession of Aboriginal land.’ Can you unpack that for me?
SS: It’s that hyphenated existence we’re constantly navigating and negotiating, right? Privilege [and] our responsibilities are always shifting depending on the context we’re in. There are a lot of people, including Palestinians and other newly arrived migrants, who come to this colony Australia, from backgrounds of formerly colonised countries. They’re coming from a context where they have been dispossessed and displaced because of all sorts of issues: conflicts, colonial history or context, current postcolonialism.

When they come to Australia, a colony very much centred around white fantasy and educating – I say educating, I should say indoctrinating – people around various themes of being grateful that we’ve [the Australian government] allowed you to come here.

People are being indoctrinated in this myth of Australia as a settled, safe place. This is a deliberate exercise of rewriting that narrative and erasure. First Nations communities are always educating us, saying, “This is a colony. We understand that you might be a refugee or a migrant or someone who’s simply looking for a better life, and we support that, and you’re welcome, but at the same time you can’t come here and be a beneficiary of that violence perpetuated on us. You need to be cognisant of your responsibility and how you’re going to actively participate to dismantle these systems. Stand with us.”

KH: What would it look like to truly have systems, law and stories that protect people?
SS: Protection requires local and global political will, which I’m sorry to say, we have seen none of. Gaza has put the world on notice. It has shown us the limitations and the failures of these very deliberately designed systems. They’re not failing, they’re working. Instead of relying on these institutions that exist for the powerful, we need to make the world less harmful everywhere. You don’t need Israel to be the safe haven for Jews: the world should be safe for Jews everywhere. I’m invested in that as an anti-racist, regardless of my background.

This moment is giving us an opportunity to reimagine like this. We can do better. These systems are new in the grand scheme of things – just because something has been the way that it is for a little while [doesn’t mean] that it should continue that way. We have the power to change that and to say, ‘This isn’t working for us, we want to try something better.’

The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat by Sara Saleh is out now