Most of all I must fight against errors, and I will correct them if I can. This was an early lesson in my first published poem, when I swapped one location for another and the aunts called my father, my father called me, his quiet disappointment palpable—wicking up the joy of a first poem published. I see after twenty years that errors are errors and that no story is better than the truth of it. I understand that the truth, then as now, was more beautiful than my error. Why did I make it?
Because truth stabs painfully, glitteringly, a fluid on the surface that forms and re-forms in liquid pools. Sometimes truth is too big to bear; it is happening to us, happening still, happening now, was happening to me and to you before we were born. It is not an explanation, but at least if you cannot understand it, then try to feel it.
In a psychoanalytic sense, I have read that wounds are impossible to heal when the wounds remains unacknowledged. Here they are in plain sight, terrible and ignored. So much psychic wounding, is there room to also be whole?
I have read that wounds are impossible to heal when the wounds remains unacknowledged.
Except this is not a story about wounds but about the preservation of something all its own. We are not artifacts or fables, not inventions or ideas. We are sumud and survivance and life life life is among us and we are not a duality, a binary, a dichotomy, but a story of our own.
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.
This is a true story though it is made of things I do not know alongside those I do. It begins with two true words. Poetry is an uncontested word that is true and through which one might feel a truth they do not understand anew. Palestine is a true word too, but it is contested. About both these words, I assure you, I am not in error.
How the light will bend about me I do not know, but I will always try to show you.
This is an extract from Find Me at the Jaffa Gate by Micaela Sahhar (NewSouth Books), available now at your local independent bookseller.
