Sara M. Saleh is a writer and human rights lawyer. She has won two of Australia’s most prestigious poetry prizes: Overland’s Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 2020 and Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2021. She has published extensively in literary and poetry journals, and co-edited Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity with Randa Abdel-Fattah.
Review: Songs for the Dead and the Living – Sara M. Saleh (Affirm Press) & The Flirtations of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat – Sara M. Saleh (University of Queensland Press)
Saleh has recently published her second full-length collection of poems, The Flirtations of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat (she self-published Wasting the Milk in Summer in 2016), and her first novel, Songs for the Dead and the Living.
The Flirtations of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat is a rich collection filled with anger, sorrow, beauty, attitude, wit and humour. Songs for the Dead and the Living is a coming-of-age story, kaleidoscopic in its formal and tonal variation, about a young girl named Jamilah Husseini and her family, spanning three countries: Lebanon, Egypt and Australia.
Palestine is ever-present in both books, which are marked by the enduring effects of the Nakba of 1948, the continued struggle to exist in the shadow of Israel, and the impact of exile and prejudice on Palestinian people forced to flee their homeland.
Saleh’s gaze is unflinching. In her prose and her poetry, she renders unique and memorable the ways people resist, transcend, adapt, make the best of things, compromise, endure, lose hope and faith – and sometimes become something other than they might have been.
Read more: The Nakba: how the Palestinians were expelled from Israel
Poetics of exile
In The Flirtations of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat, Saleh depicts bodies and places as sites of division, violence, plurality, opportunity and negation. Her poetics are attuned to the price paid by migrants for leaving their homelands. The final lines of her poem You, An Effigy are:
Nobody told you
the cost of entering was losing your way back.
Like many of Saleh’s poems, You, An Effigy is formally inventive, assured and subversive. The “effigy” of the title – a woman who must figuratively burn – desires a home. Sensual and sexual, she wants to be held. But she is ultimately isolated on a shabby, sterile street not hard to recognise as Sydney. The poem transforms the woman from an object of sexual violence to an abrasive speaking subject who defies expectations.
The title of Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat refers to an Egyptian film of the same name from 1949, but in Lebanon Ghazal el-Banat can also mean fairy floss. The double-meaning is an indication of the vitality of Saleh’s poetry.
Resolute in her willingness to confront violence head-on, she retains the wit and the playfulness intrinsic to good poetry. Her poems are funny and perfectly improper. They describe the ways women and girls negotiate gender and sexuality, inside and outside of Islam, inside and outside of a broader societal misogyny and patriarchy.
The playfulness is also serious. Saleh’s commitment to poetry as political action is bound up with an aesthetic commitment to art. She deploys poetic forms such as the ghazal – a challenging form that originated in Persian poetry – with the same assuredness as she experiments with free verse and concrete poems.
Her writing makes evident the porousness of language, territory and history – and the way borders are policed. Arabic and Australian English are enmeshed. Lebanon, Egypt and Australia are overlaid. Histories and mythologies are interwoven.
English is defamiliarised by the inclusion of the many different “God have mercies”, from alhamdullilah to hasbiyallah to inshallah. Saleh also makes use of common Arabic words like banat (girls) and bint (girl/daughter) and phonetic spellings like “HANDRED BERCENT” (100%).
In this way, English is made to feel capacious. As the third most spoken language at home in Australia, Arabic speaks directly to a lot of people, but Saleh uses the Roman alphabet, so the Arabic words are accessible, either as a phonetic experience or via Google for translation.
Saleh’s prize-winning poem Border Control: Meditations subverts the usual identity questions asked at borders, in this case the King Hussein Border Terminal between Israel and Jordan. The questions in this poem are intimate, tender, searing and ultimately heartbreaking. The interrogative is replaced with the personal, evoking a human rather than a number or a problem.
In Reading Darwish at Qalandia Checkpoint, the violence of a checkpoint between the West Bank and Jerusalem is paralleled with Australian racial violence against
Cassius Turvey, fifteen-year-old Indigenous boy
who was punched and stabbed for being Black.
The evidence— REDACTED
His rights— REDACTED
This childhood— REDACTED
The poems Punctuation as Organised Violence and CAPITAL deconstruct bureaucracy and grammar, drawing attention to the arbitrary fictions that determine
Visa. Policy. Border.
In Orientalism, Edward Said writes of the “uniquely punishing destiny” of Palestinian people, who confront a “web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology”. Saleh’s poem Headlines provides examples of the prejudice Arabs and Muslims encounter in Australia:
‘caliphate cutie’ / ‘towelhead’ / ‘sand n*gger’ / ‘stone thrower’
On the bus, in class, at the movies
‘they should sterilise you’ / ‘the only good Muslim is an ex-Muslim,
or a dead one’/ ‘don’t blow yourself up’
In places, perhaps as only a lawyer can, Saleh writes with the precise awareness of someone who understands that the law is founded on a mythic violence, both arbitrary and exclusionary, but that it is also sometimes capable of delivering justice.
Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and Australia figure in her poems as homelands and homes, as prisons and traps, as political and cultural realities. They are states of being and of mind – imagined and imaginary.
Cities are an important part of Saleh’s poetics. They are repositories of hopes and dreams, grief and loss. The various laws and languages, foods and streetscapes of Sydney, Cairo, Beirut and Nablus give form to memory.
Saleh’s vision and poetic sensibility is attuned to suffering and precarity. Her poems are about women, Palestinian fathers, a Noongar Yamatji boy, Ethiopian women trapped in the kafala system. She makes visible the suffering of those who pay a price for being something other, something more, than a citizen.
In this way, she is a diasporic writer, challenging the limitations and anachronisms of national borders and identities, which are neither adequate models nor accurate reflections of a world under global capitalism and a planet on the brink of climate catastrophe.
Read more: Orientalism: Edward Said's groundbreaking book explained
Displacement and dispossession
Saleh is keenly aware of the double bind of people dispossessed – expelled from Palestine, yet never fully welcomed anywhere else. Home is political, the body is political, and the experiences of displacement and dispossession are understood as forms of material and existential violence.
This awareness is as much part of Saleh’s fiction as her poetry. Spanning generations and continents, Songs for the Dead and the Living incorporates the stories of multiple lives. The novel is divided into three parts: Beit Samra (1977-82), Cairo (1982-85) and Sydney (1984-86), with a short prologue and epilogue.
Saleh draws on the historical, political and cultural contexts of Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt to tell the story of Jamilah, the daughter of a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, her sisters, her paternal grandmother Aishah, and Lobna, an adopted orphaned cousin.
The novel follows the family as they flee their home in Lebanon for Egypt to escape the escalating violence of the Lebanese Civil War. The final part of the novel, set in Sydney, sees Jamilah married and learning to make her life as a migrant while her family remains in Egypt.
Saleh uses a traditional narrative form to write against the grain of history, and against the political and cultural context of a world determined to stereotype Muslims and erase Arab suffering. She covers a lot of territory and includes a lot of characters.
Here is a moment to consider the particular formal challenges the novel presents to a writer moving from poetry to prose. How many characters can be rendered effectively in a relatively short novel? What techniques best achieve the goal of capturing rich and storied lives? A more sustained development of Jamilah’s perspective would have strengthened the depiction of the multiple minor characters.
The novel opens with the family at home in Beit Samra, a town on the hills outside of Beirut, where the family comes closest to belonging. They have a house with a garden. Their father is building a business. Jamilah and Lobna attend school. And Jamilah has a first love – a boy with a Russian mother and Lebanese father.
Despite the fact that Jamilah’s mother is Lebanese and her father was born in Lebanon, the family remain Palestinian in the eyes of many Lebanese, who think of them as “a liability”, or more brutally as “bottom-feeders … ruining the country”. They face discrimination. The father is unable to pursue studies because of laws preventing Palestinians from holding certain offices. Even schooling is restricted for children with Palestinian parents, regardless of whether or not they were born in Lebanon.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon identifies this kind of discrimination and inequity as “geographical compartmentalisation”, where depending on race or ethnicity, the same space is experienced differently.
Read more: Quotes from Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth that resonate 60 years later
When Jamilah’s family are forced to flee, the discrimination continues. Their position is precarious. The possibility of hospitality is conditional. The novel is aware of the way time in narrative is connected to mortality and measured in bodies: it is only when Aishah is on her deathbed that the family learn of her experience of displacement during the Nakba of 1948.
“We had a home, and then we didn’t.” That’s how Teta Aishah started it, as though it was some riddle they were supposed to solve.
A young newlywed in the early months of her first pregnancy, Aishah is woken in the night by an extremist militia, which had earlier gunned down seven people in the coffee house of her village. She flees on foot through the prickly pear trees that surround her house and joins a group of refugees to walk the miles to Lebanon, a country with its own history of colonisation, having only “prised itself out of France’s clutches a few years before”.
‘Let it be a tale’
In a 2020 article in Meanjin, Jumana Bayeh asks “what is missing when we read literature as a reflection of national boundaries?” The question seems particularly pertinent to Saleh’s writing.
She dedicates her novel “To the people of ‘kan yama kan’” – the Arabic equivalent of “once upon a time”. The dedication is an invitation to think beyond nationality to what is shared: the telling of stories. Saleh’s literary influences are diverse, from Vladimir Nabokov to Mahmoud Darwish, Ocean Vuong to Anne Carson. The friendship Jamilah strikes up with a bookseller in Cairo leads her to Naguib Mahfouz.
The importance of literary antecedents is paramount; reading is to be eclectic. Language is political, but porous. French, Arabic, slang, profanity, phatic and poetic language are brought together through a universal grammar.
As I was finishing this review, Palestinian writer and academic Dr Refaat Alareer was killed in an Israeli strike. Only a month before, he had posted a poem on social media that concludes:
If I die
Let it bring hope
Let it be a tale
The epigraph to Songs for the Dead and the Living is from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poem And We Have Countries:
… The exile tells himself: “If I were a bird
I would burn my wings.”
Between the universal human trait of telling tales – the once upon a time – and the burning of wings lies all the debris of history, with its wars, invasions, injustices and erasures.
In one of her more sorrowful, circumspect poems, City, Sitti of Grief, Saleh writes that in Arabic the word for human shares its root with the word for forgetting. But the recourse to the tale, to the story – the desire to produce a story that endures – is intrinsic to literature. It is all the more pressing for those who feel the precarity of existence daily, perhaps minute by minute. Saleh’s poetry and prose are urgent tributes to remembering.