Dedication
She asks me why I don’t write in Arabic.
“You’re Arab, no?”
“Eh, mbala … but …” I try, more question than statement.
“I am … but …” Always a disclaimer.
What I want to say,
“What does it mean to exist in in-betweens? Shame, self-doubt, siesta?”
So shukran, Zeina, for awakening the languages inside me. I am learning.
And like most things in hijra, this is ongoing.
These stories are living,
and no one can occupy that.
To rebuilding languages, and rebuilding the cities inside us.
Sara M Saleh is a human rights campaigner, poet, writer, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon, living on Gadigal land. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in English and Arabic in various national and international outlets including the Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Meanjin, Overland Journal, Kill Your Darlings, Red Room, Rabbit Poetry, the Sweatshop Women’s Anthology: Volume II, and global anthologies Making Mirrors, Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word, A Blade of Grass, and Borderless: a transnational anthology of feminist poetry. She has run poetry workshops in countless classrooms, community spaces, and festivals across the country, and has performed nationally and internationally. She is co-editor of the 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity. She is the first poet to win both the Australian Book Review’s 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2020. She is currently developing her first novel Songs For The Dead and The Living as a recipient of the inaugural Affirm Press Mentorship for Sweatshop Western Sydney. She sits on the board of national advocacy organisation GetUp! and is a proud Bankstown Poetry Slam ‘Slambassador’.
