Here, There: a Ghazal
after Zeina Hashem Beck
The barista in Chippendale wants to know where you’re from, mispronouncing your
name, a dismissal, an accusation, you are neither here nor there.
They came to your beloved Beirut and forced all the wrong languages into your
mouth, you separated yourself into 2 piles of neither here nor there.
One night, before taraweeh, Teta asks why you recite Qur’an in cracks like that; you
drought your gutturals because you understand you are from neither here nor there.
Your childhood was a series of Interruptions, everyday a kind of absence, and you
wonder can they love you if you are not enough, here nor there?
You are orphaned from your mother/tongue, your longing confused for every man you
baptise lover, and all the women in you are tired of running, here and there.
To honour the questions, you must honour the answers, only our poets
have ways of teaching us that we are much bigger than here and there.
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’.
