Sara M Saleh is bright against the picture of a rather dreary day. The poet’s blue headwrap and coloured frock are stark beneath grey clouds rolling overhead as are her white sneakers stepping through freshly moistened mud.
We meet after a night of intense storms, in the car park of an unassuming football field in Riverwood, western Sydney – the front for a secret reserve known only to locals.
Salt Pan Creek “just feels beautiful” to the poet, novelist and human rights lawyer. The only clue we are not in a private forest is the muted rumble of vehicles on the nearby motorway.
(Saleh is also a prominent advocate for the Palestinian cause. This interview was conducted before the current Israel-Hamas war, so conversation focused on her other spaces of work.)
Songs for the Dead and the Living is the writer’s first novel, published in August this year. It was borne from a single scene Saleh wrote for a short story collection years ago. In it, her protagonist Jamilah flees Beirut in the middle of the night to find safety in Cairo – inspired by her own mother’s migration from Lebanon to Egypt amid the civil war, where she met Saleh’s father.
“That was all it was meant to be.”
Years later, Saleh begun drafting the skeleton of a speculative fiction or dystopian novel to be set in a detention centre. “But that particular scene kept coming to me,” she says. “Poking and prodding.
“It was almost like, I’m not done with you, finish the story.”
Her genre shifted to historical fiction and the act of writing became a journey into understanding her family origins. Saleh calls it observer mode: why are things the way they are, what confluence of events has had to happen for me to be standing here with you, she asks.
Saleh leads the way to a narrow wooden boardwalk, which we follow until encased by mangroves – thick roots reaching up from low-lying water, branches stretching over our heads to create a tunnel of drooping leaves. The walkway opens up to wide blue skies cut through by a field of wheat that stands as tall as we do. Any hint of last night’s rain has evaporated now and Saleh describes how the research process (conversations with family) unearthed experiences she never knew her mother had. Saleh thought: “Why have you never shared that?”
She ruminated on a multitude of possible reasons: a silent shame around unpacking how past pain informs present identity, distancing from grief and trauma, perhaps not having the language to relive a displacement that was forced by the violent reality of one’s homeland being at war. Maybe, Saleh thought, she didn’t ask enough questions until she had a reason to. And, maybe, her novel became a green light for her mother to share stories from her past because “before, her own self wasn’t enough”.
Saleh has spent much of her life moving around. Born in Cairo to her Lebanese-Palestinian mother and Egyptian father, she spent her childhood in Sydney’s inner west before moving to Dubai for most of her middle and high school years, and then returning to Sydney in her late teens.
“It is a mouthful, you know, having these different intersections and geographies.”
Her move back to Sydney coincided with the 2005 Cronulla riots. Saleh recounts becoming a “default spokesperson” for what we now understand was racial violence, at 16 or 17 years old, “even in the most mundane ways”.
Saleh wasn’t a “visible Muslim” at the time but her accent would open up the “perennial ‘where are you from?’ question” in every day interactions.
“All of a sudden – and it’s not an exaggeration – even getting a cup of coffee turned very political.
“People felt like they could ask me things all the time.”
That age is when your consciousness is shaped, Saleh says. “To constantly be reacting and responding, while I am still trying to figure myself out, what I stand for, my convictions, left me [having to] get across this fast.
“I’m being asked these questions, ‘what do I think?’ but I don’t know how I feel.”
Coming of age in Australia with this hyphenated identity – being Australian, Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian at once – Saleh saw herself in how she was reflected back at by the world. When at default “you are always the other”, a young person’s psyche and self-perception is “certainly impacted”.
Saleh says she just wants to interact with the world on her own terms.
“The most exciting part of what I do as an artist, and even being a person with these intersections, is being able to say I do want to know tradition and honour it and build on it but I also want to break it where I see that is appropriate.”
Saleh interrupts herself to make a slight detour – she is taken by long, moss-like leaves that fall from a canopy of tall branches. What are they called, she asks. My father calls them grandfather’s beard, I tell her, because of their likeness to an old man’s grown out hair. “How beautiful, it is like a secret garden,” she says. “But I have no idea where we are now.”
Writing came after a decade of work in human rights law and activism, refugee campaigning, and media advocacy and policy with organisations such as Amnesty International. Saleh continues to work in legal research for the Australian Human Rights Commission. The same motivation propels her to both.
“I want to know the system and it’s flaws, so I know how to undo it, transcend it,” she says. “But the law has its limits.
“As an artist, I can talk to the system like that.”
She thinks artists are often the most radical in terms of ideas and thoughts. “You know, there is a reason why you find authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, despots often come after the artists.
“Art doesn’t end cruel policies, it doesn’t shut down detention centres … I get that.
“But it is certainly one of the core outlets, or pathways, that allows people to articulate these visions to move people into action.”
Her idealism is tangible and infectious. “It is a shame that in this day and age [art] is dismissed as a luxury or not viable or credible.”
We make it to a wide expanse of water, where one side of the wooden boardwalk is cushioned by greenery. Saleh leans over a railing, facing the creek. A flock of ducks paddle towards her. Her pull to write could be a gift from her ancestors, Saleh considers. Her grandfather was a journalist in Egypt but she was reading and storytelling before she realised that connection.
“They say there is generational trauma that is passed down, right? Grief, and loss. But so is generational gifts,” she says. “Perhaps it runs in your ancestral blood, and you can choose to honour it or not.”
But whether a generational gift or not, Saleh knew she would write, no matter what. “Whether it was for awards and accolades, or for no audience at all, I was always going to be writing. I just love the damn thing.”
Sara M Saleh is the author of Songs for the Dead and the Living (Affirm Press)
