Samah Sabawi

The root of memoir is the proto-indo-european mer-, meaning ‘to remember’. Samah Sabawi’s latest book, Cactus Pear For My Beloved, swells larger than the bounds of individual memory. With glorious sweeping scope and a light, elegant touch, Cactus Pear is family story cum national archive; a love story for the ages, a poet’s remarkable journey, a profound act of resistance. Sabawi begins with her father in contemporary Queensland (‘You want to reconstruct my life with your words?’) then leaps back in time to his father, and his father before that, charting the life of Palestinians through her lineage and under successive Empires: Ottoman, British, the 1948 Nakba and life after. It is life that Sabawi so vividly portrays. A ‘fierce poetic duel’, family beach trips, cinnamon tea, school. History, particularly in this region of the world, is often told in dry, impersonal reports: here, Sabawi animates these epoch moments in stunning, intimate detail. Spare, gracious prose delivers Gaza not as a barren battlefield, but a people, proud and human and persisting. ‘How does love triumph over a wall,’ a character asks Samah’s father. Stories like this surely form part of the answer.