‘Reflecting reality in all its complexities’: archive and literary hybridity in Palestinian Australian life narratives

As a writer and a reader, I am drawn to works traversing intersections of genre and form. As an academic, I am interested in how these works might be categorised, whether they might appear on a kind of spectrum; a ‘hybridity’ spectrum, perhaps. Yet, this want to categorise often runs counter to artistic expression, to let a text simply ‘be’ on its own terms. My interest in literary hybridity began with the conception of my own book, Dear Mutzi (2024), which I called a hybrid work of documentary fiction recounting my then teenage grandfather Harry’s escape from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. I used oral history interviews with Harry, alongside his official testimony, his collection of photographs he took as a teenager documenting his journey to Australia, and the later discovered letter collection he kept from his parents, to reconstruct a narrative at a generational distance.

This work spurred a broader research inquiry into hybrid memoir and life writing, which encompasses strands of narrative journalism. Practices of literary reconstruction and historical investigation are important components of the form and elements of the texts which comprise my present scholarly exploration: memoirs that function as narrative journalism. This scholarly investigation takes the form of an academic article, one that I presented at the recent IALJS conference in Nancy. The article focuses on two case study texts by Palestinian Australian authors who utilise hybridity in their respective long form narratives. The books are Cactus Pear for My Beloved by Samah Sabawi (2024) and Find Me at the Jaffa Gate by Micaela Sahhar (2025). I was fortunate enough to be able to interview Sabawi and Sahhar and would like to share some of their reflections on form and the broader cultural and political climate in and through which they write.

These two memoir narratives are not written as narrative journalism; they are works of life writing and literary experimentation, works of poetic defiance against the genocidal erasure occurring simultaneously in the authors’ homeland at the time of writing. Yet I noted while reading that each utilises many literary journalism elements, among other methods, to narrate their stories. Against the contextual backdrop here in Australia of draconian anti-protest laws, censorship and abhorrent misconstruction of the Gaza genocide by government and mainstream media, these texts are the true chroniclers of the current moment and vital preservers of intimate lives and histories, as well as the broader collective history of Palestine.

Sabawi’s Cactus Pear for My Beloved (2024) recounts the one-hundred-year history of her family in Gaza, Palestine, centred around Sabawi’s father, Abdul Karim. The book is episodic and weaves archive material through the prose. Sabawi reconstructs real people, events and histories in her text, and the work reads novelistically while still grounded in the historical real. Sahhar’s Find Me at the Jaffa Gate (2025) is similarly a hybrid memoir which threads together archive, poetry, history, ethnography, and scene reconstruction. It is an exploration of connection to homeland as diaspora, what it means to write in and through exile.

Common to these memoir narratives is the privileging of archival source material, proof of the existence of Palestinian life in Palestine for generations, destabilising dominant hegemonic narratives that seek to delegitimise this fact. These archives span photographs, registrations and licenses, letters, ephemera such as bus tickets, maps and tour guides. Rich familial and sociological studies hinge on found and preserved archival objects and photographs. While this is a well-worn and effective narrative tool used in family narratives and historical work, I argue that the significance is heightened in the context of Palestinian diaspora writing because of the deliberate and targeted erasure of Palestinian archival and historical institutions. In our interview, author Samah Sabawi reflects on her use of literary hybridity in this context:

Literary hybridity in my work is not a stylistic choice; it is a way of reflecting reality in all its complexities. The acts of preserving memory and history, especially as both are subjected to erasure, requires freedom of form. Memory moves between poetry, storytelling, songs, paintings, artefacts and faith rituals. When writing about the Palestinian lived experience, I find myself moving intuitively between all these forms to capture lives and histories that are slipping out of our reach. In the process, if we succeed, we create an archive that can not only exist alongside official histories but also has the clarity and validity to challenge them.[1]

Here the author emphasises the necessity of freedom of form in light of erasure. Sahhar, in our email correspondence, reflects on hybridity from her vantage as a trained historian:

I think what you are calling literary hybridity is what I think of as sitting within archival practices of liberation, which we see both in the context of Palestine and First Nations approaches to writing and scholarship for instance. And perhaps I see it like that because I am trained as an historian and not as a literary studies scholar…Some of these materials may be too slight, decontextualised or ephemeral for more traditional scholarship, but this expansion of the archive, or rethinking  what we can learn from the kinds of documents that are more often thrown in the rubbish,  has flourished in the 21^st century along with decolonial (as opposed to postcolonial) theory.[2]

Interestingly we see here the converging yet differing perspectives on hybridity from two perspectives: Sabawi as literary scholar, and Sahhar as trained historian. In both reflections there is reference to freedom and the practice of liberation facilitated/necessitated by literary hybridity. Also present in both reflections is the tension between official archive and the growing and expansive non-traditional or unofficial archives of Palestinian and First Nations approaches, which, as Sabawi notes, ‘have the clarity and validity to challenge’ official narratives and histories. This is important work, and a necessary conversation to be had within the expanding and diversifying field of literary journalism studies. I understand Sabawi’s and Sahhar’s texts as chroniclers of specific cultural and historical moments, told through the lens of intimate personal narrative. Significant too is this particular moment in time, and the recent proliferation of Palestinian life narratives in the Australian literary market. I asked Sabawi and Sahhar what they each thought of the fact that here in Australia, Palestinian life narratives are sweeping up prestigious literary awards – Sahhar won the 2026 Prime Ministers Literary Award for Nonfiction, among many other awards, and Sabawi was shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize and the 2025 NSW Premiers Award for Nonfiction – yet despite this, Palestinian voices and stories continue to be silenced/censored by government and mainstream media. Sahhar reflects:

Dehumanisation is what the oppressor does – cynically, to negate the severity of the crime or the neglect of the theft that they perpetrate against people they control all the time. You only need to look at the genocide in this country and the way it is narrated through history to know that; or the mind-blowing barbarity of Australia’s offshore detention system which tells you so much about the cruelty, the racism and the underlying values of this state. And then of course the same is true for the way that this state has politely averted its gaze from a live-streamed genocide that Israel has perpetrated in Gaza. It should beggar belief but it doesn’t, because it’s just true to form, and maybe more people are realising that. 

Why are Palestinian Australian authors writing books that are being well received? They’re beautiful books! They’re also inventive and timely. But it’s hard to answer because awards are also fickle. Maybe, given the widespread accolades that many (all?) of the recent books by Australian Palestinian authors have received, I suppose it also says, certainly to me, that the literary community has more spine and ethical clarity than the media or the political class in this country.[3] 

The literary community, and by extension the public more broadly, are more aware and attuned to the horrors being perpetrated in Gaza by Israel than ever before in history. There is an incongruity between the narrative of authority, and the feelings and sensibilities of the people; certainly, that has been my experience when I speak to those around me about the maddening dissonance between what we are watching unfold and how the Australian government has and continues to respond. As Sabawi observes:

Over the past several years, and particularly in the wake of the genocide in Gaza, there has been a profound shift in public awareness. Many Australians are actively seeking to learn more about Palestine and are increasingly receptive to Palestinian voices and experiences. The literary success of Palestinian Australian writers and the attention their work attracts are, in my view, a reflection of that growing public interest rather than an exception to it.

Where I do see a disconnect is between public sentiment and institutional power. The attempts to silence Palestinian voices that we have witnessed in recent years tend to come not from ordinary Australians but from political, media, and cultural institutions that continue to act as gatekeepers of a dominant narrative about Palestine. The controversies surrounding writers, artists, academics, and cultural events reveal a struggle over who gets to speak and whose stories are considered legitimate. What we are witnessing is not a public rejection of Palestinian voices, but an institutional resistance to the growing influence of those voices.

What we are witnessing, I think, is the reaction of entrenched power to a changing public consciousness. The gap is therefore not primarily one of empathy. It is the gap between institutions struggling to preserve an old narrative and a public that is increasingly willing to question it.[4]

This is a continuing research interest for me, as I think through the responses of these authors and how the present political and cultural moment reflects broader patterns of societal rupture and the shift away from institutional power structures and those narratives they seek to maintain. The archive, and those texts such as Sabawi’s and Sahhar’s that interrogate and experiment with archival material as liberatory, decolonial practice, are key to this changing public consciousness, as more inventive, exploratory literary works at the intersections of genre and form continue to reshape our conception of what it means to write, to preserve and to witness.

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[1] Samah Sabawi, email message to author, 22 June, 2026.

[2] Micaela Sahhar, email message to author, 16 June 2026.

[3] Micaela Sahhar, email message to author, 16 June 2026.

[4] Samah Sabawi, email message to author, 22 June, 2026.