Sara M. Saleh
Punctuation As Organised Violence
1. Thirty years ago, my folks migrated to a city half-dipped in ocean. To this day, they are sepia-faced and prayer-shaped, coal soot and cedar hills still rolling underneath their fingernails.
2. Arab-Australian
Arab Australian
ArabAustralian
This arbiter of gods. This wretched frontier: duality or hybridity?
3. The Arabic language does not have hyphens, because the breaking of something from the inside is not allowed
or we continue on as if it is not broken.
We ration bags of zaatar and green almonds and joke in our parents’ accents. In this place, we have learned to leaven like dough.
4. Colony wants to uproot the cedar from our nails. To be citizen is gauze negotiating with festering exit wound.
.
1. Father says. maybe it does not. always. have to be. a choice. between the smell of bread. or the smell of bullets.
2. The officer who watched the burning cities on my father’s shoulders said, ‘This land is for the living. For the free.’ And stamped the papers. ‘Welcome. Welcome.’
Each welcome a blister. A pledge to an elusive ‘Australian future’.
3. Welcome. To back-beating labour. To being taxed out of beloved, grey-lipped houses, for the motorway and a multiplex centre. To brazen high-rises and rooftop gardens and high ceilings with delicate emerald trimmings. To where they constantly move salvation beyond our reach.
4. Application. Visa. Policy. Border. Fence. Ceremony. Father didn’t know then, are all elements of fiction, too.
,
1. My folks grew me on a land thick with eucalyptus, moss, metropole, genocide.
2. Arab, Australian, Other,
Amen
My first words stumbled out,
shreds of language on a clumsy tongue,
clenched in between the aches of
this suspect body
our lands, our skies, our lines
heirlooms
cannot be fractured,
or curated so quietly
in your museums and galleries
3. Does a comma slow the chaos, or expand it?
4. Arab,
Australian,
Other
In a drop-down list,
who I am does not exist in English,
violence
enacted by a box,
these algorithms
of absence
‘
1. Every day, mama and baba plant the alphabet at first light. Their citrus-skinned bodies are whole canons.
Our lashes licking the sun, we make our way into the golden harvest.
2. Mama and baba, they’re so thin now. The words for what is killing us also thinning.
3. Apostrophe: to contract or to subdue; to possess.
4. Sundays at Arabic school, we chewed mastic-flavoured gum loudly and rolled our eyes at Mr Hamza’s conjugations. I must have missed the (grammar) lesson then: That which you think you possess first possesses you.
( )
1. Australia
Largest exports: metals, minerals, grains
Largest imports: machinery, precious metals, plastics, human beings
(Colony honours itself with statues and streets and medals and prefers we don’t ask whose land we are on and who builds everything around here.)
2. The Migration Act (people are footnotes).
3. Colony is a chalk outline.
We are up to our necks in fuel and muted prayers and neat piles of grief. Let us swing baseball bats instead of lighting more candles.
I know it is not convenient (when will it be?).
4. Silence in a place is the same as not existing (and they expect us not to exist).
5. My folks did not march at protests and chant slogans and they never explained preferential voting. They lined up at the phone booth for hours as the promised rains came, cradling 50-cent coins and two screaming toddlers waiting for a chance to call home. They worked dishwashing and cleaning shifts to scrape enough for my medical bills and one book from the scholastic sheet (and what is more revolutionary?).
CAPITAL
Invasion /
Terra Nullius /
White Australia /
Immigration /
English /
Multiculturalism /
Democracy /
Anti-terror laws, more than 82 and counting /
Countering Violent Extremism /
Afghanistan /
Iraq / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
1. My people are not recognised in national legislation that protects from Racial Discrimination.
Why do these Laws matter more than we do? (Do we matter at all?)
What of these holy texts lodged deep in the dredges of country?
2. How long must we live in a world that only offers Dust in our eyes and is there such a thing as courtesy in a War we never asked for?
3. I don’t want a world where we are Almost Beautiful.
4. Is Death still any less a Death if it is taking its time? •
First published in Meanjin, Summer, 2022
We thank the author, Sara M. Saleh for permission to republish this poem.
Sara M. Saleh is an award-winning poet, writer, human rights lawyer, and daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon. Her debut novel Songs for the Dead and Living (Affirm Press) and her collection of poetry The Flirtation of Girls (UQP) were both published in 2023.
Olive branches with a few olives reach across a pale mauve sky.
