Five minutes with author Sara Haddad
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A tiny slip of a book has been this year’s bestseller.
The Sunbird chronicles the contemporary advocacy and early life of Palestinian-born, now Sydney resident Nabila. And it’s changing hearts and minds. We caught up with Sara Haddad, the author of The Sunbird.
This is a slip, a tiny novella, but it carries so much weight. How did you manage to get across the trauma, the pain, the anger in such a concise way, but also such a gentle way?
I kept the writing simple, and I guess the way I’ve told Nabila’s story is almost like reportage. I think this allows the reader space to experience the horror of Nabila’s story, which elicits a profound emotional response when they process it. I think the character of Nabila plays a part too. She’s steadfast – the worst that can happen to her has already happened, so she’s not worried about what will come next. Her quiet dignity is very affecting, and powerful. The gentleness comes from my focus on the day-to-day lives of both elderly and young Nabila, ‘the delicious banality’, as Tom Keneally so perfectly expressed it.
There are some moments in the book where our main character Nabila is really gently trying to start conversations about Palestine and the war, and one assumes this is something that you’re hoping to do with the book. Did your own advocacy start a little bit like Nabila’s?
I was born into my advocacy. I grew up with my father’s extended Lebanese family whose engagement with the question of Palestine began the year I was born, 1967, the year of the Six-Day War. I grew up learning about Palestine, hearing conversations about it around the dinner table, or over coffee. When I became an adult, when I moved out into the world, I began to experience first-hand the ignorance and misinformation surrounding Palestine.
Suddenly I was in a parallel world where everyone knew a different story to me, where Leon Uris’s Exodus was accepted as historical fact. Then I started going to dinner parties where I would try to explain the truth and I would come up against the inevitable, ‘It’s complicated!’. But I knew it wasn’t complicated. And yes, one of the things I’m hoping to achieve with this book is to encourage people to have important conversations, and to be open to engaging with information that up until now has likely been withheld from them.
The story jumps between place and time: Palestine of Nabila’s youth and contemporary Sydney. How hard was it to get that balance of past and current time?
Not difficult at all, really. I started writing Nabila in the present and decided on a day in the life format because I knew I had time constraints – I wrote this story to raise awareness and was very mindful of the need to publish urgently. As the character of Nabila developed, I began wondering about what she might have been like as a child and so I then started to weave the story of her life in Palestine into the story of her present. I stopped once I felt I had a good balance.
You first self-published The Sunbird independently and now it’s come to be picked up by a publisher. How did that come about?
I’m not sure exactly how the book came to the attention of UQP. But in the months since I self-published it, in May, the book had gathered momentum and some booksellers and literary people around the country really got behind it. I did an event in Brisbane at Avid Reader in early October, which seemed to go really well, and I know there were UQP authors in the audience. Conversations with UQP started fairly soon after that. Self-publishing has been rewarding but it’s really hard work and lonely, so I’m grateful to be working with a great team at UQP who will help me deliver the story of Nabila to as many people as possible.
It’s already been something of a best seller – can you tell us about some of the responses you’ve had to the book?
Responses to the book have been overwhelmingly positive and many people have been so generous in their support of it. Readers love the character of Nabila and several have told me they wanted more. People have said it’s opened their eyes and some of them have gone on to become very vocal in support of Palestine. Many people read it more than once. Someone recently told me she was on her fifth reading. And people also give it to friends and family to read. Individuals who are already engaged in the issue seem to find solace in Nabila’s story. In particular, I’ve been humbled and heartened by the expressions of support I’ve received from many members of the Palestinian community.
The book was written before Lebanon had come into this war fully. I’m wondering now, with your personal connections to Lebanon, how that changes things for you?
Sadly, Israel attacking Lebanon is not a new or unfamiliar development. But it was particularly distressing to see a village that is very close to my family’s village being bombed – 20 people were killed in that attack. But Palestine and Lebanon are inextricably connected through their Levantine culture, language, and history. So for me, violence against either is painful and unacceptable. And speaking up for Palestine has always meant speaking up for Lebanon, given that both have been the victims of terrible Israeli aggression. The real difference now though, is that we’re seeing the agenda of Eretz Israel – Greater Israel – being implemented by the Israeli government in the most bold and transparent way ever.
What might readers of The Sunbird also be interested in reading/listening to/viewing?
For insightful and incisive commentary, it’s hard to go past established names like Edward Said, Ilan Pappé, and Palestinian Australian scholar Randa Abdel-Fattah (who is also a fiction author). I love Norman Finkelstein too. There are lots of short clips on social media that are very informative. I saw that there’s a new edition of Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin coming out, so that’s one I would recommend.
But there’s such a rich canon of Palestinian writing that it’s hard to single anyone out. If you love poetry, I would suggest reading Mahmoud Darwish as well as contemporary poets like Mosab Abu Toha, who escaped Gaza at the end of last year, and Sara M Saleh and Omar Sakr. For fiction, Amal Awad, and Samah Sabawi, and Jumaana Abdu, who both published great books this year. In podcast land, Saree Makdisi’s Makdisi Street is great. If you can find a screening of it, Nicholas Hanna’s The Last Sky is a wonderful movie. And every year there’s a Palestinian Film Festival in May, around Australia, which I highly recommend and encourage everyone to attend.
What’s on your TBR?
I’ve found it quite difficult to make it all the way through anything this year, so my TBR is an impossibly high stack of books! I’m hoping to find some time over the summer to read the new(ish) novels by Tim Winton (Juice), Sally Rooney (Intermezzo), and Michelle de Kretser (Theory & Practice), as well as a short story collection by Kirsty Gunn called Pretty Ugly. Though I do veer towards fiction, also on my TBR are Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message, Talia Marshall’s Whaea Blue and Pity the Reader by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell.
The Sunbird is out now through UQP – or your favourite bookshop.
