The Stella Interview: Samah Sabawi
In this interview, we heard from Samah Sabawi about her latest book, Cactus Pear For My Beloved, which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize.
When did you begin writing Cactus Pear and what inspired you to start?
I began at the start of my PhD in 2016. I was inspired by my father’s and family’s stories I grew up with. They were stories of great love and incredible tenacity to survive all sorts of emotional upheavals, poverty, illness, grief, war and political oppression. In the four years that followed, I conducted 60 hours of interviews, mostly with my father, and completed the first draft of the book as part of my PhD creative project. I graduated in 2020, and in 2023 I began rewriting the book in its current format. I wrote the final words, the Author’s Note on December 31, 2023, almost three months after the beginning of the Gaza genocide.
How do you navigate the balance between sharing personal aspects of your life and keeping certain details private in your writing? What influences that decision?
There is power in being the narrator of your family’s story, and with that power comes responsibility for the ways it can impact the lives of your kin. My ethical guideline was a promise I made to my father at the start: I will do no harm. The writing itself was founded upon strict ethical dimensions as part of the PhD research. I understood that the stories I was writing did not belong to me alone, but also to my family and my community. I stayed away, where possible, from referencing very personal and potentially harmful private family information that I knew would not add to the overall story, and where possible, I created fictional characters to carry the weight of such private and potentially harmful information. All the while, I ensured accurate representation of my father’s character and the historic timeline and relevant events that shaped our destiny.
As well as a poet and an author, you are a playwright. How has your experience writing for the theatre influenced and benefited (or not) your book writing practice?
I actually began doing this project as a theatre piece, but I quickly discovered there were great limitations in telling such a big and detailed story of place, time, and people. I wanted to tell more, to reveal more, and to have a bit more freedom in the structure of the way the story is told. Writing for the stage is a linear art, where most of the heavy lifting in telling the story is revealed through dialogues or monologues. But I wanted this memoire to read like a novel, I wanted to move back and forth in time, I wanted to have my own voice in the narration, to get into the minds of the characters, to describe rather than present or show Palestine in that era.
“There is power in being the narrator of your family’s story, and with that power comes responsibility for the ways it can impact the lives of your kin. My ethical guideline was a promise I made to my father at the start: I will do no harm.”
The 2025 Stella Prize judges described your writing as “spare, gracious prose [that] delivers Gaza not as a barren battlefield, but a people, proud and human and persisting.” What do you hope readers take away from Cactus Pear For My Beloved?
In writing this book, I wanted to create a portal into a place that has been under siege and military occupation for decades. Gaza is a place that few are allowed to enter or leave. Even during a live streamed genocide we see medical teams and journalists stuck at crossings not allowed to get in. So this impossible place to visit and see, I wanted to make it available in your home, on your book shelf your bedside table. I want people to know there is life, love, art, music, history, joy, culture and more in this tiny dot on the map, and that where all these things exist, there is always hope.
You write about painful events with so much love and humanity. Did you develop any specific routines or strategies to support yourself through such emotionally difficult material?
Forgive me, but I think this word ‘painful’ has been stretched over the last year and half of genocide, to contain a world of wordless emotions. Indescribable emotions. Is there a word in any language to describe what we see in Gaza today? How small and inadequate language becomes when you have fallen outside the boundaries of vocabulary. We are in the post era of adequate. We are in post language, post diplomacy, post erasure, post dispossession, post ethnic cleansing, post rules-based order, post truth in reporting, post pretending, post everything.
I have no strategy for this grief. My state of mind resembles the Gaza landscape. Bombed beyond comprehension. My only survival tactic is to breath. To acclimate myself to the idea that we, our stories, our homes, our loved ones, our lives, don’t matter. So, what can I possibly say in this post world about a book I wrote in another life, a book for my father and his Gaza, now that I live in this post Gaza moment?
Not one of the significant landmarks I’ve written about has survived Israel’s bombardment. Not one street has been left undug. Not one mosque still stands. Not one school opens doors to students to run with their lunch bags and dreams. Not the old souq with abundant fruits and vegetables collected from nearby fields. Not even fields. Not one cafe along the beach. No beach. Nothing is left. Only desperate people who have the audacity to insist on filming their genocide and making us watch them die.
Did you know that in this post moment, there is not one family member of mine left alive in Gaza? The year this book came out was the year my family was completely ethnically cleansed. Every last Sabawi forced to leave.
So what can I say about Cactus Pear For My Beloved? A book I had written as a love letter to my father and to his beloved Gaza? A book that has become a heartbreaking obituary of both baba, and the city he so loved.
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