Maen Hammad for The Key, 2026
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RAMALLAH, Palestine — On one of the walls of Sanaa Salameh’s living room, just outside Ramallah, hang her family photographs: birthdays, gatherings, her young daughter growing up. In several of them, the father has been photoshopped in. That's because Walid Daqqa spent 38 years in Israeli prisons — the entirety of their marriage and of their daughter's life — and was never home to sit for a single one. So Sanaa put him there herself.
We met at Sanaa's home to talk about her life's work and the posthumous publication of Walid's autobiography, The Ticket Seller, out this year from Dar Al Adab in Beirut. Sanaa, a translator and prisoners’ rights activist, rarely talks about herself, and it shows in the way she does it: Her answers spill out before she has finished a thought, then swerve, reliably, back to him. She was Walid's partner in more than marriage, his adviser, his first reader, and the person who got his writing out of prison. When she speaks about him, she slows down and softens.
“Walid didn't let me stand still; he constantly pushed me toward success and new ways of living. Despite his imprisonment, life with him was never ordinary or traditional,” Sanaa told The Key. “Like any couple, our relationship's success came down to personality. Even though we didn't share a home, we clicked so deeply that we constantly reinvented our relationship — always finding the drive to make things happen, no matter the constraints.”
Maen Hammad for The Key, 2026
