I want to live a life of consequence, and I want to live a life that has stakes in it because that means that things matter to you. I think, in some ways, this memoir was a project of sifting through and excavating the darkest hours, both for me and for the lineage and ancestry that I came from. I think the darkest hours were experienced by so many people I come from who have had to leave places they didn't want to leave. I live in exile and have been forced to leave behind houses, land, cities, and people. Oftentimes, this has happened more than once in a lifetime, so they have carried that trauma. Of course, it plays out intergenerationally in many different ways.
I think it's a time of fear. I don't think I'm alone in that. I am scared for people that I love. I am scared for people who are quite vulnerable. I worry for my students. I am concerned for the places that I feel are engaging in complicity because that will be such a heavy legacy to endure later on, how people, places, and entities comport themselves in moments like this. They will be remembered. There will always be people who remember it.
Hala Alyan is the author of the memoir I'll Tell You When I'm Home, the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize
—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You talk about this storytelling process in I'll Tell You When I'm Home, likening yourself to Scheherazade and how stories can change when you're not even looking. You write about the “darkest hours.” What, for you, were those darkest hours, and what stories changed for you and them?
HALA ALYAN
I think in some ways this memoir was a project of sifting through and excavating the darkest hours, both for me and for the lineage and the ancestry that I came from. I think the darkest hours were, you know, so many people that I come from have been forced to leave behind houses and land and cities and people, and oftentimes, have had it happen more than once in a lifetime, so, I have carried that trauma. Then, of course, it plays out intergenerationally in all these different ways. For me, from my little branch of that family tree, my darkest hours involved a lot of warring with the body. I think I realized as I was writing this book that the body was sort of the original site of where the story started because it was about infertility, pregnancy, etc. In trying to tell the story of the land, I couldn't tell the story of the land without telling the story of the body. I couldn't tell the story of the body without telling the story of the people that had made the body and all these ways in which I had felt exiled from the body. For me, it has a lot to do with stories of eating disorders. It has a lot to do with stories of addiction, of alcoholism, of what it meant to feel like an unwanted guest in my own body. Then, really trying to think of ways to sort of reclaim that. I’m really coming to think of it as the task of a lifetime. I don't know that there's a capital A arrival that happens. I think it's just something that I'm going to keep figuring out as time goes on, and I don't think it's disconnected from larger patterns of exile. I think when you have identity markers where you are told there is not a place for you in the world, or the places that are yours are not yours. I do think that trickles down to, I mean, where then are you at home? Are you at home in your body? Are you at home in this host country? I think there's a way in which that plays out in all these different ways.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
How do you reconcile that self that writes, the self that remembers, the self that mothers?
ALYAN
I think I've come to reconcile it by the fact that it's going to constantly be in flux. I think there's such great freedom in being able to say, well, what I hold, what I say, and how I feel today might be different tomorrow and might be different in a week, and it might be different in 10 years, and it likely will be. I think I sometimes struggle with the purity of something like, in seeking truth, like what is the truthiest truth that I can find? I think something that I hope to make peace with in my lifetime is this idea that it doesn't make a thing any less true just because it's changed. It doesn't make the version of you that believed or really fully was embodied in the narrative less valid. If that narrative changed, it doesn't discount the self that lived there for the time that it lived there. For me, I think that's how I make peace with the self that writes and makes sense of something. Of course, the story is going to be different. My story is already different. I was writing about a marriage that I was very much hoping would be able to sort of sustain itself. I'm currently going through a divorce, so even the marriage that I wrote about in this story is essentially dissolved by the time this book is published. What do you do, then, with that? How does that make the marriage any less true? Does that make the story of certain elements of its love or its truth any less valid? I don't think so. I think we're just constantly in this process of editing and re-editing and kind of repositioning our sense of self and other people.
I do think that's the work of a lifetime. So, it's incredibly unsatisfying for someone who is a perfectionist or someone who likes control — which I love control, at least I tell myself I love control, but it doesn't make it any less real.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Do you feel now that you're writing comes from a place beyond survival; it's now something closer to freedom?
ALYAN
What a beautiful question. I think so. I hope so. I'd like to believe so. I definitely think there was something in this project that was unlike anything else I've worked on before, in that it was, well, first of all, nonfiction. It's the first long-form nonfiction thing I've done. I do think there was something liberatory about being like, there's nowhere to hide. When I say "I" in a poem, I can always just say that's the speaker, that's the subject. We don't know that. That's what I felt, whereas in a memoir, you're essentially saying in the title, like, this is my memoir.
From the word "memory" in French, it's like this is my memory, this is me that is remembering and putting this together and telling you the story. There's just nowhere to hide in that. While that's very terrifying, there is something freeing about it, too. For me, it's changed my relationship to how I conceptualize these things in ways that I feel are unlike anything I've ever worked on in my life because it forced me to confront not just my memories and my recollection of things, but also how, what is truly my commitment to the truth here? What happens if that truth actually doesn't sit well with me?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So, what do you do in this memoir and your novels and poetry that makes it something you can feel close to, and it gets into your mind, and that changes people in many soft and subtle ways?
ALYAN
I certainly hope so. I mean, I think that's very much how I've always operated. This is, in some ways, just kind of what I have at my disposal: the ability to tell stories in this way. It's effective for me. You know what I mean? That's how I've changed my mind about things. That's how I've learned about things. That's how I've understood things differently in the world.
The hope is that everyone shows up for these moments historically with what we have in our arsenal. I'm a psychologist, and I'm a storyteller, and so I try again with the hope that that will be effective. We don't know; we'll see, etc. I do think there's something to be said for just showing up with what you have. Then again, you just hope that it's enough. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't.
Anytime there's as much at stake as there is right now, it's always going to feel like it's not enough, which is certainly how it feels now. But yeah, it’s not like it would be. That's kind of the privilege of having some degree of safety or separateness: you use that safety and separateness hopefully in helping others and showing up for others. That’s the ideal, and people who have access to certain spaces should be using them in the service of people that don't. This is a general philosophy that I have, outside of certainly containing.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I think your mother said that you have to pry stories out of her. I think that when there's a lot of trauma or a lot of moving, and then you write about the stories, the songs, or even the rituals, or the food or the customs, do you feel like sometimes stories are embedded in these things and you have to kind of solve a mystery puzzle to find out what really happened?
ALYAN
I think I've had to a little bit. I definitely feel like there's been a little bit of that for me, where I'm just like, how can I get what I need to get? It's very funny because I think my mom is a pretty private person, and I think she really did essentially just at some point say — I mean, this sounds like a joke, but it's true —like she was effectively, like “You are on a stories embargo. I’m just done. I’m not gonna tell you anymore. You’re writing. I don’t want you to write about any of this. I don’t want you to.” So I think my mom, in particular, is somebody who I think has a lot of struggles with the idea that I write about any of this stuff, which I understand. I really do. I get it. I mean, I think there’s also something to be said for a certain kind of silence and privacy that historically is associated with safety, too. I think for some people, there is this idea of like, why would you even expose yourself in any way? Even if it’s done with sweetness or consideration, like, just why would we even take these chances? And why would we? I think that’s also the thing of the writer or the artist in general versus other people. It’s like there is kind of almost like a compulsion to be known, or a compulsion to be able to tell a thing. That is definitely not something that everybody has, and I think it’s just as hard for me to understand how someone wouldn’t have that. It’s just as hard for another person to be like, why do you even need to? I think that’s been an interesting thing with my mother and me, is kind of finding a way to arrive at this thing together that we’re just like, yeah, I guess we just sort of need different things, you know? It’s a kind of safety, you know. Why would we keep reopening the thing? You can let the past be in the past. I think that’s very much a way that people have so many things. And again, who am I to like — it's very easy to pretend that one way is better than another. You know what I mean? Or it’s like, well, no, this is more honest. Or it’s like, but not really. It’s the way that comes more naturally to me. That’s all. I was born in the States. I was born with different kinds of privileges. I was born, you know, like in between two cultures. I think there are a lot of elements of it that play into it.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
As you think about the beauty and wonder of the natural world and perhaps some of the environmental destruction that you see, and you’re talking about these wars, what are your memories of the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and how do you find inspiration there?
ALYAN
It’s interesting because in rewriting this, or in writing this, which I guess is a way of rewriting the memory of it, I found myself revisiting certain sites that I go to often, either in dream or in memory or in retelling. So many of them took place in Lebanon, which is a place that I lived for almost a decade, but in a pretty influential part of my life, so like high school and college. I don’t think I realized how much the Mediterranean Sea profoundly impacted my upbringing. It’s interesting because I’m not someone—I’m actually quite afraid of the ocean, and I don’t really swim in it. I’ll kind of go in up to my thighs and just splash around and whatever. But there was something about the sea that, for me, is the backdrop of almost every formative memory I have during that era. There’s also where I went to high school and sort of the mountain regions in Lebanon. I think I spent a lot more time, if not in nature—because I’m not someone who has camped, right? So I’m not somebody who kind of has a—I think I’ve always thought of myself as very much someone that’s embedded in cities. But then in the telling of these stories and in writing them down, it was interesting because a memoir is different than a novel, but you’re still having to do some degree of character analysis and also of setting. You’re having to think about setting. It was astonishing how much setting took place in places—if not in nature, at least adjacent to it—how much of it connected to and also of nature in imagination. So like, thinking particularly about Palestine, how much time I spend thinking about places that I have never been or eras in which I’ve never been of those places. Imagining my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents in places that I haven’t had access to. I write in the book, and I’ve written about this elsewhere, about how I feel like I forget about land a lot. That actually feels very much part of the Palestinian condition, where you are sort of—it’s not dissimilar to other indigenous movements, where you are actually kind of dislocated from land, kind of by design. And then you’re made to feel outside of it. But it’s funny how it still finds a way to sneak back in really glorious ways, and so even though I'm, I'm, I like to tell a story of myself as being somebody not connected to land or not connected to nature or an exile from it. It's still remarkably present in all of my fiction, all of my poetry, and certainly this book.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes. And during this time, you have written powerful and moving editorials. I was moved by them. You’re just telling the truth, just saying these are the children who put on a press conference. Their parents are gone. Their family is gone. Just to imagine having to find your voice at such an age is distressing. Of course, you're in New York, and I have to mention it because we now see with the Trump presidency and the attack on universities. You teach at NYU, and I think it's just very sad that people can’t speak up for human rights without being labeled as “Hamas supporters” when they’re actually just pro-human rights.
ALYAN
I think that it's almost like in some ways the specificity of Palestine also becomes kind of a universality, where you can stay in this specific example because there is something about this experience that makes it specific, right? It's happening because it's been sanctioned to happen in this way. Right? Because you can't slaughter tens of thousands of people without consequence unless you have made those people less than people. Unless there has been a very effective project of dehumanization that's been carried out against the people that are being killed.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So much is at stake now, and I wonder what it’s like being Palestinian-American for you today? You also wrote about not always being able to travel to see your family. What are you feeling like now? I mean, this presidency isn't easy.
ALYAN
No, it's not. I mean, I think, like a lot of people, it's a real time of waiting to see how things go. I mean, they’re not going very well. Sorry, I'm going to re-answer that. I just heard her screaming and I got really distracted for a second. Okay. I think it's a time of fear. I don't think I'm alone in that. I mean, I'm scared for people that I love. I'm scared for people that are quite vulnerable. I'm scared for my students. I'm scared for a lot of international students. There are a lot of international folks that I work with, international folks that I love.
I think there's a lot of people I worry about, and then also even institutions that I work with or work alongside. I worry for the people in the spaces that are most vulnerable, and then in a different way, I worry for the places that I feel are engaging in complicity because that is such a heavy legacy to endure later on.
I think how people, places, and entities comport themselves in moments like this will be remembered. There will always be people that remember it. I'm kind of two minds because I understand what fear does. It contracts; it makes you not want to take risks. It makes you want to get really insular and be like, I need to protect myself and mine and my people, and that’s it—my little bubble. Whatever happens outside of that is none of my business. It's really difficult in times like these to remember that we're interconnected.
This whole idea of like, people think about what's happening to children over there isn't affecting my children over here. There is no such thing as "children over there." There really isn't. There is no such thing as this idea of someone else's kid. I think when you really drop into that, it’s—um, but yeah. I mean, I worry about all of it. I worry about, again, the precedents that are being set, what's going to happen next, what's already happened.
I worry, yeah. I mean, I think also internationally, it's easy for us here to get really Americentric. But I think about what the consequences of what's happening here are across the world, just the same way that we consider the consequences of things that are happening over there affecting us here. It's all interwoven; it's all so deeply entwined. I think people are starting to really see that. It means that what you do in your own backyard really is of consequence everywhere.
