No homelike place
Rootlessness permeates the life of Hala Alyan and the pages of her books, including the new ‘The Arsonists’ City’
Alyan returned here for graduate
A school and stayed, building one career Some characters would say as a clinical therapist and a they have secrets that are not separate one as a poet. lies, but even the ones you don’t
She recently spoke by phone tell can become lies. Some of that from her home in Brooklyn about is cultural — if it brings ease or the intersection of her life and her mitigates conflict to keep information writing. The conversation has been secret, there’s something edited for length and clarity. hallowed or sanctioned about that. You have avoided pain or suffering.
But the question is, who gets to decide. I’m always worried about things being hidden from me so I find that very difficult. I do believe people have the right to their secrets but if the secrets directly affect the well-being or identity marker of another person then I don’t know if that secret is yours anymore.
The title of Hala Alyan’s book “The Arsonists’ City” centers on Beirut, a city that has often burned with war or protest. Yet as in her debut, “Salt Houses,” Alyan is interested in the effects of rootlessness, of losing a home or a homeland:
Q Much of the book takes The loss of a homeland is place in Brooklyn, New York; Austin, crucial in both your novels, Texas; Damascus, Syria; and creating intergenerational Blythe in Riverside County as the trauma. Has writing about it characters lose and try to find their changed your perceptions of its way home. impact on you? “The Arsonists’ City” is simultaneously
A a sprawling look across Writing it down clarified a five decades at the legacy of unending lot for me and helped give violence in the Middle East, especially me a language for things I was in Lebanon and Syria, and half-conscious were happening. an intimate, heartfelt portrait of a I’ve realized there are patterns family gathering at their ancestral with the diaspora, for people who home in Beirut. became immigrants under duress,
Like her characters, Alyan, 34, like the younger generations has had numerous homes and trying to erase themselves by lives. Her father had been displaced drinking themselves into oblivion. from Palestine and the family was living in Kuwait when I came of age under a mentality Alyan’s mother, who had a Lebanese of scarcity where at any moment passport, flew to the United things can be lost. My parents had States while nine months pregnant been raised to think that at any so Alyan would be born here. Four moment a calamity can happen years later, when Saddam Hussein and your way of life is gone. I have invaded Kuwait, “everything was hyper-vigilance that’s not supernecessary lost and their entire lives were and anxiety that isn’t turned upside down.” particularly useful. I’ve learned to
The family received political asylum funnel it into being productive or and lived in the U.S. for eight creative but that took awhile and years before bouncing around various I had to let go of the things that countries in the Middle East. were self-destructive. I had addiction
and eating disorders.
Q
The book revolves around secrets and lies and the issue of whether family members have a right to their secrets.
Q
After “Salt Houses,” you talked about finding a sense of home where your people are, not in a specific place, yet this book revolves around a family home and all that it means. Is there still a sense of longing on your part?
A
just passed away, a week and a half before this book comes out.
My cousin said, “Maybe we stop writing now?”
That generation has started to get ill or leave this earth. After my grandmother, my great-aunt
... passed away. And I started to see the places they inhabited differently.
The place I think most of as
Q
home was my grandparents’ house You ended your email to me in a mountain town in Lebanon, with exclamation points, and that house is now vacated. which surprised me. Was that That place felt like an anchor and I an aberration or a hidden side of had taken it for granted, so it’s devastating. you? I started to think these
A
houses really are significant. (Laughing) I use exclamation marks so liberally in my emails; it’s not great. I teach and work at New York University and I picked up some bad habits from my students — one is speaking way too casually to people in a professional environment, and I use a lot of “OMGs” and exclamation marks in my texts and emails. It’s because in text form there is no tone so my students need a lot of reassurance that things are OK. It’s a signal: “Everything’s great! You’re fine!”
Q
Many of your most memorable images — as the character Mazna hits adolescence, her body is “like a house pet that suddenly transformed into a coyote,” and when Naj is singing onstage, “it’s like someone has replaced the blood in her veins with Fanta, something sugary and fizzing” — are about women’s bodies.
There is a hunger. I wish there was a house that has been in my family.
It’s surreal but “Salt Houses” had a strong matriarchal core character, and my grandmother died a week and a half before it came out, and the narrative for “Arsonists’
A City” begins when the grandfather I don’t think about that; it’s dies and now my grandfather just the way I write. But I
have noticed in this novel and the poetry collection I’m working on now that I am really body-focused. I think about what it’s like to be in their bodies: What does it feel like to be sexually aroused, to be angry? Maybe it’s because I’ve had anxiety that was physically expressed and I’m a healthanxious person.