7th Meet Round Up & 8th Meet Book Pick
Reflection on Salt Houses, and a look towards our 2nd year of the book club with And Then She Fell.
On December 14, 2023, Meaghan, Evita, Florencia, and I met in Meaghan’s studio, and Anabela, Claudia and Emilie met us on Zoom, to discuss Salt Houses (2017). It had been Meaghan’s birthday two days prior, and I was hoping to make a cake for us to share in her honour, as well as a goodbye to her studio, which was getting repossessed at the end of the year. My toddler was sick and the plans to make a cake were foiled. We did manage to have Middle Eastern snacks, warm tea, and a candid conversation that ran into the late hours.
Thank you for coming and taking time to pay attention to the enduring work of Hala Alyan (b.1986), the ineffable sculptures of Randa Maddah (b.1983), and each other.
Claudia started us off with “I loved this book, The Yacoub family really reminded me of my own family.” Indeed, the discussion brought us into discussing the ways our family’s archives move through people and how families record their lives.
Given the book’s central character was Alia, we surmised that the choice to give only certain family members their own chapters was specifically to highlight Alia’s life and context. Although, it was difficult to keep track across family members and time frames sometimes. We also figured that Alyan must see herself most in the youngest generation—Zain, Linah, and Manar, as those are the most animated characters, or perhaps they are also mostly like us? We spoke at length about their antics and the hilarity of their, and the book’s final, chapters: the time that Zain and Linah sneaked out to get cigarettes in the midst of bombs in Beirut because they were bored of being cooped up in the house for so long, and when they burned the chicken after they insouciantly promised to keep an eye on it.
We meandered through the characters, the many places they had to live, and the place that ties them all yet many of them had never even been to—Palestine. What does it mean to be Palestinian yet refused entry by external forces, the Israeli oppressors? Alyan captures so beautifully what it’s like to live around but not in the country of your family’s heritage; growing up with different accents and tangled relations to a place that is no longer what it was. Jaffa, where Alia’s mother Salma grew up is no longer even in Palestine. How must that feel like? That anyone Jewish with no direct connection has ‘the right to return’ to a place that those who have parents born there have no access to?
We loved how Alyan took the time to paint the landscape of the Middle East in detail for the reader, turning our attention to hope that we can be there one day too.
The conversation moved in and out of our personal experiences.
Claudia shared how it’s impossible to get anything but piecemeal information out of her extended older family, whereas her husband’s family have genealogical books that are frequently updated and the latest iteration already has information about their son, who is only 3. Many of us have families that immigrated to Canada, and agreed and reflected on the challenge it is speak to elders about their past, especially around traumatic events.
I sat quietly reminded that nothing was saved or rebuilt to hold me and my ancestors together. Maybe that’s what it means to be born of Holocaust survivors who don’t know how face their past?
Emilie told us about her mother-in-law, and how “she writes a short paragraph every day. Very objective. She says ‘no one will ever be able to say I said something bad about them.’ If her dozens of notebooks were digitized she could search for details like what her kids first foods were. I’m a bit of a family archivist but not to her level.”
Claudia shared that her grandfather-in-law was one of the people in The Great Escape. He had an early number, 5 or something, but he switched with a man that had left children behind, to a later number, as a way to help him. Yet, in the end, the first ten were captured and killed and he survived.
It felt spectacular to listen to, like we were in the room with living history.
Flor and I questioned the legibility of trauma. The legibility of war trauma is through what records it, whereas the trauma(s) that have no language, have not been okayed by history are silences. They are reproduced in tics, gestures, and lies, that come and go with the sun’s shadows. As with WWII, it took a long time for accounts to be part of the public imaginary, and then produce their own language.
We talked about what kind of stories will we leave behind for our children, and where will we keep them—the stories, not the children. Although in some ways, we are kept through the stories we tell.
We see that when Zain and Linah find Atef's old letters to Mustafa. A story arc that was of sustained interest to the group, as we each had our own interpretations of what role they played, and who Mustafa was in and for the story. Evita talked about her dad and his prolific output. She mused on its catch-22 for her. Such that, finding his work and going through it now, while he is alive wouldn’t have the same resonance, because what would she do with it? Although once he is dead, there’s no opportunity to clarify or ask about the work.
When does an ancestor’s work make sense for us?
We spent a long time wit(h)nessing Randa Maddah’s Puppet Theatre life-size sculptures, tilting our heads in every direction, observing, and thinking about John Berger’s analysis of them. What does it mean to be hung up with string? Where is the string coming from and who is holding it? Generally puppets come “alive” through the pupeteer towards an audience. These, instead, are dead, visibly of a violent aftermath, with eyes unable to connect to our gaze.
Inevitably, we turned to the contemporary genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, and the violence in West Bank. How their livelivehoods and martyrdom is being livestreamed for us to click on or scroll past. How the people in Palestine have become objects to get the rest of the world to notice their struggle, or worse yet, to deny their accounts.
We were shocked and angry at how long this genocide has been going on, and yet I write this almost a month later, and things are even worse.
We also took time to look through Maddah’s other work to get a sense of the visceral trauma evoked in her art.
There was much more that stayed with us. Please add anything for the archive or correct any mistakes in the comments if you can.
As always, I am so grateful for the time we continue to make.
Here is a list of twenty short stories by Palestinian writers.
We decided to read Tuscarora/Canadian Alicia Elliott’s And Then She Fell (2023) for our 8th meeting, and the first of the second year of the club. The date will be sometime in mid-/end February, TBA.
“She [Elliott] is a very skilled writer of rage,” I wrote to Claudia earlier this week.
“She is!!! We need some rage right now.”
I'm always so amazed with how you manage to capture our meetings. You have a photographic memory! A true gift. Thank for doing for us (and for yourself, I suspect!) after every session. It's a real gift
Thanks for the summary. This was such a thoughtful and fulfilling discussion. In the weeks since I have started building my family tree on Ancestry(dot ca) and I’m realizing now that this discussion was likely the seed planted. I’ve made really interesting discoveries and enjoyed sharing them with my extended family. It’s a privilege to have time and resources for this. Connecting to the settler history of my ancestors feels like an important recognition in the face of ongoing offences against indigenous people. I hope that doesn’t sound trite, I just think it’s easy for 3rd and 4th generation settlers to stop feeling like settlers.