Salt Houses - 14 Dec 2023 » 8pm EST

Our 7th (!!!) meet is coming up and the last one of the year.

*Art Monsters supports a liberated Palestine. It does not equate anti-Zionism with Antisemitism, especially as it has Jewish members. It does not stand for any settler colonial violence anywhere in the world.*

On 14 Dec (the last day of Chanukah), at 8pm EST we will discuss Salt Houses (2017) by Hala Alyan (320 pgs.) alongside the sculptures Puppet Theatre by Randa Maddah.

For this one, we are going to do a hybrid, and have a small celebration for those who can make it in Montreal. x

Installation, Fiber glass, 2008 Mural 3*2m 3 sculptures life size

In 2009 John Berger wrote about Gaza as an open air prison, meeting Randa Maddah in Ramallah, and her work:

The multitude of figures on the bas-relief are all looking at what they see in front of their eyes and wringing their hands. Their hands are like flocks of poultry. They are powerless. They are wringing them because they cannot intervene. They are bas-relief, they are not three-dimensional, and so they cannot enter or intervene in the solid real world. They represent silence.

I could walk between the impotent spectators of the bas-relief and the sprawling victims on the ground. But I don’t. There is a power in this work such as I have seen in no other. It has claimed the ground on which it is standing. It has made the killing field between the aghast spectators and the agonizing victims sacred. It has changed the floor of a parking lot into something landswept.

This work prophesied the Gaza Strip.

Hala Alyan was born in the USA to Lebanese Palestinian parents, only because her mother went to visit her brother in Illinois when she was 8 months pregnant to give birth in the USA for a chance at a passport that did something. They returned to Kuwait, then went to Syria, and finally were able to seek asylum in the US.

As a result of the history of displacement in her life, Alyan tells NPR that she’s

always been really interested in the meaning we imbue [in] objects. I grew up kind of watching my mother's attachment to certain objects, my grandparents' attachment to certain objects. ... It becomes especially valuable because the place ... you attach it to is no longer — it doesn't exist anymore.

The Palestinian-American author writes from experience. Alyan imagined the fictional characters with her own displaced family members in mind:

It felt important for me to write this one using the multi-generational format, as a way to show how different things get inherited when we’re talking about diaspora and immigration across generations, and how things get lost. 

The book begins in 1963 Jerusalem, with a mother reading her daughter’s future in the bottom of her coffee cup and hoping she’s seeing it wrong. From there, it follows the Yacoub family after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It scatters them all over the world: Riham and her parents settle in Amman, Karam moves to Boston, and Souad heads to Paris to begin school. In a series of chapters that leapfrog years and read almost like a series of short stories, Alyan illustrates the heartache of war, the perseverance of family, and the sense of unsettledness that can permeate a life in exile.

I’m not sure why, but the LARB’s extensive review of Salt Houses is no longer on the website, but is available through the Internet Archive here.

In her guest essay “The Palestinian Double Standard” for NYT, Alyan comments on how Palestinians are stuck in a never-ending audition for the world’s empathy, for the world to recognize their diaspora not as a abstract movement, but as a result of violent dispossession and occupation. That Palestinians are constantly auditioning to be seen as human, an audition for a role they have yet to get in a world that sees their lives and deaths play out as a TV series. A role that ultimately turns them into objects and bowdlerizes their subjecthood. She punctuates her point with an example from her Salt Houses book tour,

People kept commenting on how human the story was. You’ve humanized the conflict. This is a human story.

Of course, literature and the arts play a crucial role in providing context — expanding our empathy, granting us glimpses into other worlds. But every time I was told I’d humanized the Palestinians, I would have to suppress the question it invoked: What had they been before?

Claudia has also shared this evocative and intimate conversation “On Endurance” Hala Aylan had with adrienne marie brown on her podcast, How to Survive the End of the World, this week.

Have you had a chance to pick up the book? The book is available at the Toronto and Montreal libraries, and surely others too. If you need an e-copy, let me know.

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