Book: Salt Houses
Autor: Hala Alyan (Palestine✨)
My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
StoryGraph Rating: 4.2/5
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Salt Houses is a beautiful novel that tells the intergenerational saga of a Palestinian family in search of belonging.
We start the story in 1963, with Salma, the matriarch of the Yacoub family. Originally from Jaffa, they are among the many Arab families that were displaced during the war in 1948, known as Nakba by the Palestinians. At the start of the story, she lives in Nablus with her two daughters and son.
Each chapter has the name and is focused on one of the family members, starting with Salma, and following with her children – Alia, Widad and Mustafa. As they have children of their own, the new members of the family start to get their own voices in the book, and we follow them until 2014.
“The sea was like another member of the household, a recalcitrant child at times, a soothing aunt at others. She crooned them awake; she crooned them to sleep. Everywhere, there was the smell of salt.”
Salt Houses
I started reading it thinking that the whole novel would unfold in Palestine and that each generation would be affected by one of the wars with the Israeli forces. But in reality, they have to flee early on and the book is set in different cities in several countries, from Jordan to Kuwait, Lebanon and even France and the US.
In a way, it makes a lot of sense. Some organizations estimate that more than 7 million Palestinians live abroad as refugees or citizens of other countries (including Israel). This also includes the descendants of Palestinians displaced during the wars, since many of them still hold a sense of belonging.
“People’s eyes glazed over when she tried to explain that, yes, she’d lived in Kuwait, but no, she wasn’t Kuwaiti, and no, she had never been to Palestine, but yes, she was Palestinian. That kind of circuitous logic had no place over there.”
Salt Houses
It reminded me of a interview with the journalist David Shipler, who spent some time covering conflicts in the area. He retells meeting boys born in Palestinian refugee camps where their families had been for over 70 years. But when asked where they were from, they would answer with the name of their grandparent’s village.
Alyan, the author, is capable of weaving this contradictory sense of displacement and belonging in her story while still giving depth to the characters. It all makes sense when you learn she’s a psychologist, and she brings this knowledge of the human psyche to the story. Love and conflict between the different generations is a constant.
“What is a life? A series of yeses and noes, photographs you shove in a drawer somewhere, loves you think will save you but that cannot. Continuing to move, enduring, not stopping even when there is pain. That’s all life is, he wants to tell her. It’s continuing.”
Salt Houses
Having the characters move to other countries also demonstrates that the instability in the Middle East is much larger than Israel and Palestine. Their lives were uprooted and affected by Iraq’s invasion of other countries and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As a Palestinian-American herself, Alyan was inspired by the story of her own family’s displacement.
As she mentioned in an interview with Al Jazeera, Alyan is aware that the family she portrayed is privileged, in a way, by having the financial means to leave the country. “This book doesn’t purport to represent the entire Palestinian experience. It’s a slice of that experience: This is what happens if you have certain socioeconomic means and opportunities. I wanted this to be a story about being Palestinian without being in Palestine.” she says.
“And Riham remembers, as her grandmother holds her, she remembers, as though in a dream, how she’d been an old woman in the water, how somewhere she was dying and this would be part of that story”
Salt Houses
This is a wonderful read and I recommend this book to everyone who wants a different perspective on what has become one of the most known conflicts in the world.
In the end, especially after the last chapter, this book made me long for a day in which Palestinians from all over the world will be able to return to the place they all call home. This seems unimaginable now, but being at least able to picture it might be a first step.
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