"Salt houses" by Hala Alyan (Immigranten literatuur)

On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967.

Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses follows three generations of a Palestinian family and asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can’t go home again.

A Conversation With Hala Alyan

The author of Salt Houses talks about the influence of her family history and other immigrant stories

How did the idea for Salt Houses come about? 

It started out as a short story about a young man in pre-1967 Palestine, but the more I wrote, the more I became intrigued by the character’s sister and mother. I found myself wondering what came before and after this man. There was no specific moment where I decided I’d write a novel; rather, I just followed my curiosity about this family, and it turned into a multigenerational narrative of a single Palestinian family over six decades. More generally, I wanted to write something that avoided the usual (media and art) portrayal of Palestinians and Arabs, which often involves politicizing or exotifying them.

In what ways does the narrative mirror your own family's history? 

There are definitely similarities in terms of the geographical 'arc,' since my parents met and married in Kuwait City then, after Saddam’s invasion, found themselves seeking refuge in the United States, while their siblings and other family members wound in places as far-flung as Amman, Kansas and Beirut. Beyond that, I took certain elements of various family members’ archetypes (i.e. the strong matriarch, the Americanized grandchildren), but stayed away from emulating anyone too closely, since my family would never let me hear the end of it!

What was it like to write from the perspective of characters as young as 11 and as old as 75?

I loved it. Like many people, I remember my prepubescent years (too) vividly and I felt a certain catharsis in delving back into that world of self-doubt, fickle adults, and painfully elaborate crushes. One of the chapters takes place during the 2007 war in southern Beirut and I debated for a long time how to portray it, ultimately choosing to keep the focus on the youngest character. I was a college sophomore in Lebanon during that war, and I remember wondering how my younger sister and cousins were absorbing the news reports, distant sounds of bombing and frenzied adults around them. As for the other end of the spectrum, I spent a lot of time around my grandparents growing up and have always loved listening to them, stories of how the world had changed in front of their eyes. It was always startling to hear my grandparents reference something I’d learned about in history class. Writing this book, I became really fascinated with the idea of what we inherit (emotionally, psychologically, etc.), as well as conceptualizing the same historical event from the perspective of different generations.

How have immigrant stories influenced you?

I grew up reading Amy Tan, Chitra Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri, brilliant storytellers who normalized much of what I witnessed as the child of Palestinian and Syrian immigrants, moving from Kuwait to Texas and Oklahoma, from Beirut to Brooklyn—intergenerational clashes over culture; an enduring sense of homesickness; the idea of misplacing and recreating 'home' in foreign cities. More than anything, that’s what I’m most excited about—the idea of contributing to that canon of immigration literature. To paraphrase what my father recently told me, one of the implications of a post-Trump America is that these stories will become more urgent and necessary than ever before.





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