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'A piercingly elegant novel . . . with the power to both break and mend your heart.' Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane 'Epic in scope and uniquely relevant in its concern for displacement. Particularly well-suited for our times, then.' Red Where do you go when you can’t go home? On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. Although she keeps her predictions to herself that day, they soon come to pass in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Caught up in the resistance, Alia’s brother disappears, while Alia and her husband move from Nablus to Kuwait City. Reluctantly they build a life, torn between needing to remember and learning to forget. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, Alia and her family yet again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it. Scattering to Beirut, Paris and Boston, Alia’s children begin families of their own, once more navigating the burdens and blessings of beginning again.
"The Arsonists' City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan's hands, one family's tale becomes the story of a nation--Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It's the kind of book we are lucky to have."--Rumaan Alam A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home The Nasr family is spread across the globe--Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they've always had their ancestral home in Beirut--a constant touchstone--and t...
The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by an award-winning Palestinian American writer, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement, shaping the stories that will build her future. After a decade of yearning for a child, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling—her husband wants to leave; her mental health grows brittle; the city of her youth, Beirut, is collapsing. She turns to the stories of her family, of her grandmothers long gone,...
From the author of The Arsonists’ City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war. A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement. These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body—and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity, and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, What stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest?
Wild, lyrical poems that examine the connections between physical and interior migration, from award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan, author of Salt Houses.
"In Islam, hijra refers to the Prophet Muhammad's departure from Mecca to Medina; the term has come to mean any exodus. Bearing witness to the testimony of immigration--not only the poet's but also that of her family--the poems in the collection create a dialogue between the two worlds of migration"--
Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Wandering from Detroit to Haifa, Tripoli to Brooklyn, the poems of FOUR CITIES reveal the underbelly of cities, bearing witness to narratives of love, occupation and faith. These testimonies are harvested from displaced landscapes, histories and languages, revealing the unsettled lives of immigrants. Using urgent, haunting language, Alyan evokes the unlikely backdrop of Palestinian bazaars and Midwestern junkyards, policed checkpoints and boisterous nightclubs. A Lebanese village burns while lovers kiss in Paris. A traveler unpacks her grief in the homes of strangers. This lyrical collection captures the interplay between adopted and imposed homes, the poignant legacy of exile.
The global landscape is dotted with border crossings that can be particularly perilous for displaced women with children in tow. These mothers are often described by their various legal statuses like refugee, migrant, immigrant, forced, or voluntary, but their lived experiences are more complex than a single label. Reclaiming Migrant Motherhood looks at literature, film, and original ethnographic research about the lived experiences of displaced mothers. This volume considers the context of the global refugee crisis, forced migration, and resettlement as backdrops for the representations and identity development of displaced women who mother. Situated within motherhood studies, this book is ...
A riveting and unapologetic account of Palestinian resistance, the story of one family's care for their land, and a reflection on love and heartache while living under military occupation. In 1967, Sireen Sawalha's mother, with her young children, walked back to Palestine against the traffic of exile. My Brother, My Land is the story of Sireen's family in the decades that followed and their lives in the Palestinian village of Kufr Ra'i. From Sireen's early life growing up in the shadow of the '67 War and her family's work as farmers caring for their land, to the involvement of her brother Iyad in armed resistance in the First and Second Intifada, Sami Hermez, with Sireen Sawalha, crafts a ri...
A group of young girls descend on Camp Forevermore, a sleepaway camp in the Pacific Northwest. Their days are filled with swimming lessons, friendship bracelets, and camp songs by the fire. On an overnight kayaking trip to a nearby island, they find themselves stranded, with no adults to help them survive or guide them home. Five girls-- Nita, Kayla, Isabel, Dina, and Siobhan-- survive the trip, and as the following years bring successes and failures, loving relationships and heartbreaks, we see the many ways a tragedy can alter the lives it touches.