On May 21, I was returning home from a brief camping trip. I had no cell service during the four-day trip and was completely out of the loop. As I took the Greyhound bus home, I opened The Michigan Daily website and was greeted by some upsetting yet unsurprising news. I took the eight-hour bus ride to gather my thoughts.
The University of Michigan’s Gaza solidarity encampment on the Diag was destroyed at the hands of an administration tacitly supporting Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza and the killing of — as of writing this article — almost 36,000 Palestinians. The University’s actions were a cruelly poignant parallel to the circumstances of those whom the encampment wished to rally behind — the displacement of Palestinians from their homes and livelihoods in Palestine.
As I walked through the Diag encampment, there were messages and murals etched with chalk beneath my feet. The colorful symbols of the camaraderie held messages of mourning, righteous anger and hope. Even as someone who never lived at the encampment, I followed the news of the occupation of the Gaza Strip — the rapidly increasing starvation, disease, displacement and grief deliberately spread by the ruthless Israeli army under the passive supervision of an apathetic United Nations — and I could sympathize with the rage. It is a fire, destructive and fueled by decades of persecution and dehumanization. My anger caused one message scribbled on the ground to stand out all the more: “Our revenge will be the smiles of our children.”
I spent my relatively uneventful trip finishing reading Palestinian-American author Hala Alyan’s 2017 debut novel, “Salt Houses.” Considering the current humanitarian crisis occurring in Rafah and the reaction of the University’s student body to Israel’s military campaign, it was a pertinent read.
Alyan’s tragically poetic and painstakingly crafted novel tells multiple tales of a family repeatedly displaced from their home. Alyan taps into a wide range of emotions: the needling irritation of petty squabbles eroding an already strained family life, terror and uncertainty of an inevitable and impending loss, initial shock after catastrophe and consequential grief and rage. The sudden changes or additions to family can put more pressure on a stressful family situation. Homes can also bring stress of their own; turning a new house into a home can feel like a Sisyphean task, especially when it is tied to feelings of discontentment or impermanence. That being said, the hope, joy and intimacy of both home and family ultimately ground these characters.
The book follows the Yacoubs — a fictional middle-class Palestinian family — from 1963 to 2014. After facing imprisonment and displacement, the Yacoubs must leave their original home in Nablus, a Palestinian city in the West Bank. As the family grows with time, they find themselves more spread out. Between personal battles with grief and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the family find themselves in Amman, Jordan; Beirut; Kuwait City; Paris and even Boston. Each new location gives a vivid description of the city and her denizens, along with the coinciding narrator’s thoughts on their new place of residency.
As various Yacoubs sojourn around the globe, the idea of home changes with each character, like clay being molded by the hands of the speaker. To Salma, the matriarch of the family, and her daughter Alia, home is something that was taken from them; Jaffa and Nablus become somber dreamlike days past, filled with details of the mundane daily life that stuck — damp laundry never hung up to dry or pomegranates as big as the moon. To Alia’s brother Mustafa, it is something to fight for, a source of burning passion to combat the restlessness felt from years of watching land being taken from Palestinians. To Alia’s restless daughter Souad, it is the permanence and importance of heritage that her time in America lacked, and a clean slate — providing relief from a messy divorce and post-9/11 racism. To Souad’s unyielding daughter Manar, it is a disorienting place of dissonance caused by a lack of familiarity. Her expectations of a land that is personal to her, speaks to her, aren’t met, as she voyeuristically probes for evidence of memories that were never hers, pictures, stories and letters that she continues to keep alive.
From the start to the end of the book, each perspective represented feels as if it came straight from a personal account. Alyan’s novel reads like a deeply intimate project — and why wouldn’t it? Alyan paints a vivid picture of each location with meticulous strokes of refined artistry and mastery over language. Everything comes to life: the Kuwait City marketplace Atef frequents, an eerily quiet Beirut with citizens scattered and apprehensive from the frequent bombing and, especially, Salma’s lively house in Nablus — with her carefully curated garden, each color and aroma complementing one another — that turns barren and fragile once Salma leaves. Even moments that don’t tie into any themes have a place, building a closeness with the characters that contributes to the emotional resonance of the novel. To top all of this off, Alyan’s prose is expertly and unapologetically poetic; the lyricism can quickly move from feeling as delicate as the flowers of Salma’s garden to cold water in the face, with an emotional gut punch that practically knocks the wind out of your lungs.
In conjunction with thorough musings of home — home taken, home rebuilt and home reclaimed — “Salt Houses” plays with ideas of time and memory. The main framing devices of the narrative are the changing perspectives, changing setting and passage of time between each chapter. The sudden jumps between locations and circumstances help the reader connect to the feeling of being a refugee. It is a life of change that is so rapid and frequent that it can be dizzying. Although characters recount harrowing events, like war, displacement, imprisonment, torture and death, the chapters often take place within daily life, after these changes have taken effect.
Whether it is Atef forced to relive his trauma through a “shadow life” of flashbacks and nightmares, or Riham, Alia’s most responsible and pious daughter, suddenly seeing herself as an old woman during a near-death experience, time is malleable in “Salt Houses,” being stretched and squeezed, pulled apart and reformed. As characters reflect on the fickle quality of time and the changes that make it so, they often end their narration returning to the present; this is the only place life can truly be lived.
As Grandpa Atef muses on life — enduring, not stopping even in pain, continuing in spite of it all — it reminds me of the unrelenting attitude of student protests. There have been countless impediments to student voices: police presence and multiple arrests at pro-Palestine protests, the cancellation of voting for two CSG resolutions, the stifling proposed Disruptive Activity Policy and, most recently, the forceful removal of the encampment. Yet their persistence no longer feels like passion, it is more akin to a fundamental principle of being alive: perseverance. If the suffering within the Gaza Strip will not stop, the protests cannot stop either. In one way, it is tragically cyclical. In another, it is a potent demonstration of human willpower drawn from a place of necessity and compassion.
The book likes to play with scale, with figurative language that occasionally borders on the cosmic and divine. This sense of scale ties in with the novel’s discussion of religion and the role that Islam plays in the lives of the Yacoubs. Their faith in Islam is multifaceted. Characters seem to frown upon religion as a call to action or revolution. Violence begets violence, blood begets blood. As the Yacoubs live through multiple conflicts, they determine that weaponized religion is distasteful, as it leavesbehind a grisly trail of crimson and loss.
That’s not to say the book has a cynical view of religion — quite the opposite, really. Islam, from its practice to its places of worship, is looked upon fondly. Faith is something that grounds many of the Yacoubs in times of crisis. Memories of the muezzin, the mosque and the veil are all considered sentimental ones. Islam is inextricably linked to thoughts and feelings of Palestine and home.
The epilogue of the book returns to Alia’s perspective. The year is not specified like other chapters, giving it an unnervingly untethered quality in the timeline of the story. We are as lost as the elderly Alia is within her treacherous, dilapidated mind. Her memories have become a muddy, homogenous mixture of what can only be interpreted as home. This same theme that has been revisited throughout the entire novel is crafted into a bullet shot through the reader’s heart, the coup de grace of a devastating novel. It is a collection of yarns spun into a web that intersects at certain times, certain places, certain sorrows and joys. Those intersections can never replicate what Alia desperately grasps at in her kaleidoscope of recollection.
As I read through the epilogue and Alia, once sharp and dignified, meekly pleads, “I want to go home,” I wept. The novel goes to great lengths to explore what home is and what it means to us. No matter what that may be, we will never stop wanting to return home.
Home is such a fleeting, ill-defined idea. After leaving home for Ann Arbor, I didn’t want to turn back. I didn’t want Cincinnati to be the default “home” within my mind anymore. Ann Arbor is by no means home, either. So what if home isn’t a place, but people? The people I house my being within are dynamic; they are wayward creatures, by which I mean wayward from my perspective. Home is supposed to be here to stay, supposed to be fixed, supposed to be reliable. But we all live our own lives and all have our own homes — greedily asking someone to stay in my life longer for my sake blatantly disregards their own wants and needs. What is left? What is that anchor point to which I can always return? “Salt Houses” made me confront just how nebulous and unexpected this feeling of home can be.
“Salt Houses” deftly dances with the ideas of time, memory and home. To keep the deceased and the lost land alive — to carry Palestine — is a heavy and necessary burden. But to live in the fantasy of nostalgia and unoccupied, untrampled land preserved in the mind means you lose something else instead. It’s just as Alia repeats to herself: “You cannot forget them in your grief.” The characters of “Salt Houses” store the past inside them like vessels, holding it close, holding it tight. Yet they find each other in the present, the stories that live on, that are playing out in front of them, which keeps them from losing themselves in their grief.
I found my sympathies reinforced as Alyan brought light to these characters, cities and histories. When having the privilege of not being directly connected to a conflict like this, it is easy to forget or distance oneself from the fact that the staggering loss of life has real people behind it. People who are directly impacted know this all too well; it means they have no choice but to speak out, protest and grieve — they have no chance to rest.
This is why it is so important to cultivate a campus culture where students can feel welcome and safe as they pursue an education. Organizations in the TAHRIR Coalition feel compelled to act in the face of tragedy, but that action is at direct odds with the University. As we’ve seen repeatedly, being at odds with the University can jeopardize students’ safety. When faced with a choice between being coerced into declawed forms of protest or challenging the very institution that holds the keys to their future, many students will choose to face the University head-on for their moral failings. The University pays so much lip service toward its efforts to create spaces for open conversation and a campus where everyone feels like they can belong. But how could you possibly feel like you belong when forced into such an awful position?
Ono’s statement once again dispassionately recites like prayer the University’s right to regulate “incorrect” methods of protests in an attempt to ward off the rage growing at the heart of campus. Optics trump ethics in the University’s eyes, and protests might, God forbid, make visitors and prospective tuition targets uneasy. Whenever I would sit in the Diag to read through “Salt Houses,” it was clear, especially in retrospect, that the police presence was not there for the safety of the protesters. They were vultures: watching, waiting, circling. Their presence gave a clear message: Divestment is not considered an option. The University will continue to fund the destruction of Palestine and the murder of Palestinians.
As I see pictures of dismantled tents and pepper sprayed protesters and watch disgruntled people scrub the chalk messages off the Diag, I think of that colorful hope for children’s joy that stuck in my mind days after its declaration was thoughtlessly scrubbed away. I think of Manar, inspired in odd hours of the morning, writing her family tree in the sand that is washed away by a sea “that belongs to none of them,” that has never belonged to any person, any nation and never will. Homes can be razed and memories can fade. Even as Alia is worn down by the throes of Alzheimer’s and a lifetime searching to return to a home that no longer embodies that nostalgic warmth, she finds comfort in music salvaged from what has been lost and destroyed, a song sung for an infant whose smile will be nurtured and protected alongside the stories of her home.
Daily Arts Writer James Johnston can be reached at johnstjc@umich.edu
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