Hala Alyan

“Hala Alyan offers us a magnificent reckoning and witnessing. Her poems are a dazzling achievement, singing of a body/bodies tethered to tenderness and hope, even in the face of landscapes that don’t always offer ‘good and patient soil.’” –Aimee Nezhukumatathil

“From Beirut to the U.S. to Jerusalem to Kuwait, Hala Alyan draws from her experience as a Palestinian American to examine where one’s home is under occupation and forced displacement.” –Publishers Weekly

Hala Alyan is the author of the memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (Simon & Schuster, 2025), winner of the Arab American Book Award in Nonfiction, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as an NPR Book of the Year, one of TIME’S 100 Must-Read Books of the Year, an Electric Literature Best Nonfiction book of the Year, and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Guardian described the book as “a rumination on the nature of memoir and the often impossible attempts to reclaim and understand one’s past. I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a series of vignettes that go back and forth in time, in a writing style that is frantic, questioning and lyrical, designed to help the reader enter the darkest corners with the writer, almost inside her consciousness.”

Alyan’s novels include the lyrical and heartbreaking debut Salt Houses (Harper Collins, 2017), which follows three generations of a Palestinian family and confronts the most devastating of all truths: you can’t go home again. The book won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and was a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. She is also the author of The Arsonists’ City (Harper Collins, 2021), which was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us” (NPR).

She has authored six highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Moon That Turns You Back (Ecco, 2024) and The Domestic Empire (Washington Square Press, 2027). Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica.

She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

Short Bio

Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses — winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize — and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her debut memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of six highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Moon That Turns You Back and, most recently, The Domestic Empire. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

Read What’s In Print

• Stories as Salvation in I’ll Tell You When I’m Home – The Chicago Review of Books

• What It Does with Wreckage: On Hala Alyan’s The Moon That Turns You Back – LA Review of Books

• A Palestinian American Memoir of Motherhood, War and Exile – New York Times

• Grief at the Verge of Revelation: A Conversation with Hala Alyan – The Rumpus

• The Source: An Interview with Hala Alyan – Asian American Writers Workshop

• Diaspora, the Limits of Healing, and Gaza as the Conscience of the World – Literary Hub

• Uncomfortable Truths: The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan – The Rumpus

Listen to Audio

• Hala Alyan on Motherhood, Identity, and Resilience – The Uplifters Podcast

• Hala Alyan Reflects on Exile and the Geography of Loss – New Lines Magazine

• Stories the Body Won’t Let Us Forget with Hala Alyan – In This Body

• Read “Sweet Tea” in Acacia Magazine

• Read “Addiction is a Story of Wanting Gone Awry” in Electric Literature

• Read “Why Must Palestinians Audition for Your Empathy?” in The New York Times

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (an excerpt)

Month One Month One
Your baby is the size of a grain of rice! Blood cells are taking shape and circulation will begin. The embryo is only two layers of cells, making it microscopic. But by the end of the month, a little poppy seed will already have grown.

I dreamt of a lyrebird once, before I knew it existed. I was walking through an empty grocery store—that fluorescent lights find me even in dreams is the truest symptom of late-stage capitalism I can think of—and there was a strange shape at the end of the aisle. It looked like a shadow eating itself, some frenzy of smoke. As I got closer I saw it was a bird, a tail fanned out and trembling. The bird opened its beak and the sound of a siren emerged.

I don’t tell Johnny about the pink lines right away. I wait until the first blood test. Then the second. The beta numbers, as they’re called, doubling. Then the third, one week later. Johnny travels early in the month and I hold those pink lines to myself. For two weeks, it’s my secret. It feels like an affair almost, something thrilling and a little sickening all at once.

Perhaps I’d seen it before, some clip clinging to my memory like lint. But to my memory, it was years after the dream, watching a nature documentary with Johnny. On the screen, a dark bird hops and shakes, its feathers quivering. The voiceover tells us to listen. The bird can mimic the call of other birds, a perfect replication of sound.

Later, I watch David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds. We are shown a lyrebird imitating the motor of the camera. An alarm. A chainsaw. Lyrebirds in captivity can mimic hammers, chains, even—in one famous instance—the human voice.

There is a D. W. Winnicott quote: “It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.” This is the true devastation of exile. One hides, but is never found. The new country doesn’t care to find you. Often, it would rather not.

For years, I’d learned a mimicry. The mimicry of the pivotal scene in movies, the turning point in sitcoms, the punchline, the second act, those two words: I’m pregnant. For years, I’d rehearse them. I’d turn the words in my mind like twin stones. Then I spoke them. I’d see the words glide across his face. I’d see his breathing change with them. I’d see him look stunned, then smile, then slowly nod. Then—like an actor being asked to run the scene one more time, I’d speak them again. The second time it was clunkier, a question mark at the end. Then again. I’m pregnant. The words became rushed, embarrassed—how many times does a person need to get pregnant to get pregnant—an afterthought. Don’t bother reacting. Let’s wait. Don’t believe this to be true yet.

I don’t remember the final time before the surrogate, only that it must’ve been in January. I might have waited until the first blood draw, my doctor’s voice excited. These numbers look so good, Hala, and I could feel my overachiever’s heart rise like bread. I’d gone to a pastry store in the Village, bought an éclair, eaten it so quickly I’d ripped a bit of the paper with my teeth. Then I told him. I must’ve. I just can’t remember.

The month of July is hot and sticky, marked by little returnings to myself. I go to a concert alone, screaming at the top of my lungs in the first row. I wear my hair up, old dangly earrings I thought I’d lost. They are yellow, worthless beads of plastic, but I love them. I feel beautiful and embarrassed: a woman in her mid-thirties dancing alone. I am free to dance. I am free to smoke cigarettes and stay up until dawn. I have been replaced. What would the overachiever say now? I feel like a girl who failed her math exam, an actor tapped out for the understudy. I turn to my usual machinations: stoic quotes, poetry, metaphors. Surrogacy as that which carries another. Surrogacy as code for relief. Surrogacy as code for ministration. I dance, the secret of Dee’s positive test in my throat.

In Aboriginal culture, the word “Dreaming” also signifies origin tales of creation; how the world came to be. In one account of the lyrebird, it is said to be the only creature able to communicate with all others. In another, its singing moves a spirit so deeply, the lyrebird brings it into animal form—frog—and then teaches it how to sing.

In 1798, Napoleon launched a campaign in Ottoman-run Egypt and Syria. His much-hyped Armée d’Orient—thousands of men on foot and horseback—were eventually defeated, and the French left the region. They would be back briefly in the 1860s. Then again after World War I, after the Ottomans had fallen, the French would be given mandates over some of the land.

While Johnny’s away I throw a Fourth of July party and when the sun begins to set, we all walk to the pier, watching the fireworks worm their way across the sky. The booms scare me at first, the way they always do, but eventually I am enthralled by the light and color, how the sky seems to sizzle in the aftermath. I remember something almost violently: A decade earlier, a Fourth of July I spent walking the darkening streets of Eighth Avenue alone, hearing but not seeing the fireworks, dazed. I’d woken that morning to a stranger in my bed. I was still a ways away from sobriety; I still had worse and worse to tunnel through. I’d finally found my friends and their picnic blanket. The show was almost over. My stomach roiled the whole time, and the only thing that kept me from crying was the thought: Next July won’t be like this. It wasn’t. It was worse. But the next July I spent in France, cheering at soccer matches, my cheeks painted with a foreign flag. And now, so many Julys later, I sipped my sparkling water and joked with friends. Remembering that girl steadied me. It was bad, but it wasn’t that bad. This is how it always is to remember my drinking days: at least I’m not also doing that, I’d think, and something in my spirit would lift. Next July won’t be like this, I think to myself watching the bright lights. I can’t yet conjure a child.

For the first year of our life together, I told Johnny I didn’t want a baby and this is perhaps the worst lie I’d ever told.

When I was almost thirteen, my sister, Miriam, was born. For years, I’d hold pillows and dolls to my chest, murmur soothing words against fabric. Then there was a baby: Miriam, actual, mewling, reddish hair, impossibly small fingers and toes. I was practically a teenager. Her hands curled into themselves. Her lips pursed while she slept. I picked her middle name. I made up stories about a mermaid named Jewel. I changed her diapers, rocked her for hours, walking the length of our family room, singing an Arabic song about her hair, about doves, about who loved her best.

When Johnny returns, I finally tell him. “She’s pregnant,” I say, and there it is: the anticlimactic reveal. There is none of that same gravitas to the moment. A woman hundreds of miles away from here, a woman right now tucking her children into bed, a woman neither of us really knows: that woman is pregnant. It is not my body. It is not my hand on my abdomen. I tell something about someone else’s body and he says, “Okay.” Just okay, almost a question, like he is waiting for me to tell him what to do with that information. There is nothing to do. He has to finish coding something. I take a shower, then stare at my phone for an hour. We watch a dumb movie that night and barely speak of Dee again for weeks.

It is like learning a word, then hearing it everywhere. After Dee, I see ads for surrogacy, a billboard for egg donation, a TV sitcom plot about infertility, a podcaster talking about her surrogate. The metaphor concretizes. Surrogacy as metaphor for rescue. Surrogacy as metaphor for exile.

The first thing to go are the fruit-colored dresses from the spring. The ones I’d thrifted, imagining their former lives, unable to imagine my future one and so pouring myself into their lacy or velvet or tight contours. They would tell me who I was, as I ran errands and attended birthday dinners. But now their beaded waistlines feel gaudy. I look like a melted cupcake in the pink tulle. I’d never wear the silvery bodysuit, which looks like it’s been tipped over my limbs. I may not know my self, but I know she isn’t this. And so into an enormous K-Mart bag they all go, trudged down Driggs Avenue to another thrift store, on their way to their new, actual lives, not the pit stop of this one.

In twelve-step programs, the fourth step involves taking inventory. There can be a grimness to this, a necessary kind of excavation. “You get home, that’s when you notice the mold,” so goes the Louise Glück poem. “Too late, in other words.” Too late. My inventory is bleak. Who has been living like this? I think, looking around our apartment. I’d blinked three years away. I frittered away entire weeks on one obsession or another, trying to avoid the core fear. Sometimes people have to repeat themselves, once, twice, before I hear them. My husband and I barely speak. When had this happened? How could these things sneak up on you like this?

Napoleon’s doomed campaign shook the Ottoman Empire and its Arab constituents. Western inventions and ideas started to spider through the region, from liberalism to modernization to nationalism. Meanwhile, there was the Tanzimat—a period of Ottoman reform—and the Young Turk Revolution. Suddenly, there was a press, and a true one at that, literary salons, reforms at community and economic levels. Figures like Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq resisted “Turkization” and promoted writing in Arabic, having salons in Arabic. Intellectuals argued for women’s rights. Religious figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani advocated for Pan-Islamic solidarity against colonial forces. Arabic poetry and literature proliferated, led by writers like the dubbed “Poet of the Nile,” Hafez Ibrahim, and Kahlil Gibran. Egypt fought and won independence. Arab armies studied Western tactics and implemented military reforms.

This became known as the Nahda. The Arab Renaissance. They were invaded, and then they learned.

Nahda. A word that means waking up. Eyes blinking open.

Dee’s pregnancy wakes me up.

I start making lists. I’ve long thought my mental health can be assessed by two things: am I making lists and have I baked a boxed cake in the last month? If the answer to both is yes, then things are great. A list is a magnificent thing, all that future in one place. It is the concretization of hope, not only that something will get done, but that you will be the one to do it. Sometimes, if I realize I’ve completed a task without having put it on the list, I’ll go back and write it, just to cross it off. The pathos in this seems sweet, childlike, a delight in both archiving and putting to rest.

Here are the things I need to complete. Here is what I’ll do with my waiting. Afterward, I admire my handiwork: the neat blue and green letters, the geometric circles and arrows across the page, my way of connecting one goal to the other. Here it is, my map.

Albert Hourani said of being Levantine, “It is no longer to have a standard of one’s own, not to be able to create but only able to imitate.”

The lyrebird is considered a symbol of poetry. Of songs. Of the stories we tell. Of what we mimic back.

In 1986, my mother arrives in an airport in Illinois from Kuwait. She is eight months pregnant, tells the security officer she is visiting her brother. This is technically true. He lives in Carbondale, and my mother is in Carbondale. But so is the Memorial Hospital of Carbondale, where I will be born. So is the U.S. Consulate office, the clerk who will fill out the citizenship papers, the doctor who will write down my birth time, the nurse that will check me for jaundice. My mother has a vision when she lands in America and it has nothing to do with America. She doesn’t want to stay here; we will be back in Kuwait within two weeks of my birth. But she knows I will inherit more than my father’s eyebrows and temper and curls; if I am born in Kuwait, I will also receive the passport he has, which is no passport at all, just the laissez-passer papers for Palestinian refugees, the no-man’s-land of citizenship: you belong nowhere, you are allowed somewhere, always as a guest. My mother is uninterested in America as a place; what she wants for me is to have its cloak, the protection of its name. What is an American daughter, she thinks, if not safe?

It turns out, I tell anyone who will listen, everything is a surrogate. I ask Siri if she loves me, when the next full moon is, which herbs cure insomnia. Are you a kind of mother, I ask. I’m not sure how to answer that, she says, not unkindly. I watch dozens of videos online, then interrupt Johnny’s workday. Has he heard of brood care? Has he heard of allomothering? Does he know that when the mother emperor penguin hunts for food, the father incubates the egg? Does he know that worker bees are usually infertile? That they feed and take care of the larvae? So that the queen bee can reproduce? So that the colony can survive?

The lesson of performing Arabness comes young. I am seven or eight. It is summer and I am at the YMCA pool. I am my mother’s American daughter, only we’re in America now. There is a woman, white, American, probably in her twenties. Maybe she is a swim teacher or lifeguard. She is asking me about my parents.

“And when did you come here?”

I remember saying, “A long time ago.” Not because anyone had instructed me to, but because somewhere, somehow, I knew that was the correct response. I remember the wet swimsuit wedging in my butt; I didn’t want to fix it. I hated how it made you look like a waddling duck. Children understand dignity, too.

She asks what language we speak. She has pretty hair, blonde and in a ponytail. I tell her.

Her eyes light up. “Is Arabic the one with the stars and moons? In the alphabet?”

I understand her question to be ridiculous. It awakens something angry in me, but also a little mean, like I want to punish her. “Yes,” I say. She asks me to wait here. She comes bouncing back with a notebook, drying her hands against her bare thighs before holding it out with a pen.

“Can you write my name for me?”

Her name. It could’ve been anything. Emily. Jessica. Amy. She tells me and I take the pen and glide it across the page into nonsensical curlicues. I draw two five-pointed stars above the scrawl, then a shaky crescent moon in the middle. Do any alphabets have moons in them? I wonder. She beams at what I’ve done.

The French campaign failed, but the imperialism inherent in it stuck. What they took back west with them was a story. The story of civilizing—a mission narrative that would trail European colonial forces in the coming century.

What did she do with it? That nonsense scrawl of a child. Did she show it to her boyfriend? Doodle it on the corner of a college notebook? Did she get it tattooed on her forearm? And what is the name for the glee I felt watching her, as she beamed at the notebook? A revenge I didn’t even understand I was taking, but took nonetheless.

Many immigrants come to America already well versed in their erasure. They bring what they’ve learned, and what they’ve learned is to hunger for the West. For Europe’s Messianic complex, America’s exceptionalism. In the Levant, the fingerprints of colonizers are everywhere: French street names, European architecture. It’s like this around the world: Vietnam, Colombia, Morocco. Albert Hourani said, “[T]o be a Levantine is to live in two worlds or more at once without belonging to either.” This is well-trodden territory. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of talking about my own in-betweenness, living in an empire that has called itself by another name, and behaved like the old one. That empire has launched “forever wars,” has eroded countries and people of their borders, their dignity, their children, has created the conditions under which people seek shelter within her. What a trick, this empire. Like a drug dealer: creating the fix by creating the problem. There’s no mystery to it. Forget the why. Ask then what. What is landlessness that takes root, turns inward, what is it to carry that lack, that undoing.

I have never not been Palestinian. That has never not been written upon my body. In Lebanon, in Kuwait, in Oklahoma—I am what my father is and my father is a man who was once a boy who was born to a woman in Gaza. Who speaks with the accent of that place.

The lyrebirds don’t choose what sound they hear, which is to say they don’t choose what sound they carry.

And me? Now absent a poppy seed or almond, what do I carry? Klonopin. Night terrors. A note app on my phone filled with half-finished letters to women that are dead, and men that aren’t. Beirut in every dream. The vocal fry of a white girl. There is a video of my brother and me in Maine, where we are talking a mile a minute, our drawls impeccable. We sound Oklahoman. When we moved to Beirut, I was fourteen. I had to sand my Arabic down, get rid of its rough Palestinian edges. My green eyes granted me a certain leeway; my father’s G rang out in public places. I learned the soft vowels of the Lebanese accent, how to bleat out curses. I learned to carry the country in my mouth, my hand gestures. The Lebanese hairdresser beneath my grandmother’s apartment would always say Na’eeman after washing my hair, a blessing, and I’d rehearse for hours in advance to reply Merci, instead of the more Palestinian response. I’d always forget.

I love the bard symbolism of the lyrebird, of course. I love dreams and fortunes and conjecture. I decide the lyrebird is the perfect archetype. I write lyrebird as symbol for the Levantine on an index card and tape it on the wall of my new studio. Then: lyrebird as metaphor for surrogate. Because isn’t it? It carries what it hears. It returns it to the world. Days later, I find another article, this one about a male lyrebird trick. A study found that when female lyrebirds try to escape males trying to mate with them, the male bird will mimic the sound of a “mobbing flock,” a signal that a predator is nearby. Not the sound of a single bird. A flock. A whole damn flock. I know it’s ridiculous, but I am angry at these rapey, dishonest birds. I am angry at what they’ve done with their gift.

I tear the notecards up. I misspoke earlier. Landless is a misnomer. It is the adjective of the unlucky, the passively determined. But a border isn’t passive. Nor is its erasure. There’s a way history teaches rearranged maps that can sound inert. Polite, even. A housekeeper who moves the knickknacks while you sleep.

In Arabic, we say: Do you have no mother, no father? The implication being that to have no mother or father is to have no name, and to have no name is to have no anchor, nothing to claim you. This was how I’d come to feel, unclaimed, dislocated from the places that made me, the places I’d sworn I’d return to but hadn’t. I made home with the scraps, with the almosts. I’d forgotten what I belonged to. It was like the first few weeks after Meimei’s death. I kept thinking of things to ask her, things that only she could’ve answered. The questions were like fishbones scraping my throat. They had nowhere to go. And now: there were pink lines. A doubling beta number. The Canadian nurse’s chipper voice on my cell: “We’ll have the gender for you in a few weeks!”

There is an evolutionary reason for vocal mimicry—a skill driven by sexual selection or self-preservation. It can be used to attract a mate, to call the attention of others in case of a threat, to alert one another about food or other resources. I feel my anger wilt. It’s an old story: survival.

In Arabic, the Levant is blad el-sham. The Greater Syria. I prefer the simple blad. Countries. When an Arab says it to me, I know what they mean. I know which ones.

Dee tells her daughters about me, about the baby. I’m like an oven, she tells them. I’m like a little house. I think of a land mass dismantled by white hands, borders drawn and redrawn. I think of the airport in south Beirut, how during the civil war in Lebanon, tens of thousands of Lebanese sought shelter in Syria. I think of the Palestinian camps dotting southern Lebanon. How each place became a surrogate for the other. One carries when the other can’t.

Is it tiresome to say I lie at night and feel exiled from her body? Her body inside another? I imagine it bopping around like a little red dot on a map. And mine? Hundreds of miles away.

“Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. The recognition comes from presence, the state that cures what meditation practitioners call being “unconscious” or “unawake.” We do terrible things in non-awake states. We hurt. We get hurt. We see the other as an obstacle, a checkpoint between ourselves and what we want. We skirt the truth, mostly to ourselves. “Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise,” Sigmund Freud said. This from a man who recanted a wide swath of research on female trauma because of societal backlash. Still, he was right about that. Waking means honesty. It means finding the right voice and the right song.

I tape a notecard back up. I scrawl in the margins: scarcity. I scrawl: persisting. Another notecard next to it: Forgive the birds. In smaller words below: They were surviving. Next to they, an even smaller word in parentheses:

(we)

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