A Modern-Day Scheherazade Weaves Her Story of Motherhood, War and Exile

New York Times

3 days ago

I'LL TELL YOU WHEN I'M HOME: A Memoir, by Hala Alyan
'Since childhood, I've been aware of an audience,' Hala Alyan writes in her gorgeous, lyrical memoir, 'I'll Tell You When I'm Home,' which examines with a poet's precision the many ways in which storytelling is rooted in matriarchy, carrying messages between mothers and daughters as a means of survival.
Playing Scheherazade in a high school production of 'One Thousand and One Nights' — a character whose 'reassuring maternal voice' quite literally spins tales to keep herself alive, 'lulling us into imagination' — Alyan recalls having to improvise onstage when another cast member misses their cue, filling the awkward silence with clever lines she's invented on the spot. The audience laughs, and 'the magic of the moment endured,' she writes, 'the suspension of disbelief unbroken. It mattered so much to me that I was able to keep them believing.'
Alyan, the author of two novels and five collections of poetry, uses the figure of this archetypal storyteller as a framework for her memoir. Told in short passages that loop through time, the book is organized into 11 chapters named for the various stages of a pregnancy, from preconception to months one through eight to birth and postpartum. Slipping through her past and future selves, she braids together several timelines: her nomadic coming-of-age moving between Kuwait, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dallas and Oklahoma City, often in the shadow of war; her addiction and sobriety in her 20s; her struggle with infertility in her 30s and the strain it put on her marriage; her five miscarriages and her eventual path to motherhood through surrogacy.
At its core this is a book about longing: for motherhood, for a return to the Levantine homeland that shaped her family history, for a sense of belonging in America that never arrives, for a personal unraveling that may or may not come, for a sense of safety in her marriage that never resolves. Alyan speaks to different versions of herself across time, as though every moment in her history were happening concurrently, were still happening, playing and replaying itself, even now. The story must keep going for its teller to keep living.
That story begins in 1948, with Alyan's two grandmothers: Siham and her family are being displaced from their hometown of al-Majdal, Palestine, in the Nakba; and Fatima is the daughter of a sheikh in Damascus, Syria, which she will later leave for Kuwait, and then Lebanon. 'The story of the women starts with the land,' Alyan writes in a book that casts exile and war as her inheritance. 'What is landlessness that takes root, turns inward,' she asks. 'What is it to carry that lack, that undoing.'
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