Hala Alyan's story of exile, addiction and surrogacy: ‘I had to do something with the fragments'

The Guardian

2 days ago

In the poem Hours Ghazal, published in 2024, Hala Alyan writes: 'The cost of wanting something is who you are on the other side of getting it.' The line is a glimpse into the mind of a woman, who, at 38, has paid a high price for desire and emerged intact after living through what might feel like several lifetimes for the rest of us.
Alyan is a Palestinian American poet, novelist, clinical psychologist and psychology professor at New York University. She is also the author of a memoir published this week titled I'll Tell You When I'm Home.
To preempt a skeptical raised eyebrow over a memoir at 38, be assured: this is an unusual book. It is a story of the violence of exile over generations, a profound desire for motherhood, as well as surrogacy, addiction and the importance of remembering. The book is also a rumination on the nature of memoir and the often impossible attempts to reclaim and understand one's past.
Alyan was born in the United States, and though she has never lived in Palestine, early in the memoir, she writes:
I have never not been a 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.
Her paternal grandparents were displaced in 1948 from Iraq Sweidan and al-Majdal – Palestinian villages that are today considered part of, or near, the city of Ashkelon in Israel. Her father moved to Kuwait in 1958 where he met Hala's mother, and when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, they were uprooted again. This story of ongoing migration is common to so many millions of Palestinians, and the book explores the intergenerational trauma of displacement so deeply felt in her own family.
Alyan's two novels, The Arsonists' City, and Salt Houses, deal with the legacy of war in the Middle East, as do many poems in her five collections of poetry. The memoir, however, is by far her most personal, and confessional.
Alyan's body is central to this story. Her heart-shaped uterus appeals to her poetic side, but it does not do the job it is intended for. After five longed-for and failed pregnancies, including an ectopic one, her decision to opt for surrogacy leads to this memoir, in both content and form. It is structured over nine chapters, nine months during which she waits for the birth of her biological child, growing in the body of another woman, thousands of miles away in Canada. It was a time when she felt disassociated from her own body, unable to do what she desired most, unsure if her marriage would survive.
Her impulse was to write, to piece together different fragments of her life, including self-destructive phases of alcohol addiction, as well as the lives of those who came before her, particularly her grandmothers.
It is a story of war and loss – of country, but also of friends, lovers and ultimately her marriage. And her fertility journey mirrors some of this in microcosm: a uterus that cannot sustain a fetus to term is in some senses a body at war with itself. Her story of surrogacy becomes a metaphor for exile.
And it is in the forefront of Alyan's mind that her book is published at this heightened moment for Palestine, with Palestinians in Gaza not just dying from starvation and bombs, but living with the continuous threat of displacement and expulsion – a relentless repetition of history.
When I meet Alyan in her Brooklyn apartment, littered with the toys of her now three-year-old daughter, Leila, she explains what having a child means to her. It is a 'gift to steward something, to be of service to something', she says. 'I think I say in the book, I wanted to matter less. I wanted something to matter more.'
She is also aware that the joy of a much wanted child is set against the lineage she is a part of, as both American and Palestinian. And that, she says, 'feels terrible'.
The previous ease in our chatter, punctuated by laughter, tea and biscotti, turns to a faster and more urgent conversation relating to Washington's support for Israel.
She writes in the book: 'How to explain being Palestinian and American? You must disavow the former to prove the latter. You exist in both identities like a ghost, belonging to neither.'
When I ask her about this, she says that while she is fully aware of US complicity in Israel's actions in Gaza, 'I have nevertheless been startled awake by every veto hand raised at the UN, every new bill to send billions to Israel. But much more the silence, and then the vitriol, and then indifference, and in some the genuine desire for more dead Palestinians.'
More than 600 days on, her question for America today is stark: 'Just how many slaughtered Palestinians are enough slaughtered Palestinians?'
In the midst of the slaughter is another erasure – that of the stories of Palestinians, and Alyan's book contributes in a modest way towards restoration. We tell and read stories to make sense of the world, to amend our bewilderment. In some ways, the stories we tell are a record of existence and survival. Alyan reminds me of a potent moment a few weeks post-October 7, in which a photograph, shared widely, showed a whiteboard in a hospital inundated with mass casualties. The upcoming surgeries were wiped clean and replaced with words written in blue marker, by Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, a Doctors without Borders medic: 'Whoever stays till the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us.'
Our conversation turns to what each of us can do, in the face of the gravity of the situation in Gaza. Bearing witness is the bare minimum, and for Alyan, what matters is what makes a good witness, especially in a climate of fear. By now, she tells me, no one can say they don't know what is happening in Gaza. 'The person who sees and stays silent or looks away is useless,' she says. 'The purpose of a witness is someone who is articulate, unswayed by fear or threats.'
One reason why this matters is the relationship between erasure and archive. On this point, she is at her most passionate. 'When you are eradicating children, you are cutting off the story just as it is starting to be told, and in the assault on elders, you are eradicating the history, the memory, the archive,' she says. 'When you decimate the universities, you blow up libraries, you get rid of the poets, the journalists, anyone who holds a kind of collective memory, you're acknowledging that stories matter, memory matters. It is a systematic intention to do this. And what you are left with are fragments and so you have to do something with the fragments.'
What she does with the fragments is recast them, sometimes presenting them as they are. In some of her poems, she redacts words, highlights some and keeps others in faded relief. Her memoir 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.
Among the unflinching accounts of self-destruction and alcoholic blackouts is one that occurs in Mexico City, when she is barhopping alone after years of sobriety, hooking up with strangers. Her phone is dead and her husband is frantically trying to reach her. She recalls looking in the bathroom mirror of one bar:
It is the strangest thing: remembering the self. Remembering the self you evicted. I want. I want. There was something that screamed and there was something that could muffle it. I've not kept on nodding terms with this girl; I buried her, or thought I had. And here she was, 12 years later, and all her messy glory, hurling her laugh across the room like an arrow. She was awake after 100 years of slumber. She was hungry. She was taking the whole city down with her. I look into the mirror, blurred from drink. I blow a kiss. She blows one back. There it was. I'd wanted to do it and now I'd done it.
The memoir revisits two foundational stories in the eastern and western canon, One Thousand and One Nights and Homer's Odyssey. Alyan is drawn to Scheherazade, who saves herself night after nightfall by telling the king cliff-hanging tales. For her, these are 'archetypes of waiting, of survival narratives', which connect her to her own excavation of storytelling; a delicate weaving, attempting to connect the threads of her life to a bigger tapestry.
It is primarily women who help her do that: grandmothers, aunts, her mother, the surrogate, Scheherazade, Penelope. They all have superpowers, she says, and when I ask her what hers is, she says: truth-telling.
She theorizes that Scheherazade was probably the first female psychotherapist in history, because she transformed 'the passive female listener into a storyteller. She told, and her telling rehabilitated.'
And then there is the shattering truth that the current moment – what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza – defies expression, let alone rehabilitation through storytelling and remembering.
As a psychologist, Alyan knows that post-traumatic healing can only come when the trauma ends. And alongside it, she says, a reckoning for Israel and those who supported its actions, as well as those who saw and stayed silent.