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The Guardian
03-06-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Hala Alyan's story of exile, addiction and surrogacy: ‘I had to do something with the fragments'
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.
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Emotional trauma in a post-October 7 world: How are Israel's children coping?
'Many children, especially the younger ones, are suffering from emotional trauma,' educational psychologist and former longtime school principal Dr. Zipi Golan told The Jerusalem Post. 'So says the Lord: A voice is heard on high, lamentation, bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children, she refuses to be comforted for her children for they are not. So says the Lord: Refrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for there is reward for your work, says the Lord, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy. And there is hope for your future, says the Lord, and the children shall return to their own border.' – Jeremiah 31:14-16 Since the horrific Hamas attack on the South on October 7, 2023, 'Many children, especially the younger ones, are suffering from emotional trauma,' educational psychologist and former longtime school principal Dr. Zipi Golan told The Jerusalem Post. Children 'must be given tools with which to cope,' Golan said. She advises parents to read stories to their children. Many books have been written and published since the outbreak of the war that can help children understand that they are not alone. Living on a moshav near Ashkelon, Golan has not only been exposed to the intense stress of the Israel-Hamas War, up close, but also to continuous missile attacks from Hamas terrorists in the South for decades. Golan launched a private counseling center in 2016 that now has three branches: at Moshav Ge'a where she lives, just a 10-minute drive from theGaza border; in Yavneh; and in Rishon Lezion. Today, she treats children and families affected by the war – and even children who have returned from captivity. She explained that, due to the war, there are some children who refuse to leave their parents' proximity, shower alone, or be in a closed room. 'I have been in the teaching profession for over 30 years and the cases I have encountered in this war have managed to surprise me,' she said. 'Many children have been severely affected by the war, not only from the South but also from the center of the country, and we don't know how long their situation will last,' she said. Golan explained that the situation could be the cause of 'serious effects on functioning later in life.' 'I think I have helped prevent kids from committing suicide – not by stopping before jumping out of a window but by allowing them to talk. The holder of a PhD in educational psychology, Golan has been a school principal in Ashkelon for over three decades, as well as also a member of the Education Ministry's appeals committee to dealing with various problems and complaints about schools. Even after she retired from teaching at schools, Golan said, she wanted 'to continue to help kids and parents.' 'I felt there were weak points in schools, which are unable to help with everything. Parenting is a profession, so fathers and mothers need counseling, but many seek help only when the situation is very bad.' In general, parents are put under a lot of pressure, she said. 'They are busy trying to make ends meet as prices are very high. Women come home late after taking their young children home from after-school programs in which the teachers or child minders may not have have enough training. 'Youngsters need to learn rules, boundaries, and values. If they abuse their smartphones during class or use them to cheat, they should be confiscated during classes. A child without boundaries is insecure,' Golan said As a principal, she said, 'I felt that coaching and being in close contact with the parents was very important. Once a year, there were visits to the homes of all the youngsters.' She advises, 'If a student gets a low grade on a test or an assignment, he or she must be encouraged. At her centers, Golan meets with kindergarten children who are about to enter first grade. 'I don't teach numbers or letters but getting used to the different behaviors and rules in elementary school. It can be very scary to make this transition,' she said, comparing it to the move 'from sixth grade in elementary school to junior high school. She points out that there are teachers who aren't suited to their jobs. 'I don't blame them but rather those who gave them their teaching degrees!' An educator must his or her honor pupils, Golan believes. 'If they don't have an answer when a student asks, it isn't shameful to say 'I don't know, but I will learn about it.' Thanks to Google and the Internet, many youngsters know more than their teachers. Despite the current situation, Golan said she has faith in the younger generation and in the future of the State of Israel. She described the country's current youth as 'an excellent generation.' ■ Sign up for the Health & Wellness newsletter >>
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘I worried I might start finding it normal. But I never did' – what I learned as the Guardian's Jerusalem correspondent
Three days before Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, I was helping friends who live in Gaza City gather armfuls of guava in their orchard in Beit Hanoun, in the north of the Strip, when something strange happened. Hamid and Rania* had bought the small plot the year before. It was overgrown, but over the changing seasons they'd worked hard on their expensive acquisition. I called it the secret garden, a tiny oasis in the midst of the dry, dirty misery of Gaza. As well as guava, there were apple, fig, lemon, orange and olive trees. The couple planted grapefruit and pomegranate saplings, and dug vegetable beds for tomatoes, herbs and spices. Rania also put in yellow and red chrysanthemums in flowerpots made out of stacks of worn-out car tyres. The couple bought a water tank and fixed the broken outhouse. The existing shack, originally little more than breeze-blocks, a dirt floor and tin roof, was refurbished, complete with a bed and a shady roof terrace. From the terrace, you could see the Mediterranean sparkling in the distance. To the north, usually only half visible through the mist, were the towers of a desalination plant in the Israeli city of Ashkelon. The plot was surrounded by Gaza's biggest area of open, flat agricultural land, which mostly amounted to a few other small walled orchards and strawberry fields. Teenage boys often herded scraggly goats and sheep through the area. It had been a day like any other until the sound of men's voices, shouting in unison, carried to us over the wind. It sounded like a military drill. We went up to the roof terrace, from where we could see several dozen men, standing in formation, in a fallow field. Even from a distance it was clear they were wearing the bright green insignia of Hamas's armed wing, the Qassam Brigades. None of us had ever seen so many fighters in Gaza out in the open before, let alone training in full view of the farmers around them and Israeli drones above. Outside wartime, that uniform was usually reserved for funerals and rallies. Along with the rest of the world, we found out the purpose of the drill soon enough. I left for Jerusalem the next morning, through the border fortress the Israelis called Erez, and went to Shabbat dinner with Jewish and Arab Israeli friends that night. How was Gaza, they asked, always curious about a place they could never visit. Quiet, I said. So quiet, in fact, I'd been able to interview people for a feature about the revival of beekeeping there. I thought the fact that the bees could travel further than their Palestinian owners, flying over Israel's border fence to greener pastures, would make a good story. But, of course, I never wrote that article. Instead, I was soon on the other side of the barrier from Beit Hanoun, running from incoming rockets, getting caught in crossfire between Hamas and the Israeli army still fighting in a kibbutz, and retching at the smell of the bodies of murdered families decomposing in the unseasonal heat. I took the job as the Guardian's Jerusalem correspondent in 2021, although I was reluctant about it. I was happy living in Istanbul as the paper's Turkey and Middle East correspondent, from where I got to travel widely – and the Jerusalem gig was notoriously thankless. Every single word published under my name would be forensically examined for signs of bias. Plus, I found the holy city difficult – tense and unfriendly. Jerusalem is a place that attracts fanatics and zealots; one American man with Jerusalem syndrome was always wandering the streets of the Old City, barefoot, staff in hand, convinced he was Moses. I had visited several times before, but what did it say about me, I wondered, that I was willing to move here, and take on this challenge? My partner was encouraging, even though we knew holding an Iraqi passport would make it difficult for him to join me. Any outsider or journalist who wants to truly understand the Middle East should spend some time in Israel and Palestine, he said. In the end, I took the job – and now, four years later, I am leaving Jerusalem and returning home to take up a post in the UK. I have learned a lot, and the experience has changed me. Before I arrived in Jerusalem, I thought the Israel-Palestine story was an old one: a cycle of attritional violence and a slow march towards inevitable annexation because of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank. The Abraham accords, diplomatic agreements brokered in 2020 in which several Arab nations agreed to recognise Israel, seemed to suggest that the rest of the Middle East had lost interest in the question of Palestine. The conflict had also been pushed down the global agenda by the regional wars and crises triggered by the Arab spring, the war in Ukraine and China's increasing power. Even so, during my time there, it was becoming more likely that something big was going to happen. Many years ago I interviewed a pilot who explained that plane crashes don't happen without warning signs first: system A fails, or is faulty, and then B, and then C, and then D. It's always a series of events, rather than a one-off incident, that leads to a plane falling out of the sky. Israel and Palestine before October 2023 felt like that – like the dominoes were being lined up. Before 7 October, 2023 had been a difficult year. In December 2022, Israel's pugnacious prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had returned to office as the head of a new coalition that was the most far right in Israeli history. It proposed an overhaul of the judiciary that would essentially give the government full control over the courts, which critics said undermined democracy. In early 2023, there were mass protests in the streets and by July military reservists were refusing to report for duty. Israel's enemies and friends alike warned the government it made the country appear weak. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, 2023 had already beaten 2022's record as the bloodiest year since the close of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, of the 2000s, and I spent much of the year driving back and forth to cover massive Israel Defense Forces raids in Jenin and Nablus. It's strange to say this now, but in comparison with Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the West Bank, Gaza had been relatively quiet. After the last major war in 2021, Israel had gradually increased permits for men from the Strip to enter for agricultural and construction work, an incentive for Hamas to keep quiet by doing something to alleviate the besieged territory's dire poverty and accompanying social unrest. The money was making a huge difference. Every time I visited the Strip, new shops and cafes were opening, and the rebuilding from the last war had almost finished. Friends, sources and people I interviewed told me that the cash had helped them clear debts from failed investments and business ventures – a common story in a place where the economy could not function normally. There is now a tendency to wax lyrical about how wonderful Gaza was before 7 October, but life there was still very hard. One elderly friend of a friend went blind because Israel did not consider cataract surgery a valid reason to be allowed to seek medical treatment abroad, even though the treatment was not available in the Strip. Another woman I interviewed needed chemotherapy for a recurrence of breast cancer, but nine travel permit applications were refused. Permission only came through after I wrote a story about her. I never felt that I properly understood the reality of the Strip until I visited it. None of the reporting I'd read or watched could adequately convey the claustrophobia, the busyness, the dirt, the suffocation, the feeling of being trapped. It was a struggle in my own output, too. There is – or was – nowhere else like it. The Strip was the first place I went to when I started the job – and from there, I went straight to Tel Aviv. I remember sitting on the beach in nearby Jaffa early that morning and feeling a maddening cognitive dissonance. How could people be out and about, doing pilates, walking their dogs, as if everything was fine – when just 50km down the road, on the same stretch of the Med, was an open-air prison? I was worried that I too would start finding the situation normal. But it never happened. Another time, I stopped off at an Ikea on my way home from Gaza, a mistake I didn't make again. My brain couldn't handle the switch between the slum-like Shati refugee camp and a world of well-lit, flat-packed plenty in the space of a few hours. I had to go outside to get some air. Still, everyone clings to their memories of the before times: Gaza's spicy food and fresh fish, the bountiful orchards, clambering around Ottoman ruins, late night nargileh (hookah) sessions – and most of all, the beach. In the summer of 2022, Israel allowed more electricity to reliably reach Gaza's sewage treatment plants, and for the first time in years, most of the Strip's coastline became clean enough for swimming. On the busy beaches, children ran in and out of the waves, begging their parents for camel rides and candy floss. It was a glimpse of what a different Gaza and a different future could look like. Now, all of that is gone, replaced by an apocalyptic moonscape so unrecognisable that friends tell me they get lost in their own neighbourhoods. A long time ago, I ran out of things to say in messages and voice notes to the people I know there. My pleas for them to stay safe became meaningless. Instead, we don't talk about what they are going through, mostly reminiscing about old times, or we make plans for the future. No one acknowledges that we can't be sure they will materialise. If I think about the first few weeks of the war now, what surfaces first is the prickly, uncomfortable memory of the heat. The semi-desert western Negev, which makes up Gaza and southern Israel, is totally different from high-altitude Jerusalem, and for much of the year the landscape is so barren and harsh it feels as if the sunlight bounces off it with a vengance. It was such a warm autumn, far too hot: still over 30C at the end of October. Then comes the feeling of chaos, the fear and panic, rather than specific incidents – the Guardian's hotel in Ashkelon getting hit by a rocket, or stumbling across the headless corpse of a Hamas fighter. (To this day I still don't understand where it could possibly have gone; he was otherwise in one piece, and so were the bodies around him.) I told my family and editors, all far away in the UK, that I was OK – which, to an extent, I was. I was still in shock, so I focused on the work and adrenaline carried me through. I was far more affected by the stories that traumatised 7 October survivors told me – and about what was going to happen to Gaza – than by what I saw first-hand. Nothing was clear at that point except that many, many more people were going to die. The dam broke about three weeks in, when I went to report on the funerals of a British-Israeli family: mum Lianne, and teenage daughters Noiya and Yahel. Their father, Eli, was taken hostage. He didn't find out his wife and children had been killed until he was released during the ceasefire earlier this year. Watching the grief of those gathered to mourn loved ones taken away by such senseless and shocking violence, I began sobbing uncontrollably and had to leave the graveside to sit in a corner of the cemetery where I wouldn't disturb the eulogies. A member of the family came over to ask if I was all right, and whether I had known them; I didn't know how to explain what I was feeling. I just cried on her shoulder instead. I am leaving the Holy Land at a strange juncture. I never planned on staying much longer than three years, and I never signed up to cover a war like this. Unlike my Israeli and Palestinian friends and colleagues, I have the freedom and ability to leave. Fundamentally, I feel the same as when I arrived – that the occupation is wrong, and it doesn't make Israelis safer. For decades, Israel told itself a lie that the conflict could be contained and managed, sustaining a perpetual occupation and suppression of Palestinian rights without any major diplomatic, financial or security cost. That myth was shattered in the early morning of 7 October 2023. I understood what was at first a blinding Israeli need for revenge, even if I didn't agree with it, and I knew that they needed to make sure nothing like that bloody day could ever happen again. But since then, the last hope anyone I know had for a diplomatic solution to the conflict has been extinguished. Israel has doubled down on force. The slow suffocation of Palestinian hopes of dignity and statehood that was unfolding when I arrived has accelerated at a pace no one could previously have imagined. When I started out in journalism, as an assistant at the London offices of the Associated Press, I'd spend all day fielding phone calls, copy and video files from our correspondents around the globe; I used to note down their locations and loglines enviously, eager to get out and see the world for myself. I used to think journalism could help right wrongs, and I could play a role in that, but covering the wars in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and now Gaza over the past decade has taught me that is not necessarily the case. My coverage didn't do anything to stop those horrors unfolding, but at least it showed the rest of the world the reality on the ground. Martha Gellhorn, one of the greatest conflict reporters of the 20th century, wrote about feeling like a 'war tourist' in her work. In Gaza – where Israel has blocked access for international journalists – I haven't even been that. Thanks to the sacrifices of my brave colleagues in Gaza, no one with an internet connection can say they don't know the truth of what has happened in Israel and Palestine over the past 18 months. There is no silver lining here, only lessons we may not fully understand for years to come. The late Pope Francis, who called the congregation at Gaza's sole Catholic church every night until the day before he died, used to comfort his flock by reminding them that all wars end. I remember a Gaza where hope of a better future was still alive. As soon as it is possible, I will return to the Strip to sift through the rubble of ruined lives and help reclaim what has been lost. * Names have been changed
