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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- 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.
New York Times
a day ago
- Politics
- New York Times
A Novel Highlights a Dark Korean History and a Shattered Family's
FLASHLIGHT, by Susan Choi Friends are God's apology, it's said, for relations. In Susan Choi's ambitious new novel, 'Flashlight,' we're dropped into a shattered Korean American family, and friends are few and far between. This is a novel about exile in its multiple forms, and it reads like a history of loneliness. Nearly every person has the detachment of a survivor. A similar detachment — a narrative austerity that is one of Choi's hallmarks — is present in the book itself, for good and sometimes ill. This novel begins, as do Francoise Sagan's 'Bonjour Tristesse' and Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea,' on a beach. A father and his young daughter are out for a walk in the gloaming. He carries a flashlight. When they fail to return, search parties form. The girl is later found in the tide margin, hypothermic, barely alive, with little memory of what occurred. Her father, who can't swim, is gone — apparently drowned and carried out to sea. The girl's name is Louisa. She's 10 and precocious. Her father, an academic, is named Serk. That's what he goes by in America, at any rate. His impoverished Korean parents had named him Seok, and when he went with them as a child to Japan during World War II, so that they could find work, he was known in school as Hiroshi. He was a striver, and he loved being Hiroshi. 'Flashlight' spans decades, and four generations of Serk's family. The novel's abiding theme may be what one character wonders early on: if 'supernatural vengeance exists, for the person who tries to renounce his birthplace.' Serk's painfully split identities reflect the contested politics of the postwar era, with America and the Soviet Union (as well as Japan and China) jostling for advantage on the Korean Peninsula. Many writers are only partially conscious of the meanings in their work. Choi has set out to shine a flashlight, if you will, on a series of historical wrongs, the worst of them committed by North Korea. By the end of this novel, the author's research into these machinations, and some of their brutal human ramifications, including re-education camps, nearly swamps the book — the narrative begins to feel like reportage, like didactic historical exposé. It's hard to talk about the plot, and the resonances, of 'Flashlight' without dropping spoilers like a trail of seeds. But I will try to avoid them, out of deference to the reader but also to Choi, a major world writer who deserves the chance to reveal her cards slowly. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
When the Phone Rang review – meditation on memory, displacement and the trauma of exile
Hovering between memoir, docu-essay and drama, Serbian artist Iva Radivojević's third feature opens with a phone call that changes everything. Eleven-year-old Lana (a proxy for Radivojević, played by Natalija Ilinčić) receives the news that her grandfather has died; home alone, she is told by the speaker to communicate that to her mother. The Bakelite clock on the wall says it is precisely 10.36am on a Friday in 1992, 'when the country of X was still a country'. Friday 10.36am 1992 becomes a point and a rift in time, through which the historical erupts into the personal; a more intimate companion piece, perhaps, to the 2006 Romanian new wave classic 12.08 East of Bucharest. The news of Lana's grandfather's death melds with the start of the Yugoslavian war (perhaps the two events are linked, as he was a retired colonel). Suitcases are packed; Lana, in her memory always wearing a pink Nike shell suit, is driven by her father to the airport, presumably to emigrate. With these dramatised fragments – as well as ones of everyday Serbian life – threaded together in a third-person narration later revealed to be hers, Lana seems to be reconstructing her own exiled past. There's something detached but obsessive about these remembrances, contained and framed like keepsakes by Radivojević in a tight 4:3 ratio. Her focus on the every day – tailing strangers with her mate Jova (Anton Augustinov), playing piano down the phone for another friend, her fascination with local junkie Vlada (Vasilije Zečević) – conveys the general state of denial in the face of impending war: 'a pressure in the air'. The stream of minutiae also shows Lana's need to preserve this lost reality and, through her insistent commentary, give it significance; sifting through it breeds strange slippages and correspondences. The western pop music that interrupts a Serbian concert she watches with Vlada prefigures her new life. A story about her father's mafia dealings dovetails with her reaction to a TV production of Carmen she watches immediately after the fateful phone call; both contain 'just enough unbelievable drama to keep her entertained'. But the drama of Lana's own life remains off-screen and implied, always slipping between the fingers of this disquieting meditation on memory and exile. When the Phone Rang is at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 6 June
The Guardian
3 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
As Ice deports children, what futures do we lose?
Two children – a nine-year old boy and his six-year old sister – are playing at 'house', pretending to be their father and mother. Absorbed in the game, they repeat the words their parents have been whispering to each other when they thought their progeny were not listening. Playing like innocent children all over the world play and have played since the beginning of history. But, here and now, in America, the words some endangered children may be exchanging are far from innocent. What do we do if they come for you, my love, if I never see you again? Who do I call, who do I turn to? What if they also take me? And the children, what if they also come for the children? I can sadly envisage many boys and girls in this country today playing that game, asking each other questions like these while their undocumented family awaits the knock on the door, alert to the sound of a van outside ready to transport them away and rush them off to a distant land. It is not the first time I have had to imagine such a distressing situation. Almost 50 years ago, while in exile in Amsterdam, I wrote a story, My House Is On Fire, featuring a pair of siblings who ask precisely those questions while playing a similar supposedly naive game. I set the story in Chile, a land then under the savage boot of the military, using my fiction as a way of returning to the country forbidden to me as I tried to figure out how those children would cope psychologically with the threat of agents of the state roaming the streets in search of dissidents to arrest and disappear, what sort of permanent scars of dread would be carved into the souls and bodies of those kids forced to become adults before their time. It is tragic and disgraceful that the fate of a boy and a girl in yesteryear's dictatorial Chile can resonate so perversely in today's America, that their Latin American destiny of apprehension and mistrust echoes what is being perpetrated in so many homes across this land that once beckoned to foreigners to come and build a different sort of future. Though it is, alas, the current United States on to which I am projecting the Chilean experience of those conjectured children, other countries and other youngsters have come to mind over the past half century as suffering parallel afflictions: Jewish children in the time of the Nazis and Palestinian children in the time of Israeli onslaughts, and Sudan and Brazil, Iran and Belarus, Turkey and Rwanda and Egypt and on and on, a deluge of nations where so many children have asked, at one time or another, what happens if they take away my parents, what happens if they come for me? It is likely that my identification with, and sympathy for, that array of unfortunate young victims may have stemmed from my own life experiences. Even if I had no recollection of what it meant to leave my Argentine homeland at the age of two and a half when my rebellious father had been forced to flee to New York to escape the wrath of that country's fascistic military, memories of that trauma must have resurfaced when– by then I was nine years old - the Red Scare in the United States instilled fear in so many families with leftwing ideas or activities, leading our own family to once again take flight, this time to Chile. And history was going to repeat itself when, after Augusto Pinochet's coup of 1973, my six-year-old son Rodrigo followed his father and mother into remote realms, became himself a refugee. And the curse of banishment plagued us yet again in 1986, when I was arrested at the Santiago airport by Pinochet's secret police, who proceeded to expel me from the country along with our seven-year-old son Joaquín, already born into expatriation during our Dutch exile. Not strange, then, that I should be haunted by the tragedy of so many forsaken youthful lives being irreversibly twisted, what it does to each boy, each girl, to live in perpetual terror of deportation or death. But I have recently been troubled by a question about another kind of social repercussion: what do we lose, those who watch such persecution and do little or nothing to avert it, what does society lose by hunting down these children and, ultimately, removing them from our midst? We would, needless to say (and yet it must be said), find ourselves depreciated by the vanishing of even one of these defenseless minors, forfeiting the cosmic galaxy of skills and dreams and endowments that each of them promises, how they might enrich us for generations to come. Given that this self-evident truth has been insufficient to stir enough public opinion to get such maltreatment to cease, it might make sense, in our celebrity driven and success-soaked society, to exemplify that loss in a more dramatic and spectacular fashion. Faced with that ominous question, what do we lose, I answer with a name that cannot be indifferent or unrecognizable to anyone: Mozart, we risk losing future Mozarts. Can we deny that each deported child has within himself, within herself, the potentiality to become another Mozart? Instead of that musical genius I could, of course, suggest any number of other amazingly gifted human beings. There could be an Albert Einstein lurking inside the head of one of the boys being whisked right now to some unknown destination, there could be a Madame Curie inside one of the girls going through that ordeal. A Cervantes, a George Eliot, a Bob Dylan, a Taylor Swift, a Nelson Mandela, an Abraham Lincoln, a Harriet Tubman, a Simón Bolivar, a Garibaldi, a Monet, a Sappho, a Meryl Streep, who knows what miracles are being snuffed out with each stalked child? Let me insist, however, on Mozart as the most luminous paragon in this experiment bent on rattling consciences. True that, during his childhood, he never faced the threat of harassment by cruel authorities. And yet, I am sure he would understand the anxieties and uncertainties that trouble today's migrant youngsters in America. One can imagine, as I have done in my novel Allegro, what such a sensitive child must have felt when he was separated from his family and was forced to accept adult tasks and responsibilities, pondering who to trust in a world suddenly full of strangers. Like me at his age, like my own children, like so many imperiled children in the US, Mozart also must have worried about death, must have feared being abandoned at an early age. Who could better represent the latent aspirations and possible talents of many of those contemporary youngsters whose violent passing from among us should fill us with shame and grief? The most famous child prodigy of all time, composing music at the age of five, playing the piano for monarchs once he was seven: I can conjure up no more eloquent and renowned spokesperson for vulnerable children everywhere. Let us, therefore, call on the ghost of Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart to return to Earth and excoriate those victimizers who are ordering and carrying out such acts of merciless repression against his young outcast counterparts in the US and beyond its frontiers. I can hear him telling them to beware of the consequences of terrorizing and deporting a child. You are not only, I can hear him say with that voice which once sang to the world some of the most immortal and consoling melodies ever created, committing a crime against humanity. You are, Mozart would warn them, committing a crime against beauty and the compassionate imagination of our species. Ariel Dorfman, an emeritus distinguished professor of literature at Duke University, is the Chilean-American author of the play Death and the Maiden and, more recently, the novels The Suicide Museum and Allegro.
Geek Girl Authority
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Girl Authority
Book Review: CRUELER MERCIES
Thank you to Fantasy & Frens for sending me a copy of Crueler Mercies in exchange for an honest review. Crueler Mercies by Maren Chase is a fantasy novel with bite. True, it may include a number of genre tropes, like a protagonist who is a princess and a king with dubious morality. However, it sets itself apart with its ruthless refusal to pull punches. Please note that while this review avoids major spoilers, it does allude to some major plot points and resolutions. Crueler Mercies The story follows Vita, who believes she is the only child of the king of the realm. But one horrible day, when she's only nine years old, Vita's mother is executed. Vita is subsequently sent into exile. There, she spends more than a decade confined in a tower. However, the incarceration is somewhat alleviated by her new friends: a family of crows whose trust she earns and grows over time. But one day, the situation changes. An invading army conquers the city where she's being held. Soon, Vita is betrothed to the general who led the siege, Ardaric. This is thanks to her status as the rightful heir, lending legitimacy to Ardaric's claim to the throne. In exchange, Vita will achieve vengeance against her father. RELATED: Book Review: The Enchanted Feast Cookbook In the meantime, Vita meets Soline, one of her new ladies-in-waiting. Soline has her own reasons to resent Ardaric. But she also has knowledge of alchemy — a theoretical knowledge, if not a working one. Soon, Soline and Vita are working together to break the code of alchemy, so they can use it to gain the upper hand against Ardaric. Plus, Vita begins to catch feelings towards Soline … even if the stakes of such a relationship are even higher with Ardaric in the equation. Eventually, Ardaric's forces reach the castle where the king resides and begin a grueling siege. Will Ardaric conquer the king? Will Vita be trapped in a relationship she finds loathsome, or will she and Soline live happily ever after? And will Soline and Vita ever master the art of alchemy? An Accurate Title This book surprised me. In spite of the fact that the title Crueler Mercies hints toward this fact, I didn't expect it to get as brutal as it does. Part of this is probably the high number of romantasy novels I've read lately. In that fantasy subgenre, things tend to stay on this side of the 'Stephen King line.' Not so in Crueler Mercies. While it does include a romantic element, this isn't the narrative focus, but rather a subplot. This novel is simply fantasy … and comparatively grounded fantasy, too. While it takes place in a fictional world and includes alchemy, the majority of the story reads almost like medieval historical fiction. RELATED: Book Review: Upon a Starlit Tide Speaking of the setting, this novel includes one of my favorite tropes: a map of the world. But while I'm always a fan of a book that opens with a map, this map was particularly well done. The inclusion of 'handwritten notations' was inspired. One thing I do think this book could have benefited from: a more obvious content warning. As alluded to above, the novel gets surprisingly brutal. While I personally didn't feel overly blindsided by the darker twists and turns, I can definitely see how some readers might. And to be clear, there is a content warning included at the top of the copyright page. However, I didn't notice this until after I had finished reading. I think it would have been better to have put the content warning in the center of its own page, as I imagine many readers could overlook the warning on the copyright page, as I did. Spoiler Alert In this final section, I am going to briefly discuss the ending of Crueler Mercies. If you don't want to have any hints about how the story ends, then please consider skipping the rest of the review. One of my very favorite elements of this novel was the fact that Vita herself does not pull any punches in the final pages of Crueler Mercies. In many stories, a woman protagonist must be 'likable,' which is code for 'non-threatening.' I adored the fact that Vita was not forced to adhere to any such sexist standard. RELATED: Book Review: Divining the Leaves At the conclusion of the novel, Vita dispenses bloody justice. This isn't to say she does anything that many male protagonists wouldn't be 'allowed' to do. But it often seems as though female protagonists are prohibited from engaging in the same behavior as their masculine counterparts. I applaud Crueler Mercies for presenting a woman who is unapologetic in securing and wielding her power. More characters like this, please. Crueler Mercies features a cover illustration by Camille Murgue, a cover design by Charlotte Strick and a map by Ilana Brady. Incredibly, this is Chase's debut novel. For some reason, 2025 has had a number of stunning debuts, and even among these Crueler Mercies is near the top. This novel is excellent, and I'm looking forward to reading more work by Chase in the future. Crueler Mercies will be available at a local bookstore and/or public library beginning on June 3, 2025. Book Review: SHIELD OF SPARROWS Avery Kaplan is the author of several books and the Features Editor at Comics Beat. She was honored to serve as a judge for the 2021 Cartoonist Studio Prize Award and the 2021 Prism Awards. She lives in the mountains of Southern California with her partner and a pile of cats, and her favorite place to visit is the cemetery. You can also find her writing on Comics Bookcase, NeoText, Shelfdust, the Mary Sue, in many issues of PanelxPanel, and in the margins of the books in her personal library.
