For Hala Alyan, Art Is Not A Replacement for Policy Change

Palestinian American writer and poet Hala Alyan’s latest poetry collection is an inventive play with language and form as she writes into grief, infertility and a familial legacy fraught with the trauma of displacement and exile. Hala is warm when our call first connects and I launch into a confession: I’m intimidated by poets. She laughs and I tell her, it’s true because there’s something so powerful about maneuvering language, making the words mean, at once, what you want them to mean and what the reader would want them to mean.

In The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala offers the reader more control with such meaning-making through interactive poems. In “Key”, she tells the reader, “Fill in the blank with a suitable word from the right” and proceeds to give us a table with incomplete sentences that we get to fill with the word that resonates with us, from a list that resonated with her. In verses broken by columns and line breaks, Hala captures splintered memories of displacement from homeland, family, and body. There is rage—“I don’t have time to write about the soul. There are bodies to count”—as the poems contend with what it means to be Palestinian, what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a daughter—sometimes, all at once. 

“When my mother bought a patch of land & tried

to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me

because my name is my father’s name

because he was born in Palestine and so

impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t

have me you know the way our mothers did”

Hala has published four award-winning poetry collections (including The Twenty-Ninth Year) and received accolades for her novels, Salt Houses, and The Arsonists’ City. Hala tells me her writing practice is instinct-based. It is evident from the way she expertly finds her way within frameworks, both given and self-imposed. We talked about finding liberation in the constraints of structures, steadfastness in the face of erasure, the parallel between houses, bodies, and femininity, and much more.

Bareerah Ghani: I want to start with the imagery of house that you’ve used in conjunction with themes of grief, body, and matrilineality. In the opening poem, you say, “My favorite house is my mother. The heart muffled like a speaker.” Later, you write, “A good house can carry anguish and this is how I think of bodies now too.” To me, these lines are intertwined, highlighting the sacrifice and suffering inherent to womanhood and motherhood in cultures such as ours where women have historically been treated as inferior. Can you share what you were thinking and how you envision the house as body as mother?

Hala Alyan: These poems were written during a period of time marked by a lot of infertility for me, and also marked by losing my grandmother, who was one of the core figures of my life, and always will be.

I lost a matriarch while I was simultaneously grappling with what it meant to be in a body that did not always behave the way I wanted it to behave, and that ultimately was not able to be the house that I wanted it to be. I was grappling a lot with what it meant to carry and what it meant to house something at a time when I was also feeling like the connections and the roots that I had to these places that I loved, one of them being Lebanon and Beirut, where I spent a lot of time, were slowly being severed through the deaths of elders, but also through the circumstances of these countries and what was happening there. For me, there’s something in the container, and how a thing can carry and contain you. 

There’s a lot of places that I don’t have access to anymore, that my family throughout our lineage no longer has access to. And I think of how the women in my family, in particular, have kind of had to be the carriers of those places and those rituals, traditions and those memories. 

BG: I can’t help but see that your poems have containers. 

HA: You’re pointing out something really interesting. This is the first collection that I play with form and structure to this extent. The other collections, they’re  structurally very basic like my poems are usually just prose poems. So a block of text or couplets. This is the first time that I was like, okay, I’m gonna play with this thing. And it actually felt very liberating to have constraints, which seems contradictory but there’s something safe about being like, you know, you’re gonna play with a form like ghazal. And the ghazal tells you where you’re gonna go, or maybe it doesn’t always tell you where you’re gonna go but it always tells you where you’re gonna end. So you can have this migratory movement through a poem where you travel all over and go to all these different places but you’re always gonna land in the same place. And there’s something about knowing you’re gonna land there, something about knowing the home of that word at the end of each stanza that I was finding very comforting at the time, which makes sense, because if it’s a chaotic time, finding structure wherever you can find, is gonna feel useful.

BG: I wanted to talk a little bit about the places where you mentioned your grandmother. It’s beautiful, but also so heartbreaking. In one place, you say, “It’s beautiful to speak for her; she’s dead.” In another spot, you write, “My chest rising to steal her dialect.” This got me thinking about matrilineal linearity and writing into a legacy. Can you talk about what legacy and inheritance means for you especially as a Palestinian right now?

HA: I think particularly within the Palestinian tradition there is so much around this idea of inheriting memory, and not forgetting, and that plays on the theme of, I will not leave. I will return, I will remain steadfast—the concept of Sumud, صمود‎‎, I’ll remain steadfast in this land, which for people in the diaspora translates to, I will remain steadfast in my connection to that land, I will remain steadfast in my reaffirmation of that identity, not forgetting what my lineage has gone through. The inheritance within that tradition has a lot to do with, again, being holders of memory. So there’s the people that are on the land, that are steadfastly holding onto the land and what’s left of it or what they have left of it. And for the rest of us, what we’ve inherited are the stories we’ve been told, and, to be frank, the traumas that people have experienced and that we’re all still sort of experiencing. There’s something in the idea of remaining rooted that feels very much like a Palestinian tradition.

In general, I think of lineage in that way—how do we not forget that which needs to not be forgotten? How do we not forget that which must remain remembered? And what do we do with memory which is one of those silk-like emotional fabrics that changes every time you touch it. And so every time you tell a story, that story shifts, and every time you return to something, it shifts, and what do I make with the memories that I’ve been told, that I didn’t even live through? How can I do right by them and respect them and inhabit them, but also recognize that I’m taking liberties? And that’s a big thing in writing—how do you kind of operate in both of those spaces at the same time? It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible.

BG: How do you contend with the erasure of Palestinian culture and identity as an American, living in a country that is supporting that erasure?

HA: It’s deeply painful. It’s very hard to exist within a system that is enacting and participating in this level of violence and systemic erasure, and that has engaged in it against indigenous communities to whom the land belongs, against Black people, queer and trans people. It’s too easy to look at the contributions of violence elsewhere but they begin here. They’re not just things happening on “foreign soil”. So for me, it isn’t just about Palestine. It is about contending with what it is to sort of exist within spaces. What does it mean when elected representatives no longer represent their constituents? What do we call when a system, a government, an entity, etc, no longer serves the interest of the citizens, no longer serves the values that it espouses? And then what do we do with the possibility that it never really has—how do we make sense of those things? Those are sort of the questions I’m interested in. 

Of course, on a personal level, it’s horrific. I’ve been watching people that are my kin, that share my identity, be attacked on the ground and here, in different ways. Obviously, there’s no comparison to the ways people are being slaughtered in Gaza and the West Bank but I think there’s something to be said for students who were walking around wearing Keffiyeh and talking in Arabic and got shot.  A boy was stabbed many dozens of times. What’s so wild about this moment that we’re living in is that the saturation point of horror has reached such a tipping point that, quite literally, people forget stories of things that have happened, that alone should have stopped everything.

As a person, in general, I’m more interested in asking questions. I feel that way as a therapist, as a writer, and certainly feel that way when I’m trying to engage with people who have been exposed to ideas that I think they should consider letting go of. In my experience, it’s more effective to just invite people to consider certain things. Like, here are some ideas. Here are some questions, invitation for all, myself included, to engage in them. And we’ll see if that shifts anything for people.

BG: Open up dialogue? 

HA: Well, I don’t need to be part of that conversation. Because that kind of goes with this heroic archetype of, I need to go around changing people’s minds. I don’t need to do that. I think my task, other writers’ tasks, other people who are engaging in different kinds of thinking or creating, our task is just to be like, here’s a question. Here’s a possibility. Here’s an invitation to an imagined future. Real active protest begins first in the mind, on an interior level. It begins with conversations we’re having with ourselves. 

BG: There is a recurring theme in this collection—of being denied love, being denied motherhood, safety, and homeland. And the poems sway in how the narrator can be at times resigned, accepting of how things are, have been in their lineage, and then at other times, you see the language is maneuvered in a way that it almost feels like the writer is speaking through gritted teeth. It’s remarkable. And those are the moments where the writer is really putting up a fight. Where do you draw the line between fight and surrender?

HA: I always think of that expression, Let go or be dragged. And I think there’s been a few inflection points in my life, one of them was getting sober, where I got to be up close and personal with this concept of surrender and what it really means. Ideally, we work through our lives towards a place where we can surrender quicker and quicker, and we can recognize quicker and quicker what calls for surrender and what calls for fights. I struggle with that all the time, in life and in writing. For me, the tension point comes with getting more adept at recognizing earlier and earlier where it is worth fighting and recognizing that surrender, a lot of times, requires more courage than fighting, because it usually means that you’re radically accepting something you really don’t want to accept, or you’re accepting something about yourself—for other people or the world—that you really don’t want to be the case. 

I love that you caught that in my work because that’s just in general a tension point in my personhood. I’m somebody that enjoys fight, I mean, there are certain places and certain topics and areas in my life where I really get energized by showing up for a good argument, a good debate, I find it to be very life giving. But it does mean that I often find myself in situations where I’m like, I could have saved that energy, you know? I could have put it towards something that was of more value. And I’m trying to get better, as I get older, at recognizing earlier when those moments happen.

BG: In “Half-life In Exile”, you write, “Everybody loves the poem. It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee. It’s done nothing for Palestine.” How do you keep your relationship with writing in the current reality where it feels like writing as an act of resistance is falling short?

HA: I’ve been thinking about that a lot the last six months—this idea that art is not a replacement for policy change. Liberation and equal rights must exist for everybody, everywhere. Period. There cannot be exceptions when we say that, or else we don’t actually mean those values. Art is not gonna be a replacement for the idea that those who have the power to make those changes need to make those changes. Art is still crucial. Art has saved my life multiple times. Even more than that, it has saved my imagination, my hope, multiple times. Art allows us to replenish ourselves and fortify ourselves, because pleasure and beauty, and being moved, matters—they help us rest, take a beat and return to the things that matter to us. That’s why collective care is important. Art is part of that.

Also, art can be a place where you can sharpen your thinking both as the creator and as the person taking in the work. Writing about everything the last few months has helped me clarify how I think about things, how I feel about it. It’s helped me put language to it. It’s helped me take a beat, organize my cognitions. In the same way, when I read, it helps me be like, oh, yes, this is why this matters. I was reading something by Audre Lorde the other day where I had read the line before and when I read it now at a different age, in a different stage of my life, I was just like, yes, now I feel it in my bones. And so I think it also helps us build community. There’s this whole thing about how being an artist is a very solitary life, and I mean, sure, to an extent. But I never feel alone when I’m writing. If I’m writing fiction, I am surrounded by the characters that I’m interacting with. If I’m writing poetry, it’s the voices, the people, the memories. So for me, it’s a very cluttered process, not a lonely one at all.

BG: Displacement and exile haunt your work, your language. You begin a poem by asking, “Can I pull the land from me like a cork?” How does one wrestle with their sense of belonging when they’ve been exiled?

HA: If I had an answer I wouldn’t have to be writing all these goddamn poetry collections. To go back to this concept of Sumud, صمود‎‎, steadfastness. I think you find things to root yourself in. And you do that for as long as those things are aligned with your value system and serve that purpose. I think you can root yourself in a relationship, you can root yourself in a new city, in a craft, in your family. Some of those things won’t be forever, they will shift. Some of them will no longer resonate, but there will always be something to take that place. That’s something that brings me a lot of comfort, this idea that we’re not as alone as we think we are. There’s something in really asking myself, what are the places where I have felt at home? I belong to a family that’s been displaced multiple times over. I find home in that family, I find home in the family that I have sort of built over the last few years. I find home in my community. I find home in making art and writing, and also in reading other people’s work, and engaging with other peoples’ photography, film, ideas and music. That’s kind of what we meant when we said, don’t forget where we come from. Take it with you where you go—that’s been the assignment. And that’s what I think we’re seeing happen beautifully all over the world, right now.

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