50 pages • 1 hour read
Hala AlyanSalt Houses
Hala AlyanFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 10-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Linah”
It is July 2006 in Beirut, and the adults are all glued to the television. There has been a bombing at the airport. Linah and her cousins Manar and Zain have been confined to the family’s two apartments even though the power cuts on and off every few hours and they are accustomed to spending these hot, un-air-conditioned periods in one of the nearby shops. The adults will not elaborate further on the events described on television, although their auntie Riham tells them that there is a war going on and that all they can do is pray. Linah and her cousins play with the other neighborhood children, but there is some friction between the kids because of their countries of origin. Although Linah has never been to Palestine and knows only Boston and Beirut, she is teased for not being Lebanese and for coming from a country so mired in strife. She does not fully understand the distinctions between Arabs from different countries in the region.
Linah sneaks out of the house with Manar and Zain to secretly purchase a pack of cigarettes from a local shop. They have seen older children smoking in the neighborhood and want to copy their antics, although they know that such behavior is forbidden. Outside, most of the shops are closed and the streets, usually bustling, are empty of people. At the one store that remains open, a Sri Lankan domestic worker panics because her employers have left town. She is without money or a passport and can only afford bread. Back at the house, they begin to watch a movie but are interrupted when the area loses power. They dig through boxes of old items, cast off from other households, and find a sheaf of mysterious letters. Just as they are looking at the documents, they are instructed to head back to the television, which is working again. Tension fills the air. Bombs light up the sky that night and the children understand that the Israelis have increased the amount of firepower in the region. They watch from the windows as the night sky fills with lights and smoke.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Atef”
By June 2011, Alia has begun to behave more erratically than usual. She forgets words and has paranoid delusions. She stops taking care of her physical appearance. Atef arranges for her to see a doctor. The entire family accompanies Alia, who strongly objects to seeing a physician, to her appointment. After a lengthy wait, they learn that the news is not good, and the doctor instructs them on how to prepare for the imminent decline. Alia has Alzheimer’s, and her memory will only worsen with time. The family is stunned, and the news initially leads to an argument that pits various people against one another. The yelling grows louder, but Atef finally puts a stop to it by screaming “Enough!” His children and grandchildren are all shocked into silence. This kind of outburst is much more characteristic of Alia. Atef had always been the calm one.
That night, Atef is overcome with emotion and thinks back over his life with Alia. He remembers their time in Kuwait and Amman, their children, and their grandchildren. Their marriage was not perfect, and they were not always happy, but it has been a full life and he is grateful. Atef also remembers the early days of the Israeli invasion of Nablus. Although Mustafa had been fiercely political, he seemed to understand that Nablus was lost, and he wanted to flee to Jordan. It was Atef who shamed him into remaining in Palestine, and Atef still feels responsible, for his friend’s arrest and death in an Israeli prison.
Atef’s children and grandchildren attempt to process the news about Alia. They wish that they could have more time with her to talk and to learn about her life. Atef reflects that life does not always provide easy answers and that the people and experiences we think are going to save us do not often deliver on their promises. Life, he muses, is really just about “continuing.”
Chapter 12 Summary: “Manar”
Manar is in the bustling port city of Jaffa in September 2014. It is early evening, and the humidity is stifling. The hot, salty sea air reminds her of Beirut. She has less than a week left before she will have to return to Manhattan. In a café, she asks for Muhammara, a Lebanese dish. The request, combined with her accent, seems to mark her as Lebanese, and she does not bother to explain her complex Palestinian and Lebanese history. Her group of friends in Manhattan is made up of young women of similar backgrounds, all part of the diaspora, raised by families in exile. She has followed the plight of the Palestinian people closely, marched, and protested in hopes that Palestine would be free. This trip was important to her, although she has just found out that she is pregnant and agreed to marry the baby’s father, her boyfriend Gabe. She and her cousins have always treasured the sheaf of letters they had found, written by their grandfather Atef to their uncle Mustafa. They pored over the contents of his writing for years, discussing each letter with one another in detail.
Manar is amazed to finally get a chance to travel through a country that, although she has never lived in it, she considers home. Border control had been difficult. She, like other Arabs, is subject to a seemingly endless series of questions about her family members and searches that Americans and Hebrew-speaking visitors do not have to endure. She visits Jerusalem and takes a crowded bus to Nablus where she visits the house that Salma and her family had been forced to leave in 1948. She meets and befriends a group of foreigners employed by an NGO and spends a night dancing with them. She reads more of Mustafa’s letters. At the end of her visit, she sits on the beach at Jaffa and traces a family tree in the sand, thinking to herself that her family traces back to that place.
Epilogue Summary
In Beirut, Alia is surrounded by family. Sometimes she recognizes them and other times she does not. On the day that they celebrate her birthday, she thinks back to her youth in Nablus. There are moments when she understands that she is in Beirut with her family, but at other moments she has flashbacks to being a bride. She and Atef go to bed together, but she wakes up to hear the sound of a baby crying and of a woman singing a familiar song in Arabic. Alia finds that she still knows all the words.
Chapter 10-Epilogue Analysis
War looms large over this final set of chapters. The new conflict unfolding in Lebanon illustrates both the continuity of the experience of Displacement and Diaspora and the ways that new generations experience the world differently. In Beirut, there are bombings, and the family once again gathers around the television to hear news of the conflict. Although they have moved several times and are cut off from their homeland now by both geographical distance and time, they cannot escape war and conflict. It is one of the constants within the narrative, and in each of the novel’s chapters, there is some kind of mention of regional instability and its impact on the family. Yet as Linah’s narration demonstrates, the new generation of Yacoubs experience violence differently from the adults. Though the children can sense the tension among the adults, they cannot yet understand the full context of what is happening, nor do they realize that this is a pattern, not an exception. The children’s perspective demonstrates the way that The Psychological Impact of War and Trauma recapitulates itself anew with each generation of diasporic Palestinians.
Nevertheless, for families in the Palestinian diaspora, Familial Bonds in Exile provide stability even amid ongoing conflict—both sociopolitical and interpersonal. The final chapters of the novel reveal not only new external conflict in Beirut but also new sources of conflict within the family. In addition to feeling a sense of loss after the death of his dear friend and brother-in-law Mustafa, Atef felt guilt. Mustafa had wanted to flee to Jordan, but Atef urged him to stay. The regret he feels about his actions has reverberated throughout the entirety of his life. Although he has dealt with much of his trauma and has devoted his energy to supporting his children, he cannot fully move past what he endured in Nablus in 1967. Furthermore, the lifelong tension caused by Alia’s unhappiness in Kuwait City and Beirut is compounded when she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, which causes both memory loss and personality changes. Still, the Yacoubs maintain a sense of cohesion, rallying around Alia despite their differences with one another just as they reunite every year in Beirut despite the ongoing conflict in the region. Familial bonds prove to be stronger than any conflict, providing every member of the family with a sense of belonging and home even though the diaspora has scattered them across the globe.
Manar emerges as an important character during the final moments of the narrative. Raised entirely outside of Palestine, her background is a mixture of Lebanese and Palestinian, and her sense of cultural identity is complex. Many of her friends share this multi-national Arab background. Manar’s character reflects the author’s generation: Alyan, too, was raised in the diaspora and considers Palestine home although she was raised in the United States and Kuwait. Manar’s sense of Palestinian identity comes in part from her family and in part through following the plight of Palestinians through the media. Through her journey to Palestine, she recovers even more of her Palestinian identity and learns more about her family, her history, and herself. Her visit to her family’s ancestral home is particularly poignant, given the fact that during the time of the Nakba, the “right of return” was rescinded for Palestinians abroad, which meant that Palestinians who had left, even temporarily for work or school, were prohibited from returning to their homes. In Palestine, as Manar visits the orange grove, so long ago burned down by advancing Israeli soldiers, she takes in the sights and sounds of the city that was once called Jaffa, and she feels a sense of self-knowledge and peace. The narrative thus ends on a positive, hopeful note: If young people in Manar’s generation can remain connected to Palestinian history and their own Palestinian identities, then perhaps Palestine will live on in the hearts of future generations as well.
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