I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME: A Memoir, by Hala Alyan
“Since childhood, I’ve been aware of an audience,” Hala Alyan writes in her gorgeous, lyrical memoir, “I’ll Tell You When I’m Home,” which examines with a poet’s precision the many ways in which storytelling is rooted in matriarchy, carrying messages between mothers and daughters as a means of survival.
Playing Scheherazade in a high school production of “One Thousand and One Nights” — a character whose “reassuring maternal voice” quite literally spins tales to keep herself alive, “lulling us into imagination” — Alyan recalls having to improvise onstage when another cast member misses their cue, filling the awkward silence with clever lines she’s invented on the spot. The audience laughs, and “the magic of the moment endured,” she writes, “the suspension of disbelief unbroken. It mattered so much to me that I was able to keep them believing.”
Alyan, the author of two novels and five collections of poetry, uses the figure of this archetypal storyteller as a framework for her memoir. Told in short passages that loop through time, the book is organized into 11 chapters named for the various stages of a pregnancy, from preconception to months one through eight to birth and postpartum. Slipping through her past and future selves, she braids together several timelines: her nomadic coming-of-age moving between Kuwait, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dallas and Oklahoma City, often in the shadow of war; her addiction and sobriety in her 20s; her struggle with infertility in her 30s and the strain it put on her marriage; her five miscarriages and her eventual path to motherhood through surrogacy.
At its core this is a book about longing: for motherhood, for a return to the Levantine homeland that shaped her family history, for a sense of belonging in America that never arrives, for a personal unraveling that may or may not come, for a sense of safety in her marriage that never resolves. Alyan speaks to different versions of herself across time, as though every moment in her history were happening concurrently, were still happening, playing and replaying itself, even now. The story must keep going for its teller to keep living.
That story begins in 1948, with Alyan’s two grandmothers: Siham and her family are being displaced from their hometown of al-Majdal, Palestine, in the Nakba; and Fatima is the daughter of a sheikh in Damascus, Syria, which she will later leave for Kuwait, and then Lebanon. “The story of the women starts with the land,” Alyan writes in a book that casts exile and war as her inheritance. “What is landlessness that takes root, turns inward,” she asks. “What is it to carry that lack, that undoing.”
Here lies the book’s crucial reckoning: how to maintain a Palestinian identity while living far away from Palestine, how to journey toward a home that exists only in body, memory and story. She likens this identity to the lyrebird, “said to be the only creature able to communicate with all others.” A symbol for the poet, a voice of the Levantine diaspora, even a “metaphor for surrogate,” as she writes on an index card in her studio, “it carries what it hears. It returns it to the world.” Interpreting stories is itself a kind of mothering.
Alyan’s own mother, stringently honest and darkly comic, comes particularly alive on the page, frequently gibing the author about her penchant for storytelling, her sensitivity: “You better not be writing about me,” she warns, “everything is a novel with you.” Alyan does write about her, of course — “I launch into a rant about invisible costs of displacement and she tells me not to be dramatic” — and in her own reluctant gratitude her mother continues to share her stories with her daughter anyway.
In such scenes of compelling intimacy, the author’s narrative gifts shine through, the brief fragments making for quick, propulsive reading. At times, however, the collagelike structure threatens to disrupt the gravity of any one passage, with so many descriptions of the author’s prophetic dreams in the latter chapters that it’s difficult for a single narrative thread to cohere in the end. But perhaps this multiplicity of stories and selves is exactly what Alyan intends.
Just as Scheherazade’s stories were not hers alone, but “gathered over centuries and dozens of countries, by authors and philosophers and magicians and teachers,” so too is the act of mothering a necessarily collective one. “I’ll Tell You When I’m Home” shows the power of even a single narrative to resist the deliberate erasure of a people and their homeland, the violence of colonization. “How to explain being a Palestinian child nowhere near Palestine?” Alyan writes. “You are trained from childhood on nostalgia, on history, on witnessing. You, after all, are the proof: that others have endured. That something once existed.” This is how a history, and a people, survive.
I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME: A Memoir | By Hala Alyan | Avid Reader Press | 257 pp. | $28.99
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