FRAGMENTS OF HOME: GENERATIONAL TRAUMA AND WAR MEMORY IN HALA ALYAN'S SALT HOUSES

ICSSR Sponsored One Day National Seminar on Literature, War and Memory: Narratives of Trauma and Healing in 20th and 21st Century English Literature 170 FRAGMENTS OF HOME: GENERATIONAL TRAUMA AND WAR MEMORY IN HALA ALYAN’S SALT HOUSES Ms. M. Poornima Assistant Professor, Department of English, Sona College of Arts and Science, Salem. [email protected]om Mr. S. Jayamohan Assistant Professor, Department of English, Sona College of Arts and Science, Salem. [email protected] https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17283476 Abstract This paper explores how war, displacement, and memory intertwine in Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses, a novel that traces the fragmented experiences of a Palestinian family across generations of exile. Set against the backdrop of the Six-Day War, the Lebanese Civil War, the Gulf War, and the 2003 Iraq invasion, Alyan shows that trauma is not a single catastrophic moment but a slow, cumulative inheritance that shapes entire families. The novel portrays memory as both burden and balm: it weighs heavy with loss yet also preserves identity and sustains cultural continuity. Drawing on frameworks from trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and diaspora criticism, this paper argues that Alyan’s fragmented storytelling—her silences, shifts in perspective, and broken timelines—mirrors the psychological dislocation of diasporic Palestinians. With reference to Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch, and Edward Said, it considers how “postmemory” defines the lives of second and third-generation exiles who carry the aftershocks of a homeland they never knew. It also highlights the gendered dimensions of trauma, showing how women act as keepers of both grief and resilience, balancing remembering with reinvention. Ultimately, the paper contends that Alyan’s novel not only maps the wounds of displacement but also affirms storytelling as a vital means of survival and healing. Keywords: Hala Alyan, Salt Houses, generational trauma, war memory, Palestinian diaspora, postmemory, postcolonial literature, identity, displacement, storytelling Introduction In contemporary war literature, Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses stands out as an intimate exploration of displacement, identity, and generational trauma. Rather than centering on battles or political leaders, Alyan turns her attention to the quieter, longer-lasting consequences of conflict: how exile unsettles families, how memory fragments across generations, and how the question of “home” grows more complicated with every displacement. Spanning five decades and multiple geographies, the novel follows the Yacoub family as they are repeatedly uprooted—first from Nablus, then from Kuwait, Beirut, Amman, and eventually further afield to Boston and Paris. Each move mirrors the turbulent political landscape of the Middle East, but Alyan does not dwell on the political machinery of these wars. Instead, she reveals their human cost: fractured identities, strained relationships, and the inheritance of grief. As Alyan writes, “What a strange thing, to miss someone you never knew, to look at a street and feel it used to be yours” (88). This single line captures the haunting essence of exile: belonging without possession. The novel begins in 1963 with Salma, the family matriarch, reading her daughter Alia’s coffee grounds. What she sees is unsettling: a life marked by unrest and uprooting. This premonition is both prophecy and narrative device, foreshadowing the family’s recurring dislocations. From this moment forward, Alyan unspools the Yacoub family’s story through a series of fragmented chapters, shifting narrators, and jumps across time and place. This fractured structure mirrors the very texture of exile and trauma, where memory is partial, nonlinear, and difficult to articulate fully. ICSSR Sponsored One Day National Seminar on Literature, War and Memory: Narratives of Trauma and Healing in 20th and 21st Century English Literature 171 By focusing on the Yacoub family, Alyan transforms vast geopolitical events into personal experience. She writes not of frontlines but of kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms, showing how war leaves its deepest scars in everyday life. Since its publication in 2017, Salt Houses has drawn significant critical attention for its portrayal of exile and generational trauma. Critics like Alsharekh argue that Alyan “reinscribes Palestinian subjectivity into diasporic narratives that have too often erased or simplified it” (2020). Tynan adds that the novel is a “literary reclamation of voice through fragmented storytelling” (2021), suggesting that its very form resists the imposition of a single coherent history. Salt Houses engages directly with the concept of generational trauma, a phenomenon in which the psychological scars of war and exile are passed down to subsequent generations. Scholars such as Marianne Hirsch have articulated this through the framework of “postmemory”—the idea that children of trauma survivors inherit memories so deeply that they feel as though they themselves experienced them. In Alyan’s novel, characters like Riham, Karam, and Manar carry the weight of a history they did not live through but cannot escape. Manar, for instance, travels to Palestine as a form of pilgrimage, trying to understand the “home” she has never seen, suggesting the intense emotional burden of inherited loss. The novel also draws from and contributes to postcolonial literature, particularly in its depiction of diasporic identities and the colonial legacies that have shaped Middle Eastern histories. Edward Said, himself a Palestinian exile, argued that exile is not simply a matter of geography but of fractured identity—a condition of estrangement that defines the modern subject. The Yacoubs embody this fragmentation. Their sense of self is constantly negotiated through the intersections of language, religion, class, and cultural memory, with each generation responding differently to their heritage and displacement. Additionally, Salt Houses foregrounds the gendered dimensions of trauma and memory. Women in the novel often serve as the preservers of family stories, rituals, and traditions, even as they grapple with their own forms of disempowerment. Characters like Salma and Riham express their grief and anxiety through domesticity and spirituality, while younger women like Alia and Souad seek escape through rebellion or self-reinvention. Alyan’s treatment of female characters complicates the trope of the “mourning mother” or “stoic matriarch” by showing a wide spectrum of emotional responses and coping mechanisms. Alyan’s poetic prose and psychological depth lend the novel a quiet yet devastating power. Her characters are not idealized victims but flawed, complex individuals negotiating loss in their own ways. The trauma they carry is not only personal but political, rooted in a larger history of colonial dispossession, statelessness, and war. By rendering this history through the lens of a single family, Alyan invites readers to consider the human cost of geopolitical violence—not only in moments of rupture but in the slow erosion of home, language, and memory. Trauma studies provide a crucial framework for understanding Alyan’s narrative style. Cathy Caruth emphasizes that trauma resists straightforward narration because it is not fully grasped in the moment it occurs, emerging belatedly through memory and repetition. This resonates with Alyan’s choice to structure the novel in disjointed, non-linear fragments. Dori Laub’s work on testimony also sheds light on how Alyan’s characters struggle between silence and speech, withholding and sharing. Equally significant is Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, which describes the way later generations inherit the trauma of their parents so deeply that it feels like lived experience. Characters such as Manar and Linah embody this concept as they attempt to connect with a homeland they never knew. Edward Said’s reflections on exile provide another important lens: exile is not just the loss of geography, but the fracturing of identity itself. The Yacoub family’s ICSSR Sponsored One Day National Seminar on Literature, War and Memory: Narratives of Trauma and Healing in 20th and 21st Century English Literature 172 shifting identities illustrate Said’s insight that exile produces “contrapuntal” ways of seeing the world, always in tension between memory and adaptation. Finally, feminist criticism highlights the central role of women in Alyan’s narrative. Scholars like Amal Amireh and Miriam Cooke have long stressed the importance of women’s voices in Middle Eastern war literature, and Alyan continues this tradition by portraying women as preservers of memory, carriers of grief, and agents of resilience. Alyan shows that the trauma of war and exile does not remain fixed in one generation. Instead, it is passed on—sometimes silently, sometimes through stories—to children and grandchildren who did not directly live through the events. Hirsch’s theory of postmemory helps capture this process. In the novel, Manar travels to Palestine seeking connection, only to discover that she feels both at home and alien: “I felt like a visitor to someone else’s sadness” (Alyan 215). Her words capture the paradox of postmemory—belonging through inheritance, but estrangement in practice. Postcolonial theory also illuminates key elements of Alyan’s work. Edward Said’s concept of “exile” as a condition of fragmentation, alienation, and un-belonging offers a relevant framework. In Reflections on Exile (2000), Said asserts that exile is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place,” a theme echoed throughout Salt Houses. The Yacoub family’s repeated displacement—from Palestine to Kuwait, Beirut, Amman, Paris, and Boston— underscores Said’s view of exile as both material and psychological rupture. Homi Bhabha’s ideas about “hybridity” and “third space” are also instructive: the younger generation in Alyan’s novel often negotiates between traditional expectations and Western influences, creating fluid, hybrid identities that resist essentialist definitions. Silence is as powerful as storytelling in transmitting trauma. Alia, for example, rarely speaks of her brother’s death. Yet her grief permeates her home, shaping her children’s lives. As Caruth reminds us, trauma often resists articulation; it surfaces indirectly, felt by those who did not experience the original wound. Alia’s daughter Riham responds with devotion to religion, while Souad rebels, trying to reinvent herself. These divergent paths show how inherited trauma mutates across generations. Exile in Salt Houses is not only a matter of geography but also of fractured identity. Said describes exile as “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place” (2000), and the Yacoub family embodies this rift. With each displacement—from Palestine to Kuwait, from Beirut to Amman, to Boston and Paris—the sense of home becomes less tangible, more fragmentary. Manar’s journey to Palestine highlights this crisis of identity. She expects to feel rooted but instead encounters distance: the land does not match the imagined homeland of her family’s stories. Her experience aligns with Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, where identities form in the “in-between” spaces of culture. The Yacoub family embodies hybridity, their identities shaped by multiple languages, traditions, and geographies. For them, hybridity is both destabilizing and empowering—a burden of unbelonging and a resource for survival. Memory in Salt Houses operates not only as an archive of trauma and displacement but also as a conduit for cultural continuity and resistance. For the Yacoub family, remembering becomes an act of survival—an assertion of identity in the face of exile and erasure. Through fragmented personal narratives, oral histories, and rituals, Hala Alyan underscores the critical role of storytelling in preserving heritage and sustaining a sense of rootedness across generations. The novel suggests that memory is not static or monolithic. It is fluid, partial, and shaped by context and emotion. As Paul Ricoeur notes in Memory, History, Forgetting, memory is an interpretive act—it is constantly rewritten as individuals re-narrate their lives. In Salt Houses, this is evident in how different family members recall the same events with conflicting details ICSSR Sponsored One Day National Seminar on Literature, War and Memory: Narratives of Trauma and Healing in 20th and 21st Century English Literature 173 or meanings. For example, Salma recalls her decision to leave Jaffa with quiet dignity, focusing on the practical need to survive. Alia, on the other hand, sees her mother’s departure as symbolic of the loss of home and nation. This divergence reflects how memory is influenced by personal needs and generational distance. Women in the novel preserve tradition, memory, and resilience in different ways. Salma carries culture through rituals—coffee readings, food, and poetry. Alia, in contrast, resists open remembrance, her grief surfacing in silence and temper. Riham seeks refuge in faith, while Souad reinvents herself through rebellion. Manar, of the younger generation, tries to stitch together fragments of memory through her trip to Palestine. Together, these women embody the gendered dimensions of trauma. As Amireh and Cooke argue, women’s voices are central to Middle Eastern war literature, and Alyan expands this tradition by presenting female characters as diverse, complex, and deeply human. At the heart of Salt Houses lies the power of storytelling. Memory is fragmented and contested—different characters recall events differently, and silence often speaks louder than words. As Laub argues, testimony is crucial for survival, yet Alyan shows how silence, too, can become a form of inheritance. Objects like recipes, photographs, and prayers function as carriers of memory, binding the family across borders. When Manar records the smells of Palestine— “like dust and olives and something burning” (Alyan 219)—she is creating a new memory for herself, blending inheritance with lived experience. Ricoeur reminds us that memory is always interpretive, reshaped by the present as much as by the past. Alyan’s novel affirms this: memory may be painful, but it is also a site of healing. Storytelling transforms exile from pure loss into continuity, turning fragments into survival. The novel also emphasizes the ritualistic nature of storytelling. Recipes, photographs, prayers, and even silences function as narrative tools that pass on cultural memory. Salma’s insistence on traditional foods, her naming of grandchildren, and her frequent quotations from poetry function as acts of storytelling that bind the family to its Palestinian identity. In the diaspora, these become acts of cultural preservation, echoing Edward Said’s notion that exile creates a “contrapuntal” consciousness—one that exists in tension between memory and assimilation. At the same time, Alyan acknowledges that storytelling is fraught with difficulty. Some characters resist memory, fearing the pain it evokes. Alia, for example, avoids discussing her brother Mustafa’s death or the family’s early years in Kuwait. Her silence creates a vacuum that her children must navigate without guidance. Yet, as Dori Laub argues in trauma studies, bearing witness—telling one’s story—is essential for recovery and for passing on truthful historical knowledge. The absence of this testimony creates intergenerational gaps, making it harder for younger characters to understand themselves or their place in the world. For the grandchildren—Souad, Karam, Manar, and Linah—storytelling becomes a way to reconstruct the past they never lived. Their desire to understand their family's origins is not mere nostalgia, but a search for continuity in a fragmented identity. Manar’s trip to Palestine, though marked by cultural awkwardness, represents a crucial narrative act: a reclaiming of history and a confrontation with the silences of her family. She writes in her journal, “No one told me what it smelled like. Like dust and olives and something burning” (Alyan 219). Through sensory detail, she forges her own memory, contributing to a new, diasporic form of Palestinian identity. Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses paints an intimate portrait of a Palestinian family shaped by the long shadows of war and exile. The novel shows that trauma is not one event but a slow, evolving legacy, transmitted across generations in silences, rituals, and memories. Yet it also reveals ICSSR Sponsored One Day National Seminar on Literature, War and Memory: Narratives of Trauma and Healing in 20th and 21st Century English Literature 174 resilience. Through storytelling, rituals, and cultural inheritance, the Yacoub family resists erasure, keeping identity alive across borders. Drawing on Caruth’s reflections on trauma, Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, and Said’s insights on exile, this paper has shown how Alyan’s fragmented narrative reflects both the psychological and cultural dislocation of diaspora. But more importantly, Alyan affirms that storytelling is itself a radical act of survival. Salt Houses reminds us that even in displacement, memory and narrative can preserve belonging, transforming grief into resilience and loss into continuity. Works Cited Alyan, Hala. Salt Houses. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia University Press, 2012. Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Routledge, 1992, pp. 57–74. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, University of Chicago Press, 2004. Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard University Press, 2000.