Palestinian American Writer Hala Alyan on Motherhood, Surrogacy and Exile

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Christiane. Hala Ayan, thank you so much for joining us once again.

HALA ALYAN: Thank you so much for having me.

MARTIN: You know, you are a woman of many lives, <laugh>. You are a clinical psychologist. You are a poet. You are a, the author of many beautiful essays  that just sort of touch people to their core. This book, It’s a memoir, but I also read it in part, some of it reads like poetry. Some of it they’re like prose poems. Some of it is a history lesson. How do you describe it?

ALYAN: It’s a good question. I think, I mean, I think in some ways a poet is constantly giving themself away. Where like, the poetic fingerprints are kind of on everything I touch. I conceptualize the world very – and through the, you know, in all the different things that I do, sort of through the prism of fragmentation. I’m really interested in what we do with parts in general as people, which tracks with being a psychologist, it tracks with being a writer. It just kind of really thinking about how we can take all of these different things that can feel incredibly incoherent, that oftentimes do feel incoherent for us in the present. And then through the act of making and remaking and creating something starts to emerge. And so I think this book really is kind of a testament to that making that I was doing. And that sort of fumbling in the dark that I was doing in my psyche, through history, through conceptualizations of fertility, the body, land, exile, displacement. it’s archive, it’s memory, it’s dream work. I mean, it’s all of those things.

MARTIN: Well, the thing about this book, it braids together some of the most profound experiences that any human being can have. The experience of infertility, the experience of difficulties in marriage, but also the experience of displacement. I mean, you’re Palestinian. This is something that you’ve written about. You’ve written about the experience of people who have been displaced through decades, across continents, and just figure, trying to figure out where you fit in the world. What made this the time to write this book?

ALYAN: I think, you know, it’s interesting because I – this book was written pre-October 7th. Because the editing process, et cetera, you know, you give it to publication. And I, while I was doing the edits, one of the questions that I had was, is this still gonna be relevant? The urgency of the moment right now of everything we’re seeing in Gaza and elsewhere feels, I feel so completely compelled to put everything down and just speak about that and just be writing about that. it was one of those queries I had for myself during the editing process of do we now scrap this? Do we write towards a different ending? Do we, you know, the storyline as it is in the book ends in 2022 with the birth of my daughter.

Do we now write a completely different thing? Do we, do we add an afterward? Do we, whatever? And it, and one of the things that was really striking about it was that in the end, it all remained relevant because I had been writing Palestine throughout it. And writing, to your point, the experience of exile and displacement. And there’s a way in which you kind of don’t know the water you’re swimming in because you’re con, you’re constantly swimming in it, that I felt like there was something I needed to do that was more pronounced with the narrative. When in fact, it’s everything that I’m touching. It’s everything that I’m thinking about and has been for my entire life. And so for me, the necessity of this particular narrative for this story is frankly, that I just couldn’t get the narrative or the story to work in any other form.

That’s true. Yes.

MARTIN: I’m gonna edit what I said earlier. I said, you’re Palestinian. You’re Palestinian American, or you’re an American Palestinian. I don’t know, however you sort of hear it in your, hear it in your mind. Right. So briefly, would you just describe your roots.

ALYAN: Yeah. So we were my – I was born to Palestinian Syrian Lebanese immigrants. So my parents met and married in Kuwait. My mother’s background is Lebanese-Syrian, Palestinian a little bit. My dad was born in Gaza after being as family left in a village that was eradicated in 1948 called Iraq-Suwaydan. So they met in Kuwait. 

I was born in the States. We were in the States very briefly after my birth, and then went back to Kuwait. We were there until the Saddam’s invasion. Saddam’s invasion in 1990 then precipitated our needing to seek asylum, or my parents’ need. I had a passport, but my parents then sought asylum in the States. So then we lived in the Midwest until I was about 12, and then I moved back to the Middle East. 

from 12 to 22, I lived in the Arab world. And I did my high school in Lebanon, I did my undergrad in Beirut, and then came to New York for grad school and have been there since.

MARTIN: You’ve been there since, but also your family’s never left you. They’re still with you. You’re carrying them with you. Right.

ALYAN: Oh, yeah. I think that’s the really interesting experience of diaspora in so many ways  is that you’re kind of this like not quite there-ness and in between-ness that so many people have talked and written about across, I mean, centuries. It is, one of the consequences of that is that you are, you’re kind of always in a place and you’re never in a place at the same time. And you’re always sort of amassing and regathering different, you know, markers that feel like home. So yeah, absolutely. One of them is the, it’s the family never leaves you, but I think it’s also just the stories don’t leave you, the memory. You become the holder of memories in different ways, and you become the archive in different ways.

MARTIN: Well, you know, the great African American, you know, writer, sociologist, scholar, WEB Du Bois spoke about that in the African American experience of the twoness. Two warring souls in one dark body. But in your case, you’re, the two warring souls are at times countries that are literally at war with each other.  And then you talk about the war with your body not doing what it is that you so want it to do. And that is a very interesting thing to sort of compare that to that experience of war. You talk about being exiled from motherhood as something that you so very much want, but are longing for, but is eluding you. And I just think that’s quite remarkable. And so that’s where I wanna ask you to read a passage for us. And it’s written as a kind of it’s, it’s written as sort of a address to your daughter. So would you read a bit for us?

ALYAN: In you is the glittering Beirut pavement after rain, the ports of Boston. In you are both my grandmother’s rebellious blood, following men escaping wars from one country to another. My mother’s leavings, my aunts, the rage and humiliation and exile. In you is the harm and rejoicing and help of generations of women. In you live the people that made you. All of them. I wouldn’t give you another story, even if I could, for this is the one that bore you. And it is heavy and dazzling. And the truth in you is your father’s wanderlust, his father’s loneliness, his father’s father’s heart giving out on the marble floor.
In you is the story of sailors, occupiers, the occupied. The people who never left and the people who were made to. You will learn to live within this as we all do. You come from people that love the way moons pull tides or else the way tides are pulled by the moon. And someday you will have to reckon with your own unruly heart. I have no advice to give, save one thing. Don’t exile anything. Turn the sun of your attention briefly, sometimes, briefly on all that awakens your love. This is your birthright, Leila. You will have to hunt for many things, excavate them in others or yourself, but not your mother’s truth. I’ll leave that right in the open for you to see.”

MARTIN: Hmm. There’s so much here. it’s not uniquely women, but it is often women who are sort of asked to choose one or the other. You know, the personal or the political. Right. You’re asked to think about the world, or you’re asked to think about the home or you’re within your, with what’s within you. And what you’re saying here is ‘I refuse. I refuse to choose. It’s all within us.’
But the other passage here, that really, really sort of struck me is, “In you is the story of sailors, occupiers, the occupied, the people who never left, the people who were made to. You’ll learn to live within this as we all do.” Do you though? Do we all live with this?  

ALYAN: I know what you’re saying, like there’s a specific experience that’s being evoked here. I mean, I think that’s sort of one of the things about writing is how to live alongside the particular and the universal and how to, you know, to lean into the specificity. And oftentimes in leaning to the specificity, you’re calling for something that people can see themselves in. I think we all live within contradictions. You know, I think we all have to make sense of our, what we inherit and what we would want to leave behind. You know, whether or not we are mothers or caregivers or whatever in those traditional senses. I think we all hopefully are on this planet to think of ways to show up for each other and care for each other. And I think to do that is to think of the legacy that we come from and the legacy we’ll leave behind.

MARTIN: So Hala, after, after, after all of this, this very real experience of moving from place to place, and also the meditation on moving from place to place, what does home mean to you now?

ALYAN: It’s a beautiful question. I think on one hand, certainly home, as for many people in diaspora communities, has come to mean the idea of the perpetual hope for return. And in my case, to be able to bring my daughter freely to places in Palestine, to places in Lebanon, to places in Syria so that she’s able to access her ancestry, she’s able to access her birthright. I think until that is possible, for me in this present moment, home has come to mean the people that I feel in community with. The people that I know see me, and that I can see with sort of love, with affection, with warmth and with wholeness. To be able to really allow for kind of all the contradictory parts of our identities, our histories to show up fully. And so it’s come to me really more concepts and personhood and like how we show up with each other.

It’s become a far more intangible thing. I think for a long time I was really preoccupied with the idea of physical place and how I could evoke it in my writing, and how I could write towards it and, you know, the rhetoric around it and whatnot. I think that while so many of those things continue to be important, in the meantime, it’s been finding people who see the world in similar ways as me. You know, and being able to think of ways to raise my daughter to – I want, I want a home, and that is to say a future, and that is to say a world, that is better for her than the one that I’m in right now.

MARTIN: You were able to have your daughter <laugh>, and she is here, but after many trials and a lot of interventions and some heartbreaking miscarriages and painful painful experience, and you were able to have her through surrogacy. And so I just wanna say that because this is how we help to set up this passage I want to read.

“This story is about waiting. I was terrible at waiting, but used to it. Or so I’d thought. But those pink lines meant a different kind of waiting. Suddenly waiting, had a purpose, a goal. The waiting became tolerable because ostensibly it had an ending. I’d become consumed with leavings. Johnny’s, my body’s, death, the way places became inaccessible with what wouldn’t stay. No bulldozer cleaved my life in two. It had been just one noiseless departure after the other. And beneath that pulsing loss and echo of all the vanishings and takings that had come before. But now there is something coming. There is a waiting that matters. How I use my time, what amends I make, the stories I gather, what I’ll tell you and how. Stories of the people you’ll never know, of the places of love and wreckage in equal measure. My entire life I hungered for stories more than anything else. The story inside each war, each arrival, I’d lie in bed as a child and imagine myself a time traveler returning to my mother’s childhood, my grandmother’s youth, back even farther. All the women in houses and births and burials, the prayers, the wedding ceremonies, the armies. I was determined of one thing. I’d put my waiting to good use.”

That’s sort of a testimony about story and the importance, you know, of story. And now, now that you’ve told this story, you know, I want to, I want to ask, do you feel a wholeness now?

ALYAN: Wholeness is a big word. I think I feel, I feel a sense of completion in terms of having tried to tell the story that I was trying to tell. And I think one of the things that I’ve learned about writing or studying narrative kind of more on a like sociopolitical level is that you’re, it’s never, it’s never done. I do feel like I told the story that I wanted to tell. And I think that timing of it, you know, when this book is being released, is really heart wrenching. And that it’s a book about really my experience of motherhood and surrogacy and all those years of infertility has shown me just the absolute value of a life and the preciousness of a life, and what can, what one can undertake to bring a life into this world. And to sort of compare that to the absolute devastation and disregard for life that we’re seeing. That I think has been, it’s an interesting time to be launching the book to be really thinking about what it means to be writing about having brought a, you know, in many ways, like a half Palestinian child to this world.

And to think about how I, you know, I mean, there’s, there’s, I do not believe art is a replacement for, you know, policy or the changes that need to happen on the ground. But I do think there’s something about – I have come to understand narrative making as one of the most powerful tools of reclaiming, and return as I read in the past. Like, you know, return even in imagination, because I do think there’s something that we see where power often decides when a story begins. You know, so power, people of power. One of the biggest receipts of that power usually is the ability to say, we press the tape here, we press start here, we press pause here, and to shape a beginning is oftentimes to shape an ending. And so I think in some ways, when so much effort is put towards destroying archive, it, that does indicate to me that the archive is actually quite important. That includes Palestinian voices, it includes voices of anybody that’s like, you know, belongs to a marginalized oppressed community. So I think in that way, it’s like, I do feel a sense of completion, and I also feel like this hopefully is the beginning for myself and for many other people to really continue to tell the stories of how we get here and how we stay here.

MARTIN: Do you have a sense of who you would like to find this book?

ALYAN: I think, I mean, I think certainly on one level, anybody who is, you know, interested, seeking, questioning motherhood. And again, I, I mean that sort of in an un gendered sense, right? Caregiving, of showing up for that task in some way. Certainly people who have been struggling or have struggled with infertility. And I think also folks who are just kind of interested in the idea of surrogacy as metaphor too ’cause I certainly talk about it in this literal sense, but I also am really interested in the idea of meta of surrogacy as symbolism for the ways that we care for each other and we show up for each other. Because it’s really kind of like the most, it’s an extreme example of what I think we are doing for each other, hopefully on a day-to-day basis. And then, I mean, I think anyone who has belonged to an identity or community that’s facing and has faced erasure. You know, I think this is, this book is a way of trying to counter that and right against that.

MARTIN: Hala Alyan, thank you so much for talking with us.

ALYAN: Thank you so much for having me. This was such a pleasure.