Award-winning Palestinian-American author Hala Alyan speaks at VCUarts Qatar

Guest speaker touches on themes of resilience, identity and heritage

Award-winning Palestinian-American author Hala Alyan recently gave a public talk at VCUarts Qatar’s Atrium. 

Titled “Endurance and Solidarity Through Art”, Alyan, a poet, clinical psychologist, and novelist, read selected poems and nonfiction pieces touching upon themes of resilience, identity, and heritage during the talk.

VCUarts Qatar Dean Amir Berbić introduced Alyan to the audience.

“Hala has roots in Palestine and Syria. She has lived in Kuwait, Lebanon, the UAE, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, among other places. Much of her writing reflects and explores notions of displacement, relationships to home and culture, or family, including in her more recent novel, The Arsonist’s City, published in 2021.

“We invited her to speak to us in the context of the tragic ongoing situation in Gaza and the impact it has had on us. Conversations like this help us to respond and galvanize, while we do our best to carry on with life with not just resilience and fortitude, but also with hope,” he said.

Delving into the pivotal role of art in fortifying both personal capacity and solidarity, Alyan also discussed strategies for building endurance during this time.

The talk was followed by a highly engaging question-and-answer session led by Dean Berbić.

To the question “What is home in the context of displacement? What is the emotional impact of losing your home?”, Alyan answered, “I think there is an inalienable rift that happens when you’re forced to engage in a migration that is not of your choice. When you’re told you no longer belong here; you need to leave, you cannot come back, I think there’s something that happens, and I see that emotional pain a lot in all diaspora communities – not just Palestinians – where people experience longing for home. And they can’t express that longing. And I come across people who are struggling with just being able to express that.”

She also spoke about the positive and negative impacts of having a hybrid or dual identity, for instance, as a Palestinian American or a British citizen of Indian descent.

“On the one hand, it comes with the idea that you’re more adaptable, that you’re able to navigate the cultural and social expectations that come with the two cultures you straddle. You may be seen as being able to succeed and survive in changing environments, you may be able to understand the nuances that run across cultures. But it also comes with a sense of hollowness, or a feeling of never being fully settled. It’s a longing that is difficult to articulate through words.”

Alyan is the author of the novel ‘Salt Houses’, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, ‘The Arsonists’ City’, was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning poetry collections, most recently ’The Twenty-Ninth Year’.

Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, LitHub, The New York Times and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she is a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University. Her forthcoming poetry collection, ‘The Moon that Turns You Back’, will be published by Ecco, a New York-based publishing imprint of HarperCollins, next year.