Palestinian-American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan always has a way of replicating the unreliability of time and delivering one-line monumental truths. Her latest poetry collection,The Moon That Turns You Back, experiments with form and represents the disjointedness of what the in-between looks and feels like.
Alyan often writes about diaspora and inheritance and how present generations process and understand those prior. In the poem “Topography,” she writes that “the land is a crick in the neck,” and “the land looks white on the MRI images: you call your grandfather. He’s been finding the land in his stool.”
“Did you inherit the land in your arthritic wrist?” she asks. “It makes knitting hell.”
Perhaps “land” and pain complete us as much as atoms and genes. And despair and uncertainty are often the only tangible forms of inheritance we get.
Alyan discusses being pulled in several places—Brooklyn, Israel, Beirut—while trying to feel grounded. In the poem, “Half-Life in Exile,” she writes of one of her poems that “everybody loves”:
It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee. It’s done nothing for Palestine. There are plants out West that emerge only after fires. They listen for smoke. I wrote the poem after weeks of despair, hauling myself like rock.
Alyan is open about her personal experiences with despair, through miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy and how, even though that pain may look a lot different than what Palestine and other countries at war are facing, pain almost seems to connect to other kinds of pain like long-lost siblings. In the same poem she writes:
Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don’t interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage. For what it’s done to get here.
She questions order, cause and effect and how one terrible thing could possibly create something beautiful, how something beautiful could possibly be destroyed by something cruel.
And then there is helplessness in the face of war. Alyan writes of paying for a good mattress and getting Lasik alongside the lines, “You can’t put a corpse back together. / One bomb dives into the sky like a rose. / If I don’t say rose, you’ll skip ahead to the end.”
These poems weave in and out in this way—first a memory, then someone else’s memory, then secrets, then blurs of time, then directly addressing the reader.
It can be hard to quote poetry honestly, since context is everything. But with Alyan, she sees the potential in what phrases mean both separate and apart from their surroundings. Lines jump out at you, like “The cost of wanting something is who you are on the other side of getting it.” Words can be both independent and part of something larger.
Could this device reflect the poet’s feelings of displacement? Alyan, who is Palestinian but also American, balances awareness and activism while trying to enjoy daily life. Coming to terms with these kinds of opposing forces is exactly what makes life life. It isn’t fair, but it’s true.
From “Ectopic,”:
Forgive me—I mix up metaphors in two languages and sometimes you just have to * step into the mouth of the worst thing, just for a second, just to feel its hot breath on your collarbone.
See Also
Feeling the worst thing means also acknowledging the distance we place between ourselves and that thing; and also considering those who do not have the luxury of distance.
“Spoiler” ends the collection, a powerful standout that first appeared in the New Yorker. Alyan begins with probing—“Can you diagnose fear?”—and finishes with a more self-assured voice that both reflects growth and accepts surrender.
Her brilliance stems from her consistent acknowledgment of helplessness in the face of disaster, using art as a shield and a response to unfathomable despair and to the inability to reverse brutality. She ends as if finally taking a breath:
I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in. I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.
The building of sand castles is a doomed venture, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue starting again, more resilient with each new design.
Hala Alyan’s work embodies open eyes and observation and self-awareness; how to make sense through acceptance—that there often isn’t any sense to be made from loss, yet many of us survive.
Meredith Boe is a Pushcart Prize–nominated writer, editor, and poet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passengers Journal, Newfound, Another Chicago Magazine, Chicago Reader, Mud Season Review, After Hours, and elsewhere, and her chapbook What City won the 2018 Debut Series Chapbook Contest from Paper Nautilus.
