Salt Houses

Content Warning: The source text contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault.

“When Salma peers into her daughter’s coffee cup, she knows instantly she must lie. Alia has left a smudge of coral lipstick on the rim. The cup is ivory, intricate spirals and whorls painted on the exterior in blue, a thin crack snaking down one side. The cup belongs to a newer set, bought here in Nablus when Salma and her husband Hussam arrived nearly fifteen years ago. It was the first thing she had bought, walking through the market place in an unfamiliar city.”

The first scene in the novel instantly evokes displacement and loss. Salma and her husband were forced to flee Jaffa for Nablus 15 years ago, and many of their possessions were lost. Salma purchased this coffee set because of a resemblance it bore to her previous set, a cherished gift from her mother. The family’s lives were completely uprooted when they lost their home, and that loss will reverberate through the novel.

“Salma missed her home in Jaffa with a tenacity that had never quite abated. She spent the first years in Nablus daydreaming of returning.”

This passage speaks to the theme of Displacement and Diaspora. Salma never quite recovers from the trauma of being forced out of their home in Jaffa, and although their property was destroyed by the Israeli army, she still thinks of it as home. There is a sense in which the lands to which people are forced to flee never quite become home, and Salma still feels the pull of a homeland rendered inaccessible by war.

“He’d known girls like Aya, poor girls who lived by different standards than his female friends and relatives. These girls had their faith, but their lives were hard and bitter and full of death. The ones that weren’t married by their early twenties had a recklessness about them, giving their bodies with abandon. They hadn’t been raised on European summers and dinner parties; they had removed shrapnel from their brothers’ legs, had washed their sisters after rape.”

Class is an important subtext within the novel, and various characters come from a more working-class background than Salma and her family. Aya is one such individual, as is Priya. Much of the literature about Palestine focuses on the working class, and although Alyan wants to create a portrait of the way that war and displacement impact the middle and upper classes, her commitment to depicting each sector of Palestinian society makes for a more holistic and representative novel.