50 pages • 1 hour read
Hala AlyanSalt Houses
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Atef”
Ten years have passed since the end of the Six-Day War, but Atef continues to struggle with the traumatic memories of his time in an Israeli prison. He survived, but Mustafa did not. Although he has made progress in the years since arriving in Kuwait City, Atef continues to dream about the war, and he cannot shake his strong sense of loss. Still, life is not all bad. He and Alia now have three children. Souad is five, Karam is seven, and Riham is turning nine. On the morning of Riham’s birthday, he plans to buy strawberries for her at the market but stops on the way out of the door to write in his journal. Years ago, when various treatments for his psychological distress did not work, a doctor had suggested writing letters to organize his thoughts. He still does this, addressing each entry to Mustafa.
Atef loves his children, and his home life is full and bustling. He knows that Alia’s favorite among their children is Karam, but his is Riham. He recalls holding her just after she was born and feeling alive for the first time since his release from the Israeli prison. He feels that Riham brought him back to life, and he continues to dote on her. After 10 years, they still employ Priya, their Indian domestic worker, and she too feels part of the family, a “pillar” of their household. Alia, however, is a distracted mother. She never got over leaving Nablus and at times seems to move dreamlike and distracted through life. She does not pay as much attention to the children as Atef and seems less interested in motherhood than other women. She and Atef bicker constantly about parenting: Alia thinks that he spoils the children and Atef wishes that she paid them more attention.
On the day of Riham’s birthday, they engage in a nearly silent, passive-aggressive disagreement about what to do with the children. Their trip to the zoo is fun for Riham, Karam, and Souad, but there is a distinct animosity between Atef and Alia. Later, at the party that Widad organizes, Atef is consumed again by memories of the war and his dear, dead brother-in-law Mustafa. He thinks of the letter that he will write Mustafa about Riham’s birthday. He is deeply grateful for his family and for the stability that family life provides him, but the war is an ever-present source of semi-buried hurt for Atef. He wishes that he could somehow communicate this with Alia, and he wonders if knowing how he felt, she might have less resentment towards him.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Riham”
Riham is in Amman in July 1982, spending the summer there with her mother and her sister Souad. She loathes Amman, from the crowds to the noise to her frustrating family. Alia and Souad do not get along, and the two argue every day. Riham is encouraged to spend time with her cousins Lara and Mira, but she does not fit in with these girls. They are loud, put henna in their hair, and have dreams of being singers and living abroad. Riham is shy, quiet, and feels unattractive, and although she too would like to live in Europe, her dreams seem to lack the scope and glamour of her cousins’. Lara and Mira are open in their interest in boys, and although Riham likes one particular boy named Bassam, she feels shy about her feelings and prefers not to discuss them. She misses her father and their quiet discussions about literature.
In contrast, Alia adores summers in Jordan, and Riham observes that Amman “transforms” her. She is more relaxed and happier. She smokes cigarettes and although Riham turns red and flaky in the heat of the summer sun, her mother’s skin glows and becomes bronzer by the day. Riham feels most at ease around her grandmother Salma. Salma, too, had been a quiet girl and had felt uncomfortable around her peers. Salma is devoutly religious, in contrast with the rest of her family, and Riham finds her religiosity both moving and elegant. She is the only woman of the group to wear the veil, and Riham thinks it confers a special kind of dignity on her. Riham wonders about her uncle Mustafa, although she understands that the adults find him painful to talk about. One day at the beach, shortly before the family is to return to Kuwait, Riham swims out too far into the ocean and gets caught in a rip current. Although she tries to fight it, she is pulled under and loses consciousness. A man swimming nearby saves her, and she wakes up coughing and spitting on the hot sand of the beach.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Alia”
It is past 11 pm in April 1988, and Souad is not home. Alia is furious. She bickers with Atef because he is not as upset as she thinks he should be. She points out that neither of their other children engages in such blatantly disobedient behavior, and Atef refrains from pointing out that of their three offspring, it is actually Souad with whom Alia has the most in common. Souad is heedless in other ways: She eats sugary foods all over the house without cleaning up after herself, and the house becomes overrun with ants. When she arrives home at 2 am, Alia flies into a rage at her, and they engage in another of their fierce arguments.
Atef and Alia think that Souad is a sharp contrast to her sister. As an adolescent, Riham had become a devout Muslim, choosing to fast during Ramadan and rise each day before dawn with the muezzin’s first call. Although Alia and Atef had not been upset at their daughter’s religiosity, they do recall finding it slightly alarming. They had both quietly put aside their faith after losing Mustafa and had not raised their children in a religious household. When Riham had chosen to wed a Jordanian doctor old enough to be her father, a widower with a young son, the family had been shocked. Alia and Atef had allowed it, although with reservations. Souad had spoken up loudly against the match, pointing out that Riham still slept with her stuffed animals. Souad suggested that perhaps she was not yet ready to be anyone’s mother. Riham had countered that her grandmother Salma, who had been dead nearly a year at that time, would have been in favor of the marriage, and Alia decided to reserve further judgment.
Salma died during a three-day thunderstorm in Jordan that locals called “biblical” in its proportions. Alia cared for her mother during her last hours, and her mother told her to keep her memories and her identity alive. It is clear that despite exile, Salma died with Palestine in her heart. When Alia returned to Kuwait from Amman, where she had been caring for her mother, her unhappiness was obvious—not just about her mother’s death, but about being back in Kuwait. Even Souad can see that she is miserable there and that she pines for Amman. Alia longs to leave Kuwait City and recently confided in her cousin that she dreams of leaving Atef and her children to live with the rest of her family in Amman. She feels terrible for feeling this way, but she has never adjusted to the hot, desert climate of Kuwait and finds the city stifling, oppressive, and dull.
Karam, too, is growing older, and Alia observes him enter adolescence. She is struck by the fact that he is becoming a man and thinks that the girls, although more demanding, are also more predictable. They remind her of her own youth. Karam is a sort of wonder to her. Always, in the background, Atef is writing alone in his office. Alia does not know about what, and there is a distance between the two, so she does not ask.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Atef’s chapter focuses on The Psychological Impact of War and Trauma, depicting his struggles with guilt and loss in the wake of Mustafa’s death. Atef’s trauma is one of his defining characteristics, and he struggles with his memories of arrest and mistreatment in an Israeli prison even a decade after the experience. The fact that Atef continues to experience nightmares and flashbacks demonstrates the lifelong, life-altering impact that war and displacement have on victims. Though Atef learns to live with his trauma, it never leaves him. And yet, this section of the text also contains descriptions of the way that the family brought Atef back to life. His relationship with his young children is loving, supportive, and caring. Riham in particular helps him to move past his trauma, and he recalls how joyful he had been after her birth. He is aware that parenting “saved him,” and he is grateful for the stability that his children have brought to his life. In part out of that gratitude and in part because he understands that his wife’s emotional volatility impacts the children, he tries to provide them with as much love and stability as possible. Through Atef, Alyan shows that Familial Bonds in Exile can provide safety, stability, and identity to families who cannot derive those experiences from a fixed homeland. She also shows that family can provide purpose for people like Atef whom war and trauma have robbed of faith.
Alyan is interested in social class and in the way that people of different national, ethnic, and class backgrounds experience Displacement and Diaspora. Many moments in this narrative engage with class and the cultural differences between modern and traditional spaces for Palestinian women. Additionally, Alyan’s depiction of social class grounds the novel within the socio-cultural landscape of the Arab world and lends authenticity to the narrative. In this section of the narrative, Priya, the Yacoub’s Indian domestic worker, plays an important role. Atef sees her as the “center” of the household, and she is a key part of the family. Priya is representative of many workers in the Arab world. Just as migrant workers from Central America make up a portion of the workforce in the United States, guest workers from the Indian Subcontinent often find work in Arab countries. Priya represents this trend, and Alyan describes the way that “every two years she returns to India for a month, packing suitcases full of clothes and treats to bring to her husband and two children” (81). Working in Kuwait is an economic opportunity for Priya, and through the money she earns there, she better supports her family. Priya represents the fact that global socioeconomic inequality, not just war, creates diasporic communities. Like her employers, Priya is separated from her family and homeland, though she is separated because of her economic needs, whereas the Yacoubs are separated by war.
Alia’s characterization and her conflict with her daughters illustrate the diversity among women of the Palestinian diaspora. Alia is an emotionally volatile woman who, although she loves her family fiercely, struggles in her role as a mother. She and Souad constantly bicker, and there is discord between Alia and Riham, whose traditionalism and devout Muslim faith Alia finds confusing. Alia remains unhappy in Kuwait. There, “she hated the heat and dreaded the summer” (146). It is only during her yearly visits to Amman that she relaxes and feels at home. Alia prefers the more Western-oriented society in Jordan to the traditional focus of Kuwaiti families, and she never adjusts to life in Kuwait City. Her lack of interest in traditional values contrasts markedly with her daughter Riham, who feels ill at ease in exactly the kinds of social situations that breathe life into her mother. In these chapters, Riham spends an increasing amount of time with her grandmother Salma and begins to forge her own path as a devout Muslim girl. Alyan’s choice to depict a range of identities in the diaspora speaks to the complexity of Palestinian diasporic identity. Alyan takes care not to flatten or oversimplify the range of ways Palestinian women engage with the cultures of both their ancestors and the places the diaspora has taken them. The character of Riham and her contrast with both her sister and her mother illustrates the fact that identity is not a monolith and shows how many ways of identifying there are for Palestinian women.
