Sea Imagery in Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses

This article examines how Palestinian American novelist Hala Alyan employs sea imagery in her debut novel Salt Houses (2017) to reflect her characters’ emotions and thoughts. In particular, this article shows that by examining a number of events in which characters are sitting by the sea or wading into the waters of the sea, the reader is given an insight into these characters’ inner feelings and beliefs and the way they perceive their identities and contextualise their experiences as they move from one city to another. As the novel relates the narratives of four generations of a Palestinian family, sometimes using flashbacks, sea imagery increasingly occupies central positions in these narratives which reveal Alia’s and her descendants’ endeavours to express their opinions through memories and experiences of displacement, exile and estrangement. Although the title of the novel rightly heralds the significance of houses, it is the sea that forcefully emerges as a pivotal component in the narratives that these characters relate in their quests for a homeland that lives in the older generation’s memories and the young people’s imaginations. As Alia’s granddaughter, Manar, visits Palestine in the final chapter of the novel and draws the family tree of the Yacoubs on Jaffa’s beach, including her unborn baby, memories and imaginations merge to assert the right of Palestinians to “belong” to their homeland.