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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Coffee Set
At the beginning of the novel, Salma reads her daughter Alia’s future using coffee grounds. To do so, she upends a coffee cup and waits for the residue to dry. The coffee cup she uses during this pre-wedding ritual is part of a set purchased by Salma not long after she and her husband were forced to flee their home in Jaffa. Their orange groves were set on fire by Israelis, and although her husband had initially wanted to try to remain in their home, it became clear that a forced displacement of Palestinians had begun and that they were no longer safe. Because their exit had happened so quickly, the family had left many of their possessions behind, including a coffee set purchased for Salma by her mother. The replacement set, one of the coffee cups from which Salma uses for divination, was selected because it resembled the first.
This establishes the importance of loss and displacement to the narrative. Through Alyan’s depiction of the family’s internal displacement within Palestine, she demonstrates the impact that loss of home has on her characters: Salma and her family are displaced from lands where they had lived and farmed for generations, and part of that displacement is the loss of their home and their possessions. The family’s possessions, especially the coffee set, should not be read as mere objects, but rather as the material manifestations of culture. Coffee is central to Palestinian culture. Such sets are often given to women upon their marriage, and Salma’s coffee set becomes part of the divination rituals performed by women on their daughters’ wedding days. Losing her home and so many of her possessions will be a loss from which Salma never truly recovers. The coffee set is symbolic of that loss.
News of War on Television
There are many scenes in this novel during which members of the Yacoub family watch television together, specifically coverage of the various wars and conflicts that plague the region during the years between 1967 and the end of the novel in 2014. These moments speak to the theme of Displacement and Diaspora. The Yacoub family is displaced first from Jaffa to Nablus, and then from Nablus to Kuwait and Amman. Many of the younger generation end up in the United States, where they are better able to pursue education and careers. The family’s trajectory is reflective of the way that so many Palestinians have been scattered by war and through the confiscation of their properties in Palestine. Each regional conflict causes a new wave of displacement and migration. That the family watches each of these conflicts on television from their various homes in exile grounds the narrative within the history of the Middle East as a region. It also speaks to the nature of diaspora: Families end up spread out over vast regions, and their primary connection to the events that take place in their homeland is through the media. The Yacoub family watches each conflict from a new location, and through this depiction, Alyan creates a sense of what it is like to live exiled from one’s homeland, and also what it is like to be forced to move over and over again.
Atef’s Letters to Mustafa
Atef’s letters to Mustafa, which he writes on the advice of a mental health professional, contribute to the theme of The Psychological Impact of War and Trauma. Although he does not discuss it with his family, Atef spends years crafting letters to his dead friend Mustafa as a way to help himself process the trauma of the Israeli invasion of Nablus. They are a way to get his angry, scattered memories out of his mind and onto paper where they might make more sense. That he writes to Mustafa, in particular, can be read as a sign of his deep sense of grief and loss over the death of his closest friend, and it illustrates the multi-layered, human cost of war: The invasion robs Atef of not only his loved ones but also his own sense of security and stability. These letters are later discovered by his grandchildren and help them to make sense not only of their own familial history but also of the history of their lost homeland. The letters’ continuing significance speaks to the nature of family in diaspora: There is so much unprocessed trauma that reverberates through each generation that it becomes an important moment of self-understanding for each grandchild to discover the traumas that formed their parents and grandparents. This complicates the process of forging a personal identity because to understand who they are, young people like Manar and her cousins have to first make an effort to understand their family and its complex, convoluted history.
