Salt Houses

Salt Houses is a novel deeply focused on the impact of diaspora and displacement on individuals and families, and as such, it relegates much of its historical grounding to the background. This is not to say that history, especially that of war and conflict, is not important within the novel’s narrative structure. Quite the opposite is true, as all of the events of this novel are in some way the result of the history of conflict in both Palestine and the broader Middle East. Because Alyan is so interested in the psychological, human impact of war, she foregrounds the experiences of the Yacoub family rather than of the various conflicts that shape their lives and migration trajectories, but an understanding of each of the main conflicts that underpin the narrative is helpful to make sense of the way that the experiences of the Yacoubs are representative of the Palestinian diaspora, writ large.

The event that first displaces the Yacoub family from their ancestral home takes place in 1948 and is referred to by Palestinians as “The Nakba,” Arabic for the Catastrophe. The Yacoub family is living in Nablus at the beginning of the narrative, but their roots are in Jaffa, where they owned a large orange grove. They were forced to flee when it was destroyed by invading Israelis in 1948 who set fire to their trees. Alyan’s choice to ground the family within the history of Jaffa specifically is meaningful: Jaffa had been an important cultural, political, and economic center in Palestine. Although Jerusalem was its capital, Jaffa was seen as the center of Arab identity in Palestine. In 1948, Israelis expelled 98% of the Palestinian population of Jaffa. Out of a pre-conflict population of more than 120,000, just under 4,000 Palestinians were allowed to stay, and they were removed from their homes and concentrated in Arab neighborhoods in the southern part of the city. Jaffa was then “absorbed” into the greater Tel Aviv area and renamed. The Nakba extended far beyond Jaffa and displaced thousands more Palestinians throughout the country. It was part of a displacement campaign that aimed at replacing the majority-Arab population of the lands of Palestine with Israeli settlers. At least 750,000 people, almost 75% of Palestine’s Arab population, were forced to flee, and Palestinians living abroad were denied the right to return. Physical displacement was not the sole project of the Nakba: Scores of massacres targeting Arabs took place, and the violence of the Nakba remains a source of collective trauma to contemporary Palestinians.

The second key event that affects the Yacoub family’s displacement is the Six-Day War, which took place June 5-10, 1967. The Israeli invasion of Sinai is the first of the war’s primary conflicts of which the Yacoub family becomes aware, but Israel’s victory in this conflict would result in the capture of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Old City of Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Leading up to this short conflict, Palestinian guerilla groups located in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan had increased their attacks on Israel, and Israel had responded with strikes, including one on a village in the Jordanian West Bank. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, had been criticized for his failure to support Syria and Jordan against Israel, but on May 14, 1967, he mobilized Egyptian troops in the Sinai and closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping interests. On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan signed a defense pact with Egypt, and Iraq soon followed with its own declaration of support. The Arab defense pact, seen by Israel as an act of aggression, prompted attacks on Egypt’s military forces and an invasion into the Sinai Peninsula as well as into other Palestinian-controlled territories. It is this conflict that forces the Yacoub family out of Nablus (and Palestine) and into Kuwait City and Amman.

The event that spurs the final major dislocation of the Yacoubs is the Gulf War of 1990-91, a conflict that began with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, ordered the invasion and occupation of Kuwait to acquire Kuwait’s vast oil reserves, expand Iraqi power in the region, and avoid paying a debt that Iraq owed to Kuwait. Hussein and the Iraqi army quickly occupied the entirety of Kuwait, and they managed the country first through a puppet government and then through full annexation. Hussein’s invasion was met with swift international condemnation, and both the United Kingdom and the United States deployed troops and sent equipment into neighboring Saudi Arabia to aid the Kuwaitis. An array of other nations, including regional countries Saudi Arabia and Egypt, soon joined the American-led coalition. Iraq was unable to withstand coalition attacks and Kuwait was liberated following a coalition ground assault into Kuwait in February of 1991. It is the initial Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that displaces Alia and Atef from their home in Kuwait City.