Photographs, Diaspora, and Identity: Homecoming in Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City

ABSTRACT

Hala Alyan is an Arab American novelist and poet. Besides The Arsonists’ City (2021), which will be examined in this paper, she has published a novel titled Salt Houses (2017) and four collections of poetry. This paper argues that Alyan’s novel shows how photographs help the protagonist, Ava, to re-discover her own identity and unveil a forty-year-old family secret. This goal will be achieved by drawing on Roland Barthes’s concepts of punctum and stadium. Ava’s story is situated within the broader context of Palestinian experiences of displacement and homelessness. Her life turns upside down when she spends her summer holiday in Beirut in the late 2010s. She realises her identity by tracing a number of photographs which she finds in an album in her grandparents’ old house in Beirut. Like other Arab novelists in diaspora, Alyan portrays Ava’s identity as a site over which social, cultural and transnational forces converge.

KEYWORDS:

• Photographs
• Roland Barthes
• diaspora
• identity
• Hala Alyan

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Awad, “Sea Imagery in Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses,” 42.

2 Awad, The Arab Atlantic, 12.

3 Ibid., 12.

4 Driscoll, 23.

5 Ibid., 23.

6 Letaief and Awad, 251.

7 Awad, 87.

8 Ibid., 87.

9 Brown, 5.

10 Ibid., 5.

11 For an in-depth discussion of how “Thing Theory” helps understand the works of diasporic Arab writers, see: Louati and Abu Amrieh.

12 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26-27.

13 Alyan, Salt Houses, 288.

14 Sontag, 120.

15 Hall, 226.

16 Ibid., 235.

17 Ibid., 235.

18 Barthes, 82.

19 Bourdieu, 31.

20 Ibid., 31.

21 Barthes, 26-27.

22 Hirsch, 115.

23 Ibid., 116-117.

24 Ibid., 125.

25 Ibid., 125.

26 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 28.