Hala Alyan

Hala Alyan (born July 27, 1986) is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma, addiction, and cross-cultural behavior. Her writing covers aspects of identity and the effects of displacement, particularly within the Palestinian diaspora. She is also known for acting in the short films I Say Dust andTallahassee (directed by Darine Hotait).

Quotes

 * ...When I talk about inheritance, I really don’t think of physical objects at all. I think maybe it’s having an identity where that’s not what we become. This is partly Palestinian and it’s probably the region...
 * ...what do we inherit in terms of the way that we exist in the world, the things that we look for, and the things that we turn to when we’re afraid, or when we’re sad, or when we’re overwhelmed? When I think of what I’ve inherited, I think of my understanding of what it means to feel connected to the world, or what it means to feel connected to other people, and how I learned a lot of that from my grandmother, or from my parents, or my uncle. It’s much more of an intangible thing...
 * ...I think people don’t realize most of what you do as an adult, you learned when you were young, as a kid...
 * ... Some people are really uncomfortable with being sad. Some people really feel okay getting mad or losing their temper and that’s all been modeled for you at some point...
 * ...I definitely think that you can write in the colonial language and completely disrupt that frame. But a lot of the times you have been educated within a particular frame, you’ve been exposed to a certain kind of writing… I think that it definitely has the power to disrupt. But I do think that in some ways the frame has its own limitation...
 * ...I have moved away from trying to associate or locate feelings of homesickness with a place… Like I’m homesick for a particular time that’s gone, or a particular year, or I’m homesick for being 23, or I’m homesick for my grandmother’s voice — the things are super intangible...
 * ...I just try to allow for places, like people, to be big enough to contain those multitudes...
 * ...I think nostalgia warps memory… when you introduce nostalgia, you are completely rewriting history. You’re completely rewriting what your past meant, or what your childhood meant, or what those courtship years meant. You’re kind of paving over them with a completely different narrative...
 * Locating Curiosity and Joy: A Conversation with Hala Alyan
 * ...Whatever you say about the region – and the fact that different places have different levels of support for Palestinians and different narratives about Palestinians – my identity is not something I had to contest. It’s like, you don’t have to like Palestinians, but we know they exist. We’re not negating the fact that they’re there...
 * ...Of course, nobody wants anyone to speak for them, but, to be realistic, I think there is something to the fact that there are groups and allies that are able to carry messaging further because they have access to spaces that, I personally, as a Palestinian-American do not have access to...
 * IN CONVERSATION WITH AWARD-WINNING PALESTINIAN-AMERICAN AUTHOR HALA ALYAN