Award-winning Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan’s new collection of poetry, The Moon That Turns You Back (Ecco, 2024), traces paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Blurring the boundaries between space, time, and poetic form, each of her poems is an act of resistance: resistance against forgetting; resistance against the womb that will not hold; resistance against personal and public plunder, dispossession, and erasure. Her poems speak of trauma betrothed with the mundane. These poems spool threads of life back and forth, punctuated by loss. Starting with the loss of her beloved grandmother, Alyan continues this theme through the loss of innocence, home, history, and maternal losses.
I spoke with Alyan via email and a recording about the role of a poet in times of external and internal exile, how writing is a cathartic experience, and the importance of remaining humble when you’re representing the histories of oppressed people.
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The Rumpus: Are your poems catalysts for grief? Do you believe in a poet as a canary in a coal mine or more of a midwife in poetry?
Hala Alyan: I think of the poet’s role [as one that is] more active than just the canary in a coal mine. My conceptualization of the task of poetics is one that is relatively active and embodied. I think of my responsibility as a poet to be one of seeking and transcribing truth to the best of my ability, to be showing up for the things that I find most painful in my own life, in the world, in other people, and trying to practice being disciplined about not looking away.
Poetics and bearing witness feel super connected in the way that I write poetry. I think it requires a certain alertness and willingness to have the world change you. That is not always a pleasant experience or an easy experience, but it’s almost always a very valuable one and a very meaningful one. The archetype that I would resonate with more is probably that of a midwife. You’re both the thing that’s being birthed and you are all of these roles. You’re the thing that’s helping the birthing, you’re the thing that is doing the birthing and the entire result of it.
Rumpus: I see the relationship between a lost motherland, motherhood, and motherlessness in your poems. Exile is external, material, and maternal in your poems. What’s the relationship between your concept of exile and these images of the womb?
Alyan: These poems came at an interesting time. My grandmother, who was one of the big loves of my life, had passed. She continues to be the image—both real and mythical—of the maternal and as the matriarch of our family in so many ways. She had passed away during the era of these poems. I was going through infertility, and I realized that while I could get pregnant, I couldn’t stay pregnant. So the uterus and the womb became this really complicated site to navigate for me in my life and poetically, because it was a place where life would be held briefly. I would step into motherhood in these ways and then it would end. I had a lot of feelings about my body as a place that could carry, that could nurture, that could hold. Then I felt, honestly, very dislocated from my body. I felt very dislocated, in some ways, from the feminine in me, which is very reductionistic, and I recognize that now. At the time, it was just the reality of my experience: the exile that was happening was between me and my own ecosystem.
Rumpus: What is the relationship between exile and erasure, as in your poem “Record”? Why did you choose an almost unreadably faded font for the medical and diagnostic terms within the text?
Alyan: I was going to, for the medical records, just have more classically laid-out erasure poems, black them out. Then I thought, “No, I want people to be able to see them, in part because so much gets hidden in shame around things like infertility.” It was important for me to not hide it in these pieces and allow it to be something that the reader could step into or step out of while also highlighting the words that I wanted them to pay the most attention to. Thinking about the relationship between exile and erasure, usually, very few people are exiled without there also being concerted efforts to erase the histories and the places that they came from. Part of exile, part of dispossession, part of the very conscious policy and effort behind that is to dispossess people from their lands, their homes, their villages. You see this with Palestine. You see it in other communities as well. Then they also erase and try to erase the lineage or any relationship or any possibility of return. When you hear narratives, if there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people, it’s by design. First, you need the people not to be on the land to then claim that they were never on the land.
Rumpus: What are some ways in which poetry can exalt the human condition without succumbing to any ideologies that would like to claim the work for its own purposes? How can poetry humanize the faces of suffering without sentimentalizing or misrepresenting them?
Alyan: If you’re working with the stories of other people, the stories of other people’s histories, persecution, suffering, you do it by remaining really humble and treating the material as respectfully as possible. I think that you consider your vantage point as the poet. You’re mindful of the entry points into the different stories. I think there’s a way in which that intentionality and that combination of intentionality and humility is how we maintain the appropriate amount of space between us and the stories we’re referencing. I think a really beautiful example of that is Seam by Tarfia Faizullah, in working with an archive and working with other people’s direct lived experience. That’s a great example of how to work with the lyric “I” in ways that are, again, respectful, restrained.
Rumpus: How can poetry practice or offer healing in what seems to be an insurmountable rift of dislocation?
Alyan: I believe the responsibility of the poet, in many ways, is the responsibility of the witness. I think what poetry does—I’m under no illusion that poetry is a replacement for deeply needed policy changes—what it can do is invoke curiosity in people. It can help people start asking better questions of what they understand to be true about the world, about other people, about history. I think that there’s a way that poetry [and] all art can be a place that’s cathartic. It’s extremely cathartic for me to write, and it’s extremely cathartic for me to read other people’s cathartic writing, because I get to go on that journey with them as well. The second you step into an experience, the only way you can other someone, the only way you can believe that someone is worthy of less than you believe you are worthy of—or people like you are worthy of—is if you’ve dehumanized them. Anything that interrupts the cycle, anything that invokes empathy—and usually the first step of empathy is curiosity—is a worthy exercise. And I think poetry is absolutely a place where that happens.
Rumpus: “The interviewer wants to know about fashion” is a poem where you write, “I watch a woman / bury her child” and you add a few lines after, “I watch a woman and the watching is a crime.” In the same poem, you also write: “Please, I’d rather be alive than holy / I don’t have time to write about the soul.” How do you remain quotidian and yet soulful in your writing?
Alyan: I am obsessed with the mundane. I’m obsessed with the day-to-day and what makes a life. I think maybe this is the question I’m most driven by: What makes a life? Not even what makes a life worth living, but what makes a life a life. I think I really resonate with this concept that what you do with your hours is what you do with your life. And so much of my hours are, like many of us, involved in these incredibly lucky, incredibly boring tasks of just getting from thing to thing.
The transitions from “my attention is here, [and] now my attention is here.” The miracle and boredom of parenting, of work, of attending to my various responsibilities. I wonder if that’s . . . it’s a hard question to answer. It’s like, I don’t know how it comes across in the writing, but I think it’s probably a reflection of how it feels in my life and how it feels in my body to be somebody that’s just interested in this question, in general: How can we stay grounded in the day-to-day and in the truth of what our life is, while also allowing for the soulfulness or the miracle of all of it to peep out when it wants to without feeling contrived or overwrought?
Rumpus: Your title and several poems revolve around the deictic preposition “back.” Was the preponderance of “back” intentional, or did “back” write itself into your poems? Does the recurring graphic of a dotted arched line have something to do with the landscape of “back?”
Alyan: Yes, I think “back” wrote itself into my poems. I’ll tell you what it was. When I was doing the audio version of the book, did I notice how often the word “back” came up? I knew the line—it’s a line from one of the interactive poems, it’s the ending. When I wrote that poem, I thought, “Oh, I think that’s going to be the title of the collection.” I didn’t realize that I had such a proliferation of the word “back” throughout. The title for me is one that I’m really attached to because it means so many different things. It’s the moon that beckons you to look at it. It’s the moon that beckons you to return to an earlier version or iteration of yourself. The graphic didn’t have anything to do with the landscape of “back,” but probably it did. This is what I love about poetry: it’s like a Rorschach test. It’s like, I put all of this. There’s conscious material on the page, but there’s so much subconscious material. One of my favorite things about writing is having people tell my experience back to me and having people pick up on things I never would have picked up on.
Rumpus: I love the polyphonic nature of your title. It has so many facets and can actually mean completely different things all at once. Can written words and poems bilocate or create bilocation for readers?
Alyan: I think for me, there is something in thinking about the different ways that the same word can mean and occupy totally different sentiments, depending on when you say the word, in what way, in what sentence, in what chapter of your life, in what season of your existence. I don’t know if that fully answers it, but that’s something that comes up.
Rumpus: To loop back to the theme of grief we started our conversation with, I want to end on the topic of exile again. How has your understanding of exile evolved or transformed over the years, in your writing and in your clinical practice?
Alyan: One of the things clinically that I’ve realized is that people can be born and raised in the same house, [have] never lost a city in their life, [have] never moved away from the same people, and still feel incredibly exiled, in a very interior sense. There are these ways that we can be exiled from parts of ourselves, from parts of our culture, our upbringing, our families. It has nothing to do with having been directly dispossessed by another entity or another group of people, or whatever. That’s something that I’ve been really thinking about in clinical practice. Then the other thing for me has been just, yeah, I think I can see the ramifications of exile, both in writing and in clinical work. I think it’s surprising to me and also, of course, unsurprising when I really think about it, that I continue to be drawn to the same kinds of stories. That’s how deep the intergenerational wound is.
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Author photograph by Elena Mudd
