Award-winning author and poet Hala Alyan’s debut memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, is a poignant exploration of her tumultuous path to parenthood, identity, and displacement.
In this memoir, Hala documents her experience with infertility and finding motherhood through surrogacy, a journey intricately linked to her fractured background as a displaced Palestinian.
Her poetic background resonates throughout the memoir, with fluid prose that conveys her desperate longing to become a mother. Hala reveals the heartbreak of multiple miscarriages, the challenge of addiction, and the strain on her marriage.
As she navigates these struggles, Hala wrestles with the multifaceted question of who she is and who she isn’t, allowing readers to connect with the depth of her emotions. After many years, surrogacy provides her with a path to motherhood.
So, as her baby grows in another woman's womb, Hala reflects on her past, the stories of her grandmothers, parents, and ancestors.
As her baby grows from the size of a poppyseed to a lime, and eventually to a fully formed human, she stays connected to her child by telling it — and us — these stories. These are the stories that liberate her and shape her legacy.
The 'waiting woman'
The memoir unfolds like the tale of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, where Hala becomes the ‘waiting woman,’ reckoning with all the truths of her life before stepping into motherhood.
Hala, whose family has been uprooted for generations from Syria and Palestine, invites us to plunge into the depths of her heart and mind.
Through this, she reflects on what it means to be a woman, to love and long for a home, to experience the trauma of diaspora, and to grapple with the hypocrisy of the West.
The memoir introduces two central figures — Hala’s grandmothers, one Palestinian and one Syrian — who were forced to leave their homelands because of war and violence. Eventually, they settled in Kuwait, a decision that shaped the course of Hala’s life. Her parents met in Kuwait, got married, and eventually had children who continued their stories.
Hala herself has spent much of her life moving between countries — from Texas to Oklahoma, Maine to the United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon — before eventually finding herself telling her story from her Manhattan apartment.
Her life has been one of exile, existing in multiple identities, yet never fully belonging to any one place. In her writing, she expresses that being both Palestinian and American means having to disavow the former in order to prove the latter.
In a stunning kaleidoscope of vignettes, she narrates scenes from her own life and those of her family. Her mother travels to America alone and pregnant, ultimately providing her with the safety net of American citizenship.
For a short time, she was Holly — more American than Arab. Drunken blackouts, the resolve to become sober, graduate studies, affairs, the death of grandparents, and pregnancy loss marked her early adulthood years. She simply spent her childhood ping-ponging between the United States and the Arab world.
Though she returned to America and found love there, the scars of her mother’s childhood, the trauma of her grandmothers, and the legacy of survival through wars became an indelible part of Hala’s identity.
Unimaginable loss
All of Hala's life — her anguish, epiphanies, the horrors of conflict and miscarriage, the all-encompassing shadow of addiction, disappointments, hopelessness, and, ultimately, light — is presented to us in montages and fragments that transcend time and place. These moments jolt back to the present, where she waits for her baby to grow, miles away.
Without a doubt, Hala has experienced loss in ways unimaginable. She has grieved the dead, the living, her past self, and even what could have been.
Her background as a clinical psychologist is evident in her insightful analysis of the human psyche. She tears apart the myths and facades we carry about ourselves to expose the raw emotions underneath. She reveals the universal nature of human experience, making us feel inextricably connected to her. She tells her unborn child that these stories are their inheritance and an indelible part of her because these tales shaped those who created her.
And so, she welcomes her baby with complete honesty.
Reflecting on how she and her mother made a perilous journey to cross the border after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and on the lies she told as an adolescent in her American school, Hala reconciles with her irreversibly fractured relationship with the country she now calls home — the very same country that corrupted her family’s homes.
The fact of the matter is, America is the empire that has waged endless wars and created the conditions in which people are forced to seek shelter within it and submit with humble reverence at gunpoint.
Hala writes that we are accepted if we disavow where we came from and melt into whiteness, if we remember the asylum granted by the passport and obscure its funding of dictators and siphoning of oil.
Celebrating women
More than a story of motherhood and exile, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a testimony of everything at once — a purging of the fervour that burns within her. She eagerly awaits her daughter’s arrival for nine months, striving to create a home for this new life.
Yet, the question of home and belonging is far more complex than rose-coloured nurseries. Hala comes to realise that surrogacy is not merely a method of childbirth for her child; it is a metaphor for rescue, exile, and the culmination of her life’s journey. It symbolises the intricate interplay of loss, hope, displacement, and belonging that has shaped her life.
In her writing, Hala shares, “I think of a land mass dismantled by white hands, borders drawn and redrawn. I think of the airport in South Beirut, how during the civil war in Lebanon, tens of thousands of Lebanese sought shelter in Syria. I think of the Palestinian camps dotting southern Lebanon, how each place became a surrogate for the other. One carries when the other can’t.”
Ultimately, this memoir is Hala’s heartfelt gift to her daughter and the reader — a moving tribute to the strength of those forced from their homelands and ruthlessly exploited, as well as a celebration of women’s determination to survive and thrive despite violence and oppression.
Noshin Bokth has over six years of experience as a freelance writer. She has covered a wide range of topics and issues, including the implications of the Trump administration on Muslims, the Black Lives Matter movement, travel reviews, book reviews, and op-eds. She is the former Editor in Chief of Ramadan Legacy and the former North American Regional Editor of the Muslim Vibe