Cultural Negotiations and Trips of Rearrival in Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City

Cultural Negotiations and Trips of Rearrival in Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City

Presenter(s)

Merna Fahmy

Comments

11:00-11:20, Kennedy Union 312

Description

Displacement, voluntarily or exilic in nature, strikes such a deep chord within the immigrant that it permanently changes the global landscape to them, even if they remain abroad, and especially if they return home. The Arsonists’ City by Hala Alyan, published in 2021, takes the Nasrs from California, Austin, and New York and delivers them back to Beirut. At the head of the family are Idris and Mazna, first-generation immigrants, fleeing from Lebanon and Syria, respectively; their children, Ava, Mimi, and Naj are born in the US. The trip to Lebanon is made every summer until the Nasrs grow wary of this return due to various traumas. The propelling event for their ‘reverse immigration’ years later is when Idris, a cardiovascular surgeon, hears a heart he’s operating on telling him to return to Lebanon to sell his childhood home.This paper contextualizes and tracks the effects of transmobility of first and second generation immigrants and the different coping or defense mechanisms of processing diaspora. For the Nasrs, who long for Beirut with as much devotion as they resent it, the rearrival journey serves to demythologize their ‘home.’ However, instead of reiterating the Arab-American conundrum of being Arab in the US and American in the Arab World, Alyan creates a new space where both the Arab and US identities are inherently changed due to the characters’ transnational acts of mobility. The rearrival breaks through the hegemony and the veils nostalgia places on memory.

Publication Date

4-23-2025

Project Designation

Graduate Research

Primary Advisor

Shazia Rahman, Tereza M. Szeghi, Shannon C. Toll

Primary Advisor's Department

English

Keywords

Stander Symposium, College of Arts and Sciences

Institutional Learning Goals

Scholarship

Cultural Negotiations and Trips of Rearrival in Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City

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