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JEDDAH: \u201cOur Cut of Salt\u201d is an extraordinary debut partly because it understands that the haunted-house story has always been most effective when it is, at heart, a story about people and the fears they carry with them.<\/p>\n
Under Palestinian American writer Deena Helm\u2019s pen, a haunted house in Haifa that once was home to a Palestinian family is not merely the site of a ghost story; it is itself a record of displacement, violence and belonging, as well as an indictment of military occupation.<\/p>\n
Forthcoming from US publisher Tor\u2019s horror imprint Tor Nightfire on Sept. 22, the gothic horror novel follows three generations of Palestinian women and the history embedded in their ancestral home, Dar Sayadi.<\/p>\n
After Nuhad\u2019s death, her granddaughter Marina in Chicago becomes determined to visit the house she has inherited that she only knows of through her grandmother\u2019s stories. Her mother, Haifa \u2014 named for the city her family lost and carrying inherited trauma herself \u2014 reluctantly agrees to let her go to Palestine.<\/p>\n
Nuhad had not returned to the house since the Nakba of 1948, but she continued to carry it in her heart until death. Rania, her childhood friend, becomes a guide and a bridge connecting Marina to her ancestry.<\/p>\n
Helm\u2019s characters feel remarkably full and vibrant even when they appear only briefly. The debut author\u2019s measured prose moves deftly between the poetic and the clear-eyed. At times, her language is lyrical and atmospheric, giving the house and its haunting an almost dreamlike quality; at others, it becomes restrained and precise, allowing scenes to speak without being weighed down by narration.<\/p>\n
In \u201cOur Cut of Salt,\u201d the supernatural elements expose the inadequacy of ordinary language to describe the psychological consequences of forced expulsion and Israeli military occupation.<\/p>\n
Locals and cats alike avoid Dar Sayadi\u2019s perimeter; strange sounds and screams sometimes emanate from within; and any Israeli settlers who occupy it either die or disappear. Even as they keep coming, the house \u201crefuses\u201d to become a sanctuary for the Israeli settlers.<\/p>\n
More significantly, Dar Sayadi is a \u201cpainful, festering\u201d wound, and as Marina digs into the family past, the illness \u2014 symbolizing the Israeli occupation \u2014 becomes increasingly physical.<\/p>\n
By placing the supernatural alongside the very real horrors that have continued to reverberate since the Nakba of 1948, Helm takes the machinery of the American gothic haunted-house story \u2014 the ominous building, unexplained noises, apparitions, a family entering a space where it should not be \u2014 and turns it toward a history for which the word \u201chaunting\u201d is more than literal.<\/p>\n
Within the architecture of Palestinian belonging, a house is never only walls, windows and a roof: It is also the place from which a family was expelled. Helm\u2019s narrative is tightly wound around the understanding that to lose such a place is not merely to lose property.<\/p>\n
A Palestinian home lost to colonization becomes an archive of domestic life, forever tethered to the family that once cared for it, that it continues to belong to. They are rooms in which children grew up, where meals were eaten, arguments took place, prayers were said.<\/p>\n
Dar Sayadi\u2019s \u201csickness,\u201d anger and violation become a way of exposing the inhuman conditions that Israeli occupation has allowed to fester across generations, a violence that continues to reproduce itself in the present.<\/p>\n
Beneath the apparitions and hauntings, \u201cOur Cut of Salt\u201d is about inheritance: what mothers transmit to daughters, what displacement severs, and how a place can remain an emotional time capsule even when generations have been physically separated from it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n