English Studies in Africa

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Acting Across Diaspora: Transnational Spaces and

Voices in Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City

Majed Aladylah

To cite this article: Majed Aladylah (2022): Acting Across Diaspora: Transnational
Spaces and Voices in Hala Alyan’s The�Arsonists’�City, English Studies in Africa, DOI:
10.1080/00138398.2023.2128508

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2023.2128508

Published online: 12 Oct 2022.

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Acting Across Diaspora: Transnational Spaces and Voices in Hala Alyan’s
The Arsonists’ City

Majed Aladylah
Mutah University, Jordan

Abstract
In The Arsonists’ City (2021), Arab American novelist Hala Alyan casts a
piercing spotlight on how diasporic and transnational voices are burdened with
cultural ambivalences, negative stereotypes, prejudices and discriminations.
This paper shows how Hollywood cinema does not help the protagonist,
Mazna, to remodel her diasporic identity to be a successful actress. A Syrian
actress who has emigrated from Syria to Lebanon and then to the USA to
achieve her dream and identity, Mazna’s life turns upside down when
Hollywood forces her to take on negative terrorist, sexualized and culturally
insensitive roles in films. As this article discusses, Alyan uncovers how these
roles dehumanize and trample the Arab races and cultures. It is in this sense
that the diasporic novelist draws attention to Hollywood’s negative
stereotypes, prejudices and injustices in relation to the representation of an
Arab actress in Hollywood cinema. In being thus represented, Mazna is
exploited and humiliated when she is forced to perform in naïve and trivial
scenes in American movies. Alyan explores Mazna’s diasporic journey as an
exterior space over which political, religious and cultural dilemmas
conglomerate. Consequently, Alyan opens up spaces based upon cross-cultural
tolerance, acceptance, living with difference and valuing religious and cultural
diversity.
Keywords: Hala Alyan, Hollywood, diaspora, transnational, stereotype, identity

Over the past decades, the concepts of transnational voices, spaces and diasporas have attracted
the attention of not only cultural studies and academic literature, but also of cinema and media.
These terms are now applied in relation to mobility, scattering and dispersion of immigrants
outside their homelands across countries and cultures. In this analytical repertoire, displacement

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DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2023.2128508 English Studies in Africa
majedadaylah@MUTAH.EDU.JO © 2022 University of the Witwatersrand
pp 1–9
Majed Aladylah

creates differences, tensions and ambivalences between one’s origins and the place of arrival,
highlighting differences of culture, tradition, value, history and language. Helena Schulz and
Juliane Hammer argue that ‘Diaspora, life away from one’s homeland, is life in flux; it
implies an unstable and ephemeral, fugitive condition. The diaspora condition encompasses
transnational lives. The very term implies, as we have seen, a cross-border, unbounded con-
dition’ (10). As Schulz and Hammer aver, the concept ‘diaspora’ has entailed the doleful and
bitter images of dispersal, wandering and uprootedness that haunt immigrants’ identities. Simi-
larly, Claire Alexander states that:

Here the emphasis is on diaspora as inseparable from forced movement, exile, loss and
longing, on the one hand, and the forging of new identities in the places of arrival, on the
other. The recognition of the unequal and often traumatic circumstances of migration and
dispersal, along with the minoritization. (113)

Here, Alexander draws attention to the intersection and overlapping of diaspora with loss,
forging new identities, transnational voices and the horrific and traumatic consequences of the
scattering and dispersal of immigrants.
These wide-ranging notions are in line with the contexts and subjectivities represented by
diasporic Anglophone Arab writers who have experienced uprooting from their homelands, a
sense of fragmentation, political and existential tension, transnational displacement, devastating
loss and exilic diasporic traumas. This has led these writers to carve out a space of assimilation,
cultural and social acceptance, and attachment in diaspora. In this regard, I have pointed out else-
where that the works of Anglophone Arab writers ‘shed light on a series of cultural and ideologi-
cal perspectives, making them trapped between two spaces, ideologies, identities, homes and
cultures’ (Aladylah 50). In this respect, they interrogate spaces at diasporic borders, and
strive to create new spaces, voices and channels between moving and belonging ‘here’ and
‘there’ and construct new identities that are hybrid and syncretic. Their discourses spring
from the experiences of estrangement, living in-between and exclusion. They engage the domi-
nant cultural, political and social forces that ‘other,’ which construct alterity. Dalal Sarnou
demonstrates that Anglophone Arab writers ‘voice two consciousnesses: home and diaspora,
English and Arabic, the past and the present’ (210). They excavate the cosmos of the diasporic
space and navigate transnational immigrant voices, emphasizing the construction of diasporic
identities. We thus ought to consider how individuals negotiate diaspora, address conflicts
between dislocation and relocation, and struggle against discrimination, racism and negative
stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims in narrative discourses, media and cinema.
Contemporary diasporic Arab Anglophone writers address current political, cultural and
social issues related to dispersion, displacement and the scattering of transnational voices
across diverse spaces. They shed light on the traumatic and racialized circumstances of immi-
grants and their marginalized or excluded identities. The diasporic and transnational journeys
these writers depict are refracted through their fictional characters, who experience the trans-
lation of sociocultural, political and religious practices across borders and the multiple ruptures
between homeland and host societies that these translations produce. Furthermore, they nego-
tiate issues of imperialism, distorted stereotypes, vilification and denigration of Arabs and
Muslims in the diaspora. One of these writers, Hala Alyan, is a Palestinian-American novelist
and poet who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has won various prestigious literary prizes
and is also a clinical psychologist. She was born in the US, but grew up in different places:

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Lebanon, Brooklyn, Kuwait and Texas. She has authored collections of poetry, most notably
Hijra, Four Cities and Atriumm, and two novels – Salt Houses (2017), and The Arsonists’
City (2021). She has been a lifelong diasporic traveller, finding herself displaced, uprooted
and exiled. Alyan sets out to represent and negotiate contemporary political and cultural
issues in the Arab world, such as civil wars, diaspora, exile, discrimination and prejudice.
Her work opens multiple spaces connected with Arab immigrants and their estrangement, and
the torsions and traumas they face in host countries
Alyan interrogates pejorative images of Arabs and Muslims and reflects on negative atti-
tudes towards them in her latest novel The Arsonists’ City. She casts a piercing spotlight on
the exclusion, alienation and racial and ethnic differentiation of Arab immigrants, their being
relegated to subaltern positions in terms of race, nationalism and religion. As with many Arab
Anglophone writers, the novel is also concerned with the culture of fear and various threats
caused by ‘war on terror,’ which has cruelly associated Arab-Muslim immigrants with terrorism
and fundamentalism. This ideological Manicheanism has led to negative depictions of Arabs in
the diaspora. Yousef Ubu Amrieh’s analysis of the novel, ‘Photographs, Diaspora, and Identity:
Homecoming in Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City,’ which reflects on several related concerns,
focuses on how photography is used in the novel to reveal the identity of the protagonist’s father.
Ubu Amrieh demonstrates how Alyan uses photography for aesthetic and thematic purposes (5).
The Arsonists’ City is a personal, experimental and political novel. As an experimental
work, it is aligned with the avant-garde: it presents fragments of a linear plot, juxtaposes multiple
spaces simultaneously, and presents photographic allusions throughout, which are self-reflective
meditations on representation. The two themes, the political and the personal, are vividly inter-
woven and amalgamated, and made more striking as the narrative sequences follow one another
in direct and indirect speech, both using the third-person pronouns ‘she’ and ‘he’. Alyan’s nar-
rative presents us with conflicts, tensions, interrogations of subjectivity and context and intellec-
tually resonant enquiries. The novel has evoked tempests of controversy related to diasporic
spaces and the transitional voices of her fictional characters who are rooted and routed in
their spatial journeys. The Arsonists’ City is divided into five parts; the time span of the
fabula is thirty years. Alyan uses ‘camera eyes’ as a narrative device, revealing the conscious-
ness and experiences of her characters. The narrator of the novel relates the events in the present,
past and future tenses from a limited third-person point of view. The Arsonists’ City is a multi-
layered text shifting among spaces and narratives that are set in various locales: Syria, Beirut,
Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. The narrative is dislocated, fragmented, disintegrated,
and it moves back and forth in time. Its events turn around a Syrian mother, a Lebanese
father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration and diaspora. Alyan
peppers her novel with issues related to Arab sociopolitical conflicts: Lebanon’s civil war, the
Palestinian diaspora and the experience of Arab immigrants worldwide.
The narrative of The Arsonists’ City relates the experience of Idris’s family who travel to
many locales. The mother is Mazna, who is from Syria, Idris is the father, from Lebanon. They
have three American children, all of whom were born and raised in the US and have lived a life
of diaspora and immigration. The diasporic narrative transports us to Damascus, in the 1960s.
Mazna, who is the protagonist, dreams of acting; her dreams express her wishes, desires and
aspirations, and turn on her longing to be a successful actress. Her dreams of travelling to
Europe and America reveal her existential and psychic preoccupations. As The Arsonists’
City’s narrative moves ahead, Alyan jumps to 1965, where Mazna is presented as a self-con-
scious woman who is attempting to grasp her passion for performance. Idris, on the other

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Majed Aladylah

hand, is a medical student who dreams of doing his residency in medicine in the US: ‘I got
accepted to the surgical residency program. In America. That university hospital in California.
It’s somewhere in the desert. A town called Blythe’ (198).
Mazna, in imagining her future, tries to create a meaning and a purpose for her life, a space
for her existence and coherence. Mazna is a prototypically modern individual experiencing the
difficulty of breaking free from the restraints of society and conventions in order to be radically
self-realized. She decides to go to Damascus University to study theater and become an actress.
At the university, her passion for the theater grows and she plays roles in Shakespeare’s The
Tempest and Romeo and Juliet. The Lebanese Civil War breaks out while Mazna is in college
and Syrian troops enter Beirut. An émigré from Lebanon, Tarek Haddad, offers Mazna roles
to perform in plays depicting ‘one-armed merchants who speak to animals or women who
sneak across borders in the bellies of trucks’ (136). These roles do not satisfy her appetite for
theater. She wants to be an actress, to achieve her identity and dreams. Mazna needs to be recog-
nized, heard and praised, and she believes that there is a future for her in acting. Her family
encourages her and appreciates her artistic identity. She is a dreamer, and she finds acting a
space in which she can actualize her identity. Mazna longs to act abroad, in America and
London, yet she remains interested in issues related to the Arab world such as the raging civil
wars, the occupation of Arabs’ countries and spiraling political conflicts. At a point, Tarek
stares at Mazna and says,

Yes, the colonizers. They’re involved, however indirectly, in every single political thing
that’s happened since the Ottomans. Each country had its oppressor – the British in
Palestine, the French in Lebanon. The Westerners drew the maps. They’re the reason
the streets in Beirut have French names; they’re the ones who set up a parliamentary
structure that distributed power unfairly. They’re the reason Palestinians arrived here
in the thousands in ’48, then again in ’67. I want you all to remember that as we rehearse:
The biggest war criminals are always offstage. (130)

In this context, Mazna desires her acting to articulate the conflicts of Arab countries, the ethnic
division of Lebanon and the impact of Western hegemony on Arab countries. The cultural the-
orist, Jack G. Shaheen, sheds light on the influence of media and TV programmers in vilifying
Arabs and Muslims, especially as they are depicted stereotypically as threatening terrorists and
villains. William Greider, in his foreword to Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs, notes that ‘the Arab
stereotypes created by British and French colonialism are still very much with us’ (44).
Greider elaborates that Western colonial influence is still felt, performed and elaborated. In
this regard, Alyan aims to present the influence of Western colonization in Palestine and
Lebanon and its devastating impact on the Palestinians, which has been experienced since the
colonial era and is still with us, scattering and dispersing the Palestinians. Mazna introduces
the negative stereotyped images of Arab countries, drawing on the discourse of Western
orientalism.
Mazna is a vibrant, young woman who is profoundly self-aware: ‘she wants to be an
actress, to fill screens with her pretty, heart-shaped face’ (11). She dreams of life in Beirut,
the cafés, restaurants, and beaches. So, she takes a trip to Beirut with Lara and meets and
befriends Idris, her future husband, who is Lebanese. They also meet his close friend,
Zakaria, who is a Palestinian and lives in a refugee camp. Afterwards, Mazna and Idris marry
and relocate to the Californian desert where they have three children.

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 Acting Across Diaspora

Mazna dreams of having the opportunity to attain success in America well before she enters
this country not her own. She realizes the challenges she might face in the diaspora; she struggles
to experience some transformation that will facilitate a positive vision, hope and optimism in
relation to her future in cinema. Her diasporic cinematic voyage is full of twists and turns.
Mazna and her husband arrive in California a week after their wedding. Her husband Idris
studies medicine and she tries to break into acting and eventually achieves her dream of becom-
ing a successful actress. As her career progresses, Mazna experiences emotional separation from
her family and her country of origin. From the moment of her arrival in the US, she longs to go
back to Syria:

As they walk through the automated doors and down the arrivals hall, see the hundreds of
people carrying signs and balloons, Mazna has the perverse wish for the man not to show,
as though that would settle it. She imagines them returning to the same customs officer.
Our car never came, she’d say. We have to go back now. (283)

She feels herself the victim of xenophobia on her journey to the United States, which she describes
as frightening and arduous. Her loss of life aspirations and dreams causes her despair and anxiety.
This introduction to the country is a shock to her, and she begins to live with uncertainty about her
future. Mazna feels alienated, disintegrated, detached, isolated and emotionally damaged. In
addition, in this phase of the novel, she develops fear and loathing in connection with being a stran-
ger in the US. Earlier, in Lebanon, Mazna had experienced the untimely death of a man she loved,
Zakaria. So, by the time she arrives in the US, she not only experiences alienation and displace-
ment, but she is also mourning after the traumatic death of Zakaria.
The Arsonists’ City continues its diasporic journey of displacements through multiple zones
of conflicts, where frustration, resentment, discrimination and prejudice are intertwined and inter-
connected. Mazna attempts to re-create, reproduce and remodel her identity as a successful actress
in Hollywood. Hollywood plays a crucial role in her attempts to construct a unifying and stable
identity. She strives to be accepted and settled in diasporic spaces, seeks to liberate her caged,
besieged and threatened sense of identity. Moreover, she tries to achieve self-realization, self-
awareness and self-determination amidst psychological and contextual dissonance. Mazna
aspires to be a successful actress in Hollywood but being treated as an immigrant persistently tor-
tures and disappoints her: ‘I will always be an immigrant’ (73), she says resignedly. This recog-
nition to some degree mitigates – by contextualizing – her feelings of hurt, defeat and apathy, but it
leads her to question her existential, mental and emotional identity. In Hollywood, Mazna is mar-
ginalized and discriminated against; she faces a variety of psychological, social, ideological, cul-
tural and emotional traumas associated with her displacement. I observe elsewhere that ‘Alyan
presents many voices of different generations, from the past and the present, amalgamates and jux-
taposes them; these voices are homeless, shuttered and fractured’ (Aladylah 48). Indeed, in the
novel, Mazna tries to challenge Hollywood’s master narrative, but it dominates her personal nar-
rative and fragments her, leaving her at the intersection of several identities fashioned from preju-
dice and discrimination. She is othered, demonized and feels tainted. Her sense of assimilation and
attachment to Hollywood is shattered when she is pushed to the margins of the film industry:
‘[T]here was no part. There was no movie, she’d say. I’m a fucking idiot’ (329). She expresses
frustration and resentment at this situation; she lacks confidence and feels vulnerable and out of
place. Mazna wants to ‘scream. She wants to hit Idris and ask where Hollywood is now, where
London is, where the rest of her life is. “I’m not doing that again”’ (320).

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Majed Aladylah

Mazna can feel ‘others eyeing her curiously when she speaks, not hostile, exactly, but atten-
tive. It’s different with Idris – America can’t abide Arab men – but with her, the reaction almost
borders on pity. Mazna can’t explain why it’s worse’ (323). Mazna becomes aware of the extent
of prejudice and discrimination, and of the impossibility of assimilating into a world that regards
Arabs and Muslims as signally responsible for the horrific events of 9/11. Transnational Arab
voices are unaccommodated in US hegemony, making it impossible to maintain a sense of iden-
tity, achieve any meaningful social integration or cultural assimilation. Arab diasporic voices are
excluded, segregated and marginalized in ‘host’ societies. There are moments, though, in which
Mazna resists: ‘“Stop ogling,” she says in a voice that reminds her of Lulwa. She thinks of the
customs officer. “They already think we’re peasants”’ (282). Yet Mazna’s creolized and diasporic
identity cannot find accommodation given the obstacles and challenges arising from her
displacement.
Despite these obstacles and challenges, Mazna insists on persisting, on overcoming these
dilemmas. She scours the Yellow Pages and messages many acting agencies, but unfortunately
the agents all claim that thy are not taking on new clients. Mazna is understandably frustrated
and depressed by this. But, at a graduation ceremony, Mazna meets Mr. Cal, the head of film
studies at the university where Idris is studying medicine. Cal knows that Mazna is an actress
and suggests her name to a friend of his, who is making a short movie. She happily agrees to
audition, but unfortunately the role is trivial and stereotyped. The movie director, Pen, agrees
to give her the role because she has “the perfect look. A little 1920s, old Hollywood” (301).

They shoot a scene of her walking along the road, the smokestacks in the background.
The pretty, thin girl who dressed Mazna lights one cigarette after the other for her,
and they film her smoking moodily as she walks, then crushing the butt under her
heel. With every puff, she imagines a kitten in her belly wrinkling its nose at the
smoke. (302)

Mazna feels rejected and alienated by the bland role, and she begins to develop additional nega-
tive sentiments towards Hollywood. Jack G. Shaheen points out that western heroes call Arabs
‘“assholes,” “bastards,” “camel-dicks,” “pigs,” “devil-worshipers,” “jackals,” “rats,” “rag-
heads,” “towel-heads,” “scum-buckets,” “sons-of-dogs,” “buzzards of the jungle,” “sons-of-
whores,” “sons-of-unnamed goats,” and “sons-of-she-camels’ (Real Bad Arabs 38). Shaheen
goes on to reflect on how Hollywood contributes to spreading stereotypical negative images
of Arabs. Mazna, in the midst of these pejorative representations, feels nauseated, and
decides that she does not want to act again. She comes to believe that her acting is wooden
and unnatural, nothing at all like it was in Tarek’s plays. Her face seems slack and bare. It’s
as if she is a doll emptied of stuffing. Cal again offers her a role to act in a love story. She
has met the director, but she is not satisfied with the role she is offered. Nevertheless, Mazna
begins auditioning for other movies, but without much success. She does not get a serious
role as a real actress:

She doesn’t audition for a single part she truly wants, and she comforts herself with this
when she doesn’t, in turn, get a single part. They are commercial roles for hijabis or two-
liners in movies with terrorist plots. (335)

Mazna is offered only commercial and subsidiary roles entrenched in the rhetoric of threat and
terrorism. The stereotype in the collective Western mind is that all Arabs are Muslims, and all

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Muslims are Arabs. Thus, the negative stereotypes of Arabs in Hollywood cinema continue to
surface. The filmmakers and movie directors want Mazna only to act in movies related to terror-
ism, extremism and violence. Jack G. Shaheen argues that ‘films project the diverse Muslim
world as populated with bearded mullahs, billionaire sheikhs, terrorist bombers, backward Bed-
ouins, and noisy bargainers’ (‘Hollywood’s Muslim Arabs’ 26). As Hollywood filmmakers think
almost exclusively in terms of misleading, dubious and negative stereotypes of Arabs and
Muslims, Mazna is therefore repeatedly cast as a villainous female.
The negative image of Arabs is now deeply rooted in the American psyche, as it is in much
western ideology and thought. This distortion equates Arabs and Muslims with devils and
demons; they are viewed in terms of ‘Islamic terrorism,’ ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and ‘militant
Islam’. The association of Arabs and Muslims with radicalism, fanaticism and terrorism has been
reinforced in the media. Edward Said argues that ‘the purport of the film is to agitate against
Islam as a sinister breeder of cruel, insensate killers, plotters, and lustfully violent men’ (85).
These twisted depictions seek to arouse resentment, anger and hate in Hollywood audiences.
In this regard, Ibrahim Kalin notes that ‘the depiction of Islamic societies as sensual, despotic,
backward, underdeveloped, tribal, promiscuous, aberrant, irrational, and mysterious collectiv-
ities have found its way into American popular culture’ (Kalin 164–65). These distorted, sensa-
tionalist depictions are myopic and fundamentally detrimental, and have been used to buttress,
ideologically, both colonization and the ‘War on Terror’.
In this regard, Edward Said observes ‘the frequent caricatures of Muslims as oil suppliers, as
terrorists, and more recently, as bloodthirsty mobs’ (45). He continues, stating that ‘[f]or most of the
Middle Ages and during the early part of the Renaissance in Europe, Islam was believed to be a
demonic religion of apostasy, blasphemy, and obscurity’ (45). Occidental ideologies have been
consistently invested in the demonization of Islam – the Western cultural imagination has been
crafted, in significant part, from Islamophobia. This finds a particularly damaging focus in the rep-
resentation of Arabs and Muslims in the diaspora, in all media. Rachid Acim situates this tendency
in its historical context: ‘Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism is clearly not a new phenomenon;
dislike and hatred of Islam is deep-rooted in the 7th century when the Prophet Mohammed
(570–632) started preaching and spreading out the faith throughout Arabia’ (27).
In the diasporic discourse of The Arsonists’ City, Alyan situates her fictional protagonist in
a constant struggle between her dreams and the foreign country, in which they are not realized.
Mazna is dislocated in the American cinematic space, a space marked by denial, rejection, preju-
dice, discrimination and marginalization. ‘In America they are considered brown. You become
attached to that. You are given a name and you respond to it. They are brown in America. There
is something self-righteous that lives alongside that marginalization’ (241). Despite Holly-
wood’s discrimination and exclusions, Mazna finally does not lose hope of fulfilling her
acting dreams. She becomes a cinematic traveler and meets a new film director. But she faces
a new challenge; the new film director does not accept her because of her accent: ‘The directors
don’t want authenticity. They don’t want her accent – they want someone who speaks perfect
English and can do an accent. She is too pretty for simpler roles, too dark for American
parts’ (335). Mazna, thus, experiences another mode of discrimination – as an Arab immigrant
who is fluent in English she is held not to be ‘authentic’. Alyan highlights other structural preju-
dices and negative projections. Mazna meets Sam, who is a film producer and director, but he
informs her that he has taken her on as a favor to Cal: ‘This is a favor to Cal. Another time: I
can’t prioritize clients who don’t live in LA’ (336). Given that she does live in California, this
decision masks the director’s obvious prejudice. Arabs, Mazna’s experiences suggest, are

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Majed Aladylah

most often deployed by Hollywood as religious fanatics, who are threatening American democ-
racy, freedom and culture.
As an Anglophone Arab novelist, Hala Alyan draws our attention to the destructive socio-
political, cultural, political, religious and ethnic stereotypes that distort representations of Arabs
and Muslims across the world. She shows Hollywood, her particular site of grotesque misrepre-
sentation, to be a velvet weapon: it views and casts Muslims in general and Arabs in particular in
hideous ways, as terrorists, murderers and ignorant religious extremists. As a counterpoint, she
presents narratives of diasporic resistance, self-assertion and accomplishment. Alyan’s protago-
nist, Mazna, encounters conflicting racialized histories, alienation and a constant rejection of her
hybridity. She searches for personal success in her diasporic cinematic voyage, seeks to find and
refine her diasporic identity, strives to become famous and successful in her acting career. Fur-
thermore, she has strived to cross anachronistic spaces, ideological beliefs and structural dis-
crimination; she sought to achieve her identity in a cinematic space, a space of an Arab
actress in diaspora. Mazna carves out a space of self-discovery through her diasporic experi-
ences. Sadly, she is not able to shape a diasporic identity based in difference and diversity.
Thus, she meets with loss, frustration and insecurity, faces prejudice, institutional discrimination
and racism because of her identity, religion, color and language. Stuart Hall proposes that dia-
sporic identities ‘are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew,
through transformation and difference’ (235). He suggests that diasporic identities open
spaces of transformation and rediscovery of self through a mode of attachment and acceptance
rather than separation and exclusion.
On the contrary, Alyan sheds light on the fundamental dilemmas and traumas of the exist-
ence of a diasporic Arab woman whose identity is fractured and shattered due to discrimination,
exclusion and negative stereotypes. Mazna emigrates from Syria to Lebanon and the US,
encounters difficulties, problems and inhospitality that prevent her from maintaining a stable,
homogeneous identity. She suffers rejection by foreigners and strangers, which affects her
emotionally and existentially. Alyan depicts an ambivalent identity that oscillates between
two cultures, two identities and across multiple spaces. In so doing, she reveals the tensions
and clashes that may cause emotional dissonance, grief, damage and confusion for immigrants.
Furthermore, she exposes the reductive negative stereotypes, colonial sentiments, prejudice and
discriminatory schemes that divert and direct public opinion. Alyan focuses on the political,
social, religious and structural environments that influence migrants’ capacity to establish and
maintain their identities in diaspora. Mazna travels with her husband to the US in the hope of
addressing her loss of self, so that she can strive to devise a new identity based in her autonomy
and self-determination. She attempts to overcome the many dilemmas caused by uprooting, the
difficulties of migration, the structural prejudices and discrimination against Arabs and Muslims.
For Mazna, acting in Hollywood remains a distant dream that she will never achieve. Yet Alyan
opens spaces of cross-cultural tolerance marked by a willingness to accept others, in which it is
possible to live with difference and value religious and cultural diversity: ‘Let the past die’ (401).

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