Our Cut of Salt
by Deena Helm
Nuhad was a teenager at the time of the Nakba in 1948, when her family was forcibly evicted from their house in the port and fishing city of Haifa. Having settled in the US, she clams up about her past, although she names her daughter Haifa, a tribute to the homeland she has left behind. She is an icy, distant mother, haunted by long-buried secrets and tragedies.
When Nuhad passes away, her granddaughter Marina, despite Haifa’s reservations, travels to Palestine and seeks out the house which used to belong to her family. From Rania, who was Nuhad’s best friend during their golden pre-Nakba years, Marina learns that the family home has built a reputation for being cursed and haunted. Regularly put up for sale, its inhabitants periodically disappear or die in tragic circumstances. The discovery of Nuhad’s teenage journals reveals long-buried guilt, while the family's ghosts deliver ominous warnings against the wider backdrop of the Palestinian conflict.
Gothic and horror fiction have long held a subversive edge, from the earliest wave of Gothic fiction, which introduced the frisson of emerging Romanticism in the Classical and Enlightenment Age, to the “political Gothic” of Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, to the socially conscious nineteenth-century Gothic of the Brontës, Wilkie Collins and others, right down to contemporary horror with its taste for feminist, LGBTQI+ and political themes. Deena Helm’s debut novel Our Cut of Salt is, however, the first novel I have read which harnesses the haunted house trope to examine the plight of Palestinians under occupation. Like her protagonists Marina and Haifa, Helm is herself a mixed Palestinian-American author, and it is clear that her own family history has infused the novel, giving it a particularly passionate and authentic feeling. For this alone, Our Cut of Salt is a promising debut which is well worth exploring.
Where I find the novel disappointing is in its breach of the “golden rule” of showing rather than telling. There is a tendency to repeat, highlight and underline. Strong and effective metaphors are diluted through reiteration and explanation. The psychology of the main characters is laid bare not simply through their actions but also through expositions of their thought processes.
This is a strong novel, and also quite innovative in its use of the haunted-house trope. Yet I feel that greater subtlety could have made it much more impactful.
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