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Hala Alyan is an Arab American novelist and poet. Besides  The Arsonists’ City  (2021), which will be examined in this paper, she has published a novel titled  Salt Houses  (2017) and four collections of poetry. This paper argues that Alyan’s novel shows how photographs help the protagonist, Ava, to re-discover her own identity and unveil a forty-year-old family secret. This goal will be achieved by drawing on Roland Barthes’s concepts of  punctum  and  stadium . Ava’s story is situated within the broader context of Palestinian experiences of displacement and homelessness. Her life turns upside down when she spends her summer holiday in Beirut in the late 2010s. She realises her identity by tracing a number of photographs which she finds in an album in her grandparents’ old house in Beirut. Like other Arab novelists in diaspora, Alyan portrays Ava’s identity as a site over which social, cultural and transnational forces converge.

Photographs, Diaspora, and Identity: Homecoming in Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City