Al Jazeera Podcasts.

Today, the psychological impacts are bearing witness to genocide.

The destruction or the suffering is so unimaginable on a scale that feels really impossible to grasp

that the mind just sort of shuts down.

And there's a lot of just like throwing up your hands and like there's nothing I can do.

How one Palestinian-American writer and clinical psychologist grapples with displacement and trauma in her work.

I'm Malika Bilal and this is the take.

In you is the glittering Beirut pavement after rain, the ports of Boston.

In you are both my grandmother's rebellious blood, following men escaping wars from one country to another. My mother's leavings, my aunts, the rage and

humiliation and exile. In you is the harm and rejoicing and help of generations of women.

In you live the people that made you, all of them. I wouldn't give you another story,

even if I could, for this is the one that bore you. And it is heavy and dazzling and the truth.

My name is Halalian, and I'm a clinical psychologist, professor, and writer based in Brooklyn, New York.

And that was an excerpt for my forthcoming memoir.

I'll tell you when I'm home. Hala, it is so nice to have you on the take. Welcome.

We've just heard how you introduce yourself in one line, but we know from your writing and from your poetry that your identity is made up of not only what you do and where you live, but where your family is from and why they

left those places. How does all of that inform your work? I mean, I think it's one of those

things where it's actually so ubiquitous. It's hard to even place it. I think even my relationship to language and storytelling and

reading and writing is connected to exile in that I learned English at the same time that I learned

to read and write because we had left Kuwait after the invasion and my parents had sought asylum

in the state. So there's a way in which even my

introduction to the English language was kind of connected to displacements. And by the time I was

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