A poignant essay collection on the longing and hope of living in diaspora and what it means to be Palestinian today, from the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of You Exist Too Much.
Of the many Palestinian Americans in the diaspora, few have direct experiences or memories of their ancestral land, if any at all. So how does one maintain a connection to a home so volatile, ever-shrinking, and nearly unattainable? And how does a child of diaspora raise a child of diaspora, at a time when Palestinians throughout the world-particularly those living in their homeland-are vulnerable to massive violence?
A highly anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed You Exist Too Much, the essays in Our Arab coalesce around the fundamental characteristic of living in diaspora, the state of longing: longing to be elsewhere, longing to return home, and longing to know what home is. This is a book that holds many truths at once about society, identity, and family, filled with flashes of radical compassion and anger to form an incredibly complex portrait of what it means to be Palestinian today.
Zaina Arafat is an LGBTQ Arab-American writer. Her debut novel You Exist Too Much won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay's favourite book of 2020. Arafat's stories and essays have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, Harper's Bazaar and VICE. In recognition of her work, she was awarded the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts and named a Champion of Pride by The Advocate. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.