Our Arab

"In Our Arab, Zaina Arafat brings her singularly compelling voice—compassionate, wry, curious, furious, and saturated with devotion—to the complexities and heartache of Palestinian diasporic life: cultivating love and lineage in the face of constant attempts at erasure and the anguish of watching a genocide unfold from afar. This is an account of heartbreak that is also full of radiance. Arafat doesn’t traffic in hollow narratives of redemption, but she does suggest that one way to respond to 'a disappearing map is to find yourself within an expanded world,' and gives us this expanded world in all its saturated colors, its grief and love, its refusal to surrender home."—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams

"Our Arab is a stunning collection of interconnected essays by Zaina Arafat, written in prose—at once sharp and deeply lyrical—that traces the contours of diasporic longing. Moving fluidly through questions of identity, inheritance, and motherhood, these essays speak to the quiet negotiations of belonging that shape mothering, love, creative practice between places. Beautifully written and bracingly honest, Our Arab is a meditation on displacement, memory, and the fragile, enduring work of making a life."—Hala Alyan, poet and author of Salt Houses and I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

"A beautiful and thoroughly honest meditation on home as both journey and destination. Amidst a decades-long campaign of erasure, amidst virulent racism and repression, amidst a genocide, Arafat interrogates what it means to be rooted to Palestinian and American identities, memories, ways of being in the world. Every word, every detail of time and place, rings true, and having read these precise, vulnerable and deeply thought-through essays, one is left with the sense that belonging is not some binary state, but rather an ongoing, ever-expansive act."—Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

"A moving, insightful, intelligent, never didactic meditation on the very idea of home. With humor and affection Zaina Arafat weaves the improbable details of her Palestinian family’s splintered journey post-dispossession. Her young father thrives as the only Arab student in a rural Minnesota high school. Her mother’s father, a surgeon, cares for miners in rural Virginia. Her insistently fashionable mother longs for high society back in the Middle East. Our Arab is a chronicle of the Palestinian experience that will find resonance with anyone who has ever been in love, taught high school English, mined coal, mothered a child, or indulged the fantasy of permanence."—Kerry Howley, Features Writer for New York Magazine and author of Bottoms Up

"[An] outstanding portrait-in-essays of the Palestinian diaspora. Throughout, she explores her own psyche, detailing minute reactions and feelings that emerge from her daily life, relationships, and personal milestones, but that also intertwine in unexpected ways with the maddening reality of living in a world that refuses to acknowledge the daily crimes perpetrated against her people. Clarifying and powerful, this probes at the wounded hearts of Palestinians in exile."

—Publishers Weekly

"...Brilliant essays exploring the joys and grief of life in the Palestinian diaspora. With luscious prose that at moments took my breath away, she dives into her family's history and search for home, the horrors of watching the genocide in Gaza from afar, Arab women's rage, her experiences with queer motherhood, and more. Arafat's talent is undeniable."

—Book Riot

"A thoughtful view from the far-flung Palestinian diaspora of life at home and in exile."

—Kirkus