Our Arab

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 and 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
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. – ‘Under the Radar LGBTQ+ Reads from 2026 You Won’t Want to Miss’ * Book Riot *
A stunning collection … at once sharp and deeply lyrical … 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, author of I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME
Outstanding … Throughout, [Arafat] 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. * Publisher’s Weekly *
A moving, insightful, intelligent, never didactic meditation on the very idea of home. With humour and affection Zaina Arafat weaves the improbable details of her Palestinian family’s splintered journey post-dispossession … 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, author of BOTTOMS UP AND THE DEVIL LAUGHS
Arafat brings her singularly compelling voice-compassionate, wry, curious, furious, and saturated with devotion-to the complexities and heartache of Palestinian diasporic life … This is an account of heartbreak that is also full of radiance. – Leslie Jamison, author of SPLINTERS
A book poignant in passion and electric in expression. – Jay Griffiths, author of WHY REBEL
I was captivated by this tender, funny, fierce collection of essays which grapples with loss, despair, hope and yearning. As funny as it is moving, it is thoughtfully written, poetic and heartfelt. – Emma van Straaten, author of THIS IMMACULATE BODY

Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian American writer and the author of the novel You Exist Too Much, which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay’s ‘favourite book of 2020’. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Granta, Guernica, Harper’s Bazaar, The Believer, Vice, and BuzzFeed. She has received fellowships from the Hawthornden Foundation and Jack Jones Literary Arts, and was named a Champion of Pride by The Advocate. She is a professor at Hunter College and also teaches at Barnard College. She lives with her family in New York.

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