Our Arab
On Longing, Belonging, and Hope
Contributors
By Zaina Arafat
Formats and Prices
- On Sale
- Sep 29, 2026
- Page Count
- 320 pages
- Publisher
- Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN-13
- 9780316584708
Price
$14.99Price
$19.99 CADFormat
Format:
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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?
Our Arab is Zaina Arafat's highly anticipated follow-up to her critically acclaimed novel You Exist Too Much, with essays that 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 and forming an incredibly complex portrait of what it means to be Palestinian today.
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"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
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"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
