Early Praise:

“One way to mitigate the pain of a shrinking homeland... is to find yourself in an expanded world,” writes Lambda Literary Award–winning novelist Arafat (You Exist Too Much) in this outstanding portrait-in-essays of the Palestinian diaspora. In “Palestine Has a Cold,” Arafat travels to the Middle East with her pregnant wife and toddler with plans to visit her family’s hometown of Nablus, only to decide the danger is too great and realize that, “sometimes, to see a place most clearly, you must be outside of it.” The title essay recaps Arafat’s father’s year as an exchange student in small-town Minnesota in the 1960s, where he was embraced and voted onto the student council and homecoming court, and Arafat’s discordant experience joining him on a trip to his class’s 50-year reunion in a post-9/11 world. In “Angry Arab Woman,” she considers how Arab women are denied access to their own rage through her experience as the lone Palestinian voice on a 2023 panel about the war on Gaza. 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.

—Starred Publishers Weekly Review

"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, National Book Award Winner, 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 at New York Magazine and author of Bottoms Up

"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, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, poet and author of Salt Houses and I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

"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