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Our Arab
On Longing, Belonging, and Hope
Contributors
By Zaina Arafat
Formats and Prices
- On Sale
- Sep 29, 2026
- Page Count
- 224 pages
- Publisher
- Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN-13
- 9780316584685
Price
$28.00Price
$37.00 CADFormat
Format:
- Hardcover $28.00 $37.00 CAD
- ebook $14.99 $19.99 CAD
- Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $24.99
- Trade Paperback (Large Print) $30.00 $40.00 CAD
Preorder from Retailers:
Fewer and fewer Palestinians living in the diaspora today have direct experiences of their homeland. How can they maintain a connection to a land so volatile, ever shrinking, and nearly unattainable? And how can a child of diaspora raise a child of diaspora, at a time when Palestinians throughout the world—particularly those living in their homeland—are more vulnerable than ever to censorship, violence, and erasure?
Luminous, joyous, and evocative, Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope is Zaina Arafat’s highly anticipated follow-up to her award-winning novel You Exist Too Much. In essays that move from Nablus to the Appalachian Mountains and from Amman to Manhattan, Arafat reveals “in a singularly compelling voice” (Leslie Jamison) that to live in diaspora is to exist in a state of longing: longing to be elsewhere, longing to return home, and longing to know what home is. A call to action and a call to love, Our Arab holds many truths at once—about society, identity, and family—and flashes with radical compassion, fierce pride, bitter loss, and righteous anger, 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
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"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
