Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging and Hope

Zaina Arafat

Zaina Arafat

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?

A highly anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed You Exist Too Much, the essays in Our Arab 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 to form an incredibly complex portrait of what it means to be Palestinian today.