Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope - Paperback

by Zaina Arafat (Author)

A poignant, moving essay collection on the longing and hope of living in diaspora and what it means to be Palestinian today, from the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of You Exist Too Much.

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.

One of The Chicago Review of Books' Most Anticipated Books in Fall 2026 Goodreads October Memoir & Autobiography Pick

Author Biography

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 favorite book of the year. 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.