Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging and Hope

'Precise, vulnerable and deeply thought-through . . . 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'With humour and affection, Zaina Arafat weaves the improbable details of her Palestinian family's splintered journey post-dispossession' Kerry Howley, author of Bottoms Up and the Devil LaughsOf 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. 'Beautifully written and bracingly honest, Our Arab is a meditation on displacement, memory, and the fragile, enduring work of making a life' Hala Alyan, author of I'll Tell You When I'm Home

Pagina's: 224, Hardcover, Dialogue Books