Our Arab : On Longing, Belonging and Hope

Together, the essays in this collection create a portrait of the Palestinian diaspora and the tensions and joys that come with being part of this community.

The collection begins with Arafat traveling to the Middle East, August 2023, to visit Palestine while her wife was newly pregnant. The piece tells a larger story of how a Palestinian in the diaspora maintains a connection to a homeland that''s so volatile and that''s ever-shrinking and hard to reach, almost unattainable, and to an identity that''s facing erasure. How does a child of diaspora raise a child of diaspora, at a time when Palestinians throughout the world are vulnerable to massive violence?

The essays then move backward in time, with Arafat''s father arriving in America for the first time in 1963, as a foreign exchange student in Windom, Minnesota, and the coincidence that took him back to Windom fifty years later. Each subsequent essay tells a story that touches on a different aspect of the diasporic experience, including "Disfigures of Speech," and the challenge of trying to communicate across the vast divide between first- and second-generations, when that existing gap, is widened by barriers of language and culture. "The Problem of Being Palestinian," published in BuzzFeed, and "Fasting for Ramadan While Gaza Goes Hungry," published in The New Yorker, each take on the question of how to respond to events in your native country, often in our case wars, famines, and genocides, when you are thousands of miles away.

All of the essays consider the ways in which the collective traumas that are unique to the Palestinian experience are handed down from generations and trickle into our lives, our psyches, our behaviour, impacting how and who we are in the world.