Finding Hope in the World Anew

The first time I heard Arafat read, we were nestled deep in the high desert of New Mexico, where she was fine-tuning her first novel, You Exist Too Much (2020), a riveting book about an unnamed young lesbian caught between dualities: America and the Middle East, straight and queer culture, desperate—and terrified—to be understood.

Arafat has been going to Palestine since she was 8 months old. Her first memory is being at her great-grandparents’ house in Nablus and playing on the neighbors’ swing set. She also remembers playing cards, long lines, dusty slippers, the undulation of Arabic music, m’sakhan—chicken cooked with sumac, allspice, turmeric, and fried onions served over pita bread soaked in olive oil, served on Friday and wrapped in paper.

You Exist Too Much was selected by Roxane Gay as her favorite book of the year and also won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award. Arafat’s next book, a nonfiction essay collection, Our Arab, is forthcoming from Little, Brown. She teaches writing at Barnard College and over the last few months has been writing beautifully about being a Palestinian in the diaspora, grappling with the distance, the live-stream feed of devastation on our phones, the young journalists sending out updates from Gaza, the illusion of safety and the long arm of trauma, and the practice and necessity of memory work.

We met up on a hot summer day in the backyard of a Brooklyn coffee shop and talked about the heat, the escalating cost of living, Arafat’s life as a mother of two, our commitment to writing despite the deceleration of the publishing industry, and identity politics. We continued chatting through a Google Doc, texts, and voice notes. (These conversations have been condensed and edited for clarity.)

J Wortham: How are you arriving today? What has your day been like up to this point?

Zaina Arafat: I love this question. My day has involved waking up at around 6 to the sounds of Nour, our 19-month-old, pulling books off the shelf by her crib. Then, like every day, we play with her toys before I feed her breakfast and dress her, then pack her lunch. Today she tripped over my foot and hit her head on the corner of the dishwasher, which was terrifying. My wife, Rebecca, iced it, and Nour cried intensely for one minute then seemed to forget all about it. Aya, our newborn, had her two-month checkup at the pediatrician’s office and, though we’d planned to drop Nour off at daycare beforehand, we ran out of time and ended up taking them both in to see the doctor, which was handy after Nour’s tumble. We dropped Nour off at Montessori then went to look at a house on the other side of Brooklyn, as life in our little apartment has gotten quite cramped. The other day I was trying to put my computer down and literally could not find one clear surface.

JW: Ah, I’m so glad baby Nour is OK! I think we met way back in 2018 or 2017 at the Jack Jones Literary Arts writing residency. What were your goals then as a writer and where are you in proximity to them? How are they evolving?

ZA: I had just sold my novel back when we met and I was working on edits. My goal was to tighten together all the novel’s various threads so that they together answered the question of why something in the distance could be more appealing than what’s in front of you—i.e., what is the appeal of unattainability? In the book, unattainability orbits around unrequited love, cultural in-betweenness, and lack of statehood/self-determination, which is the basic condition of all Palestinians. In many ways, this latter unattainability explained the first two. The new book explores the dual gaze toward the adopted homeland and the home left behind, perpetual longing and language as a barrier, particularly between immigrant and first-generation, between colonizer and colonized, between parents and children (I grew up understanding very little of what my parents were saying).

Another goal back when we met was to challenge assumptions about Palestinians subversively through fiction, essentially asking a reader to spend 250 pages with a queer Palestinian and see them as just as human and “normal” as anyone else. This is a goal I’ll always work toward in some way or another with my writing, though now I’m really interested in larger systemic structures and legacies that oppress, in addition to media representations, including colonialism and Zionism, capitalism. I’m thinking through these -isms in the collection I’m now working on, how these shape power dynamics.

JW: There’s a line in You Exist Too Much where the character is talking about memory and how hers is contested by people around her who insist she can’t remember details from her childhood: “I remember. Perhaps because I want to. I can just as easily forget when I want.” How does the practice of remembering inform your creative process/work?

ZA: The act of remembering feels like the starting point for the writing process, examining a bit of either individual or collective history and creating a scene of it, then thinking how that moment speaks to a present-day psychology or manifestation.

The practice of remembering is important to me because so much of what I have been through or what I’ve experienced as a first-generation Palestinian is informed by events that I’ve had no understanding of. And so there’s this desire to unearth those memories and the trauma surrounding them to understand my own present-day self and present-day reality. And my parents, both of them growing up under occupation and then coming to America from there. All of these things trickle down into my own life that I have no direct memory of. In some sense, it’s their memory. [And that] recollection is really important to me because it informs so much of who I am. I can remember dates. I can tell you exactly the dates we were at Jack Jones. I could tell you your birthday. It’s embarrassing, I’m a fucking weirdo, but I do.

JW: That sounds like care.

ZA: I do care.

JW: It seems like there is also an active practice of refusal in your work, in choosing what is allowed to be remembered and by whom. How does refusal figure into your life and your process?

ZA: Oh, so much. In life, I refuse to remember bad things, which can actually be a problem, because I end up repeating mistakes or else giving people the benefit of the doubt when I shouldn’t.

JW: How does privacy/refusal/vulnerability shape your nonfiction writing—like how are you self-editing your new essay collection, which you just sold to Little, Brown?

ZA: I think I always balance each of these against its opposite and place my writing somewhere on the middle of the spectrum. I always think about Kierkegaard’s idea that despair is an imbalance between freedom and necessity, too much of either creates it. I think vulnerability is necessary in order to reach readers, but too much of it can also alienate them. Same goes for both privacy and refusal.

JW: Your first novel is about a young woman who is caught in the middle of that, and it manifests as a ferocious desire to be seen and the safety of hiding. She is trying to compile a composite image of herself using other people as a mirror. Even though it’s about someone struggling with validation and a love addiction, I remember finding it to be such an apt metaphor for social media. Does that resonate with your intentions?

ZA: Yesss, though perhaps not entirely intentionally, since social media wasn’t as central a feature in our lives when I started writing this. But so much of her journey is going from a place of seeking approval from others—her mother, her obsessions, and feeling like she’s not enough or else unworthy of existing in and of herself—to feeling like she is valid in her own right, in the spaces she occupies.

JW: There’s a line in your New York Magazine essay called “Witnessing Gaza through Instagram” about the limits of empathy and compassion and the distance that screens allow: “Will a picture of a girl who has lost 60 family members and the use of her legs inspire only empathy? Will it change anything, or will the bombing just continue, the number of orphans and murdered doctors keep rising?” What is your relationship to the display and consumption of tragedy as an instigator of care?

This conundrum reminds me of the work of Saidya Hartman, who in her book chapter “Innocent Amusements” studies the letters of an abolitionist who performed grotesque re-enactments of enslavement to try and shock people into supporting abolition, and she observes that over time, he starts to derive pleasure from the performance of spectacle and that he eventually “fails to expand the space of the other but merely places himself in its stead.” Which is to say, the act of trying to force others into empathy can sometimes displace the people who need the empathy in the first place.

Do you feel like there’s a tide turning in terms of galvanizing people or are we all just traumatizing ourselves over and over again?

ZA: This is such a fascinating question, and I really want to read Hartman’s work. I don’t think that we necessarily derive pleasure or even become immune to scenes of suffering, but I do think that we don’t know what to do with the emotions they engender, and I think that, in many ways, we try to absolve our guilt by “witnessing,” such that the images become a sort of salve for us rather than a call to any action outside of just witnessing. It feels exploitative for the subjects of these images and realities.

JW: Something that I’ve been wondering about is whether we’re at the limits of the power of sharing.

ZA: Simply sharing is not a real action in the sense that it involves no sacrifice, really, except again, in the context of Israel-Palestine where you could lose your job, as we’ve seen with many people, or be put on probation. Beyond that, though, it’s not a disruption to the system. Whereas the protests that were taking place at Columbia and the encampments felt like, to me, more of a disruption and is, I think, what gets society to really stop and pay attention to something. I was like, This is going to be a turning point. But there’s also this feeling of voyeurism. We’ve seen thousands and thousands of pictures of children maimed and killed, buried beneath rubble, and yet this continues every day. What does that mean if nothing changes and we continue to consume these images, whether we share them and outrage or not—we’re still just watching them?

JW: It’s twofold: we wouldn’t have the protests without social media, but they also contribute to the necropolitics you’re describing. As people of the global majority, our visibility is often intertwined with suffering and tragedy. There’s both a compression and expansion that happens. No one is commissioning us, listening to our book pitches, reaching out to text us except during moments of extreme cultural exaltation—OK, maybe sometimes, but rarely. How do you reconcile that? Do you even need to?

ZA: It’s precisely its own discrimination and bias, which can be ironic when the people insisting on making visible only our suffering and tragedy see themselves as serving us.

JW: Are there other things that you want to write about? Do you feel like you can give yourself permission to make art and make work about things other than being Palestinian?

ZA: I initially started by writing about Palestine in response to the war in 2006, but then I was like, I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I want to be able to write about other things. But then I was like, Well, the thing is, I kind of have to, you know, lean into that. And it’s all that’s on my mind right now. In September I wrote a profile of a Chilean chef for a culinary magazine and it felt amazing.

A reader once said to me that [my novel] was the most and least about Palestine. And that’s what I want. In some sense, it’s always in the background—all the sort of associated themes of being denied and living unsustainability. The erasure and denial of an existence and identity. And at the same time, my book is just about this queer woman that kept falling in love with women she couldn’t have. I like the subversiveness of writing about things other than Palestine but always having Palestine sort of in the background in some sense.

For me, also, when I go back to Palestine, I wonder if I’ll be able to get back in after having all of this writing out about it. I haven’t been since 2018.

JW: There’s also a line in one of your pieces about Palestinian people going to the beach after a bombing to celebrate their aliveness. A practice of sustenance. What’s sustaining you these days?

ZA: Lately my family. Watching Nour and Aya experience everything for the first time, the joy and wonder they derive from a leaf on a tree. It really makes you, me, the world new again, as a hopeful place. Also writing, always.