Zaina Arafat

Striking down the bowling pins of diaspora and desire. 

By Elika Khosravani

Illustration by Audrey Wang

It is my understanding that at some point in every student’s undergraduate career, they meet a professor who quietly, and then all at once, rearranges their world. For me, that professor is Zaina Arafat. Every Thursday, she takes the train down from her apartment in Harlem to teach Fiction and Personal Narrative at Barnard, and I have the privilege of watching up close the rare combination of intuition and generosity that makes her not only a gifted writer but a magnetic teacher. 

Arafat is a force to be reckoned with: her debut novel, You Exist Too Much, won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, and quickly established her as an emerging voice writing about queerness and intergenerational trauma. Her essays and stories have appeared everywhere, from The New Yorker and The New York Times to Granta, Guernica, and NPR, and her work has earned her a Jack Jones Literary Arts fellowship and a spot on The Advocate’s list of Champions of Pride. She is currently finishing an essay collection to be published next fall. 

I spoke to Arafat on a grey November day, from my tiny double on campus. The Zoom rectangle of her dark-green home office—a room lined with wooden shelves and brimming stacks of books—seemed almost too small to contain her presence. What follows is our discussion on diaspora, literature, and the legacies that writers inherit and pass on. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

. . . 

The Blue and White: My first question for you is—because in class we talk a lot about arriving to new spaces—how are you arriving today, and what did your day look like before we start this conversation?

Zaina Arafat: Yesterday, really late at night, I turned in a revision of my manuscript for my second book, which is supposed to come out next September. I woke up extremely tired, more so than usual, to the sound of my daughter babbling in her room—my one-and-a-half-year-old. She was singing, which was very cute. I taught this morning, which always gives me energy. It’s lovely to be teaching while you're writing because when you're deeply in the throes of a project, it can be so isolating—you’re in this tunnel. I feel like [my students] pull me out of the tunnel, based on our conversations, and I get to return to the great literature that we read together.

B&W: Has your writing gained or learned something from being a teacher? Do you feel like it’s shaped the direction of your writing?

ZA: In a workshop, when I give a piece of feedback—either something working well or something that needs attention—it immediately triggers something in my mind that relates to my own work. I think, Maybe I'm not building enough character in a piece I'm writing. Everything reflects back on one’s own writing.

I think you learn just as much about writing when you're workshopped as when you're workshopping someone else. It's the same for me as a teacher—I'm learning a lot during workshop discussions. So I definitely gain something from teaching, in addition to sanity.

B&W: Sanity is always important. Although, I guess you could argue the best writers in history were not very sane.

ZA: That’s true. And you know what? I would rather be sane and happier than insane and better. I don’t need to be the best. I need to get to do what I love and feel balanced.

B&W: That’s a very healthy perspective.

ZA: It comes with age and experience. I didn’t always feel that way. The tortured artist … I’m over that.

B&W: That makes me think of rituals in writing. I always notice how you close your eyes when you speak to us in class. You’ve said it helps you visualize and articulate your thoughts. Do you have a writing ritual or superstition that helps push your creative process forward? 

ZA: I’ve gone through many rituals. Anytime I start something, I start it in a Google Doc and place it in a shared folder where other people can see it. Those other people are members of my writing group. We only meet every two weeks, but just knowing the document is shared and that at any moment someone could jump in and see it creates accountability and an audience that I find helpful—especially when I’m just getting started.

B&W: That is so daunting. That's my worst nightmare. How do you have this instinct to just write and let it flow with people watching? Or did you develop that skill over time?

ZA: One of the main ways I started writing was with a blog I shared on Facebook. I had to write in the Notes field—not in a separate document—because I could feel the weight of my Facebook friends watching, even though they couldn't actually see until I pressed “publish.”

I’m internally driven, but I often need external motivation. It’s the same reason why I run, the adrenaline. There’s an adrenaline to feeling like you’re writing with people watching, that there’s going to be an audience. That’s how I’ve always been.

B&W: Writing seems like the most solitary art form—it’s so isolating. You make it sound like a performance.

ZA: Exactly. I think it is a performance. I write to reach people. Usually there’s something I'm trying to say beneath the story or essay. In order to communicate that, there’s a performative element.

I was watching a documentary today in class, and there was a line: “One good song or one good artist on stage can do more than 5,000 protests.” It was about Mashrou’ Leila, the Lebanese band. And it’s true—the act of performing is integral to art and communication. It’s subversive and resonant.

B&W: Through your writing, you’re adding to the existing body of queer literature and Arab American literature. Were there specific gaps in the literary continuum that you identified when you started writing? Any gaps you hope to fill or feel you’ve begun to fill?

ZA: Yes. In both the queer literary landscape and the Arab and Arab American diasporic literary landscape, there was a gap. The gap fell in the depiction of these qualities as secondary—allowing them to exist on the page and be visible, while allowing the person to be three-dimensional.

Nobody wants to be defined purely by their sexuality or by their cultural background, and nobody wants to be erased for these things either. I wanted characters who could hold both identities. In You Exist Too Much, she’s queer and she’s Arab American. At the time I was writing, I found it hard to find representations that truly spoke to me—representations that were humanized, not tokenized or stereotyped.

B&W: Do you feel a sense of responsibility when it comes to representing the queer Arab experience to Anglophone readers? And how do you navigate the tropes expected of Arab or queer writers?

ZA: My goal—whether or not it translates into responsibility—often puts me in a position of walking a tightrope when publishing. I started writing out of frustration with the discrepancy between the Arabs and Muslims I knew in my life and the depictions in the media, especially post-9/11 and post-Iraq War.

I wanted to challenge stereotypes and humanize characters who are queer or Arab American. But the expectations in publishing were geared toward stereotypes. When I first went out with You Exist Too Much, certain agents or editors wanted more “camels,” more “spices from the marketplace,” more women in hijabs—more imagery that conformed to the stereotypes I wanted to undercut.

This was a problem because adding those things would undermine the project, but I still wanted the book to exist. So the challenge was finding the agent and editor who weren’t reading with those expectations.

One reader told me my book is “the most book about Palestine and the least book about Palestine,” and I loved that. I wanted the context of the Middle East—particularly Palestine—to be in the background. Unattainability appears in the narrator's love life, but also in cultural heritage and, on an existential level, as a Palestinian: unattainable statehood, self-determination, homeland.

So yes, I gave myself the responsibility of challenging the gap between the reality of Arabs—the variety, nuance, multitude—and the single story of Arabness and Muslimness in the media.

B&W: Something you mention often is the absence or erasure of identity, especially when you’re in an in-between—like the U.S. and Palestine. Here at Barnard, we’ve witnessed a tightening atmosphere around what can be said and who is allowed to say it. 

Have you ever felt your freedom to write or speak has been challenged? And how do you navigate that?

ZA: Absolutely—150,000%. It was always a tricky subject to write about, especially in America: Palestine. You’re up against many obstacles in the media. As a result, I ended up writing a novel because fiction felt more subversive than nonfiction. You can ask readers to spend hundreds of pages with a Palestinian American character, to empathize before they even realize it.

B&W: After writing your debut novel, did you arrive at any understanding, or even further confusion about what it means to occupy an in-between state? Would you even classify it as an in-between, or is it something else entirely?

ZA: I still classify it as an in-between state. To live in an in-between state is to always be in a perpetual longing. It might be painful, but whether it be the in-between of place, emotional state, or family, you’re constantly longing. That awareness was liberating because it takes away some of the pain. I constantly feel longing and pain, and knowing why helps me mitigate it, sit with it, maybe not act on it. That's what in-between is: longing.

B&W: That makes sense, especially given that You Exist Too Much emerges from a question about longing, specifically desire directed toward things that feel out of reach. How did that interior question expand to the world of the novel you created?

ZA: It came out of unattainability. Why would someone set their sights on something in the distance? In the case of this narrator, it’s unattainable women. The question is why. Belonging manifests in this pattern and pathology. The unattainability of her mother, as an embodiment of Palestine, influences the narrator's sense of longing. That’s how longing manifests: a quest for the unattainable.

B&W: I’m interested in the idea of the mother being an extension of her queerness, or rather the incompatibility of queerness with being Middle Eastern. These identities do not sit easily together. How do you approach writing that tension without simplifying it for a reader who may not share the background?

ZA: That was hard. I didn't want to simplify or falsify it, nor pinkwash it. There’s a tension between being queer, Muslim, and Arab. I wanted to capture the nuance of allowing these realities to coexist. The narrator coming out to her mother shows reality: the mother is upset, but there’s still closeness.

B&W: I related deeply to the protagonist. She felt so universal. Did you leave her unnamed to be more relatable?

ZA: In You Exist Too Much, the mother says to the daughter: “You exist too much.” Leaving her unnamed is a way to say she exists less. Being in diaspora leaves you in-between: not fully American, not fully Arab.

B&W: Your debut novel came out in 2020—were you pregnant then? In writing your essay collection, how has becoming a parent, or anticipating parenthood, reshaped your sense of what it means to be in diaspora as a writer?

ZA: Truthfully, I had been working on this collection for a long time, even before You Exist Too Much, but I returned to it and wrote most of it after that book. I became pregnant in 2022. Writing the second book as a mother has been a completely different experience. I have an entirely different set of questions and considerations, especially around lineage, heritage, and passing things down. Being a mother makes this process more active, compared with simply receiving a lineage. Some things remain the same—I still grapple with longing, and that continues to be a theme I explore in this book.

B&W: In thinking about raising a child of diaspora while being a child of diaspora yourself, what questions or anxieties surfaced as you wrote this essay collection? Were they any hopes that you want to pass on to your children? 

ZA: Many. I want to pass on their Palestinian heritage, to feel connected and proud, without hiding it.

B&W: Did you ever feel you had to hide your heritage as a writer?

ZA: When writing bios, I sometimes list “Palestinian American,” but other times I leave it out or write “Arab American” because that’s less politically charged. I’ve wondered whether I would be in a different place if I didn't carry this identity. I wondered if it would be different without this weight of identity. A name is a lot to carry.

B&W: A large part of your upcoming essay collection is about your father arriving in the U.S. in 1963, then returning 50 years later—which runs parallel to your fiction novel’s protagonist. What did excavating his narrative reveal to you about generational shifts in how Palestinians experience displacement or belonging?

ZA: It revealed so much. My dad had a gaze for America from 1963 that later met disillusionment. He crystallized this small town where he was a foreign exchange student, holding fond memories. That showed me how we crystallize places in our minds.

As a Palestinian in the diaspora, you often hold a crystallized image of Palestine, whether you've been there or not. The Palestine I remember as a child is different from today’s Palestine. Many in the diaspora hold onto memories of places that may not exist anymore. The greater the distance, the more crystallized the place becomes.

B&W: Distance makes the heart grow fonder. My family feels that way about Iran, too—they yearn for the place it was. These essays move backward in time; the reverse structure mirrors how memory is processed as it tracks trauma across generations. Do you see writing as a method of interrupting inherited patterns, or mapping them?

ZA: Mapping, more than interrupting. Trauma is hard to catch in the act. What writing does is reflect upon the ongoing trauma—observe, analyze, grapple, and make sense of it.

B&W: Finally, what questions—about identity, belonging, or diaspora—do you feel you are still circling, even after writing this collection? What is the most pressing thought that you're leaving with? 

ZA: How do you ever feel like you can stop searching? I think that’s one of the main questions I’m always grappling with. When will I ever feel home? Will it take literally returning to Palestine to feel it? But will I even feel it then? It’ll be a different Palestine than when my parents left. The question is: Does one ever stop searching? And how do I give this to my daughters in a way that’s safe for them to inhabit, given the landscape right now—not just for Palestinians in Palestine, but also in the diaspora—and how do I give them the beauty of what I had, allowing them to inhabit it even as the particular place becomes less attainable?