#Zaina Arafat

[fairycosmos]

you exist too much by zaina arafat

#you exist too much #zaina arafat #books

[smokefalls]

You’ll find that having someone who has a claim on you, and who you can claim, it’s one of the greater things in life.

Zaina Arafat, You Exist Too Much

#Zaina Arafat #You Exist Too Much #quote #fiction #queerlit #2024 reads

[iambic-stan]

last book read + last stethoscope used, part 25

My MDF starry night procardial titanium scope is here with Zaina Arafat's novel You Exist Too Much. What a title. But about the MDF--he had the honor of accompanying me on a short road trip last week to be used by someone other than the same two people who use him all the time. Happy for him, even happier for me! Ecstatic, actually!

The book has mixed reviews on Goodreads but I really enjoyed it. It's a semi-autobiographical story of a Palestinian American woman who flits from relationship to relationship, desperately searching for the sense of belonging that eludes her and her family--especially her parents, who grew up under military occupation and were cruelly thrown out of their home. Her mother is emotionally-manipulative and despite multiple attempts at honest conversation on the matter, is unlikely to accept her daughter's bisexuality. This is the narrator's story of learning to be kinder to herself as she makes (many of the same) harmful mistakes, and to be forgiving of those around her. I think readers wanted a neat ending full of epiphanies and a resolution to the protagonist's struggles and self-defeating behavior, but that's a tall order. A timely read and an important perspective, considering what is happening to the Palestinians right now.

Free Palestine.

#cardiophilia #cardiophile #stethoscopes #zaina arafat #Free Palestine #auscultation #lgbtq+ #lgbtqia #queer fiction #lgbtqia+ #bisexual rep #last book last stethoscope #lbls #Palestine #Muslim women

[clamjams]

You Exist Too Much - Zaina Arafat

#you exist too much #zaina arafat #book recs #queer books #palestinian art #palestinian author #user: clamjams #alt text

[houseofpurplestars]

"...only a white man would feel comfortable taking up so much space."

- from "You Exist Too Much" by Zaina Arafat

#you exist too much #zaina arafat #palestinian literature

[mypatchworkreflection]

"Writers including Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, Hisham Matar, Isabella Hamad, and Zaina Arafat announced Wednesday that they will not participate in this year's PEN World Voices Festival over what they say is host PEN America's weak response to Israel's "cultural genocide" in Gaza.

"We have concluded that attending this year's festival would only serve to contribute to the illusion that PEN America is truly devoted to 'the defense of free speech at the center of humanity's struggle against repression,' as it has claimed," the writers said in an open letter published by Literary Hub announcing their decision. "In the context of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, we believe that PEN America has betrayed the organization's professed commitment to peace and equality for all, and to freedom and security for writers everywhere.""

#current events #pen world voices festival #naomi klein #michelle alexander #hisham matar #isabella hamad #zaina arafat #free palestine #ceasefire now #stop gaza genocide

[qbdatabase]

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East–from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine–Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

#You Exist Too Much #Zaina Arafat #adult books #literary fiction #Palestinian rep #bisexual #bi rep #middle eastern rep #poc rep #daily book #fiction #lgbt fiction #lgbtqia #bookblr

[booksandkawa]

You Exist Too Much is definitely one of my favorite reads this year. I couldn’t put the book down - but due to other life responsibilities sometimes had to - and finished it in three days. I can’t even say why I loved it because I couldn’t even fully identify with the main character. Yet Zaina Arafat’s style of writing just captured me. Also it’s just great to read a queer story from a Palestinian-American perspective.

I also asked my girlfriend who read the book after my recommendation and also loved it. She just left me a 4 minute voice message about it and to sum it up, she liked: - the very realistic depiction of mental health struggles (btw my girlfriend is a psychotherapist); - she could definitely partly identify; - queer story; - interesting perspective of different worlds and cultures the first person narrator was brought up in; - description of complicated relationship with mother; - a book about a writer; - language neither over simplified nor unnecessarily complicated.

I even looked up if there are other novels by the author but it seems like this one was her debut. I’m definitely looking forward to more!

So, both of our conclusions: we were totally sucked in by the book.

#You Exist Too Much #zaina arafat #book review #booklr #recommendation #reading #queer #lgbtq #palestinian #American

[battyaboutbooksreviews]

🍉 Queer Palestinian Books 🍉

🇵🇸 The algorithm is going to keep silencing my posts, but they're not going to silence me. I grew up with little to no books that made me feel seen as a queer/bisexual Palestinian Arab American. Today, it's still not easy enough to find those books online, even though we have thousands of lists, posts, and directories to guide us. To make your search a little easier, here are a few queer Palestinian books to add to your TBR. Please help me spread this by reblogging. Consider adding these to your least for Read Palestine Week (click for resources)! 💜

🍉 The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher 🇵🇸 A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar 🍉 Hazardous Spirits by Anbara Salam 🇵🇸 To All the Yellow Flowers by Raya Tuffaha 🍉 You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat 🇵🇸 The Specimen's Apology by George Abraham 🍉 Birthright by George Abraham 🇵🇸 Nayra and the Djinn by Iasmin Omar Ata 🍉 Where Black Stars Rise by Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger 🇵🇸 The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan 🍉 Guapa by Saleem Haddad 🇵🇸 From Whole Cloth: An Asexual Romance by Sonia Sulaiman

🍉 The Philistine by Leila Marshy 🇵🇸 Love Is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar 🍉 Shell Houses by Rasha Abdulhadi 🇵🇸 Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Sa'ed Atshan 🍉 Belladonna by Anbara Salam 🇵🇸 Confetti Realms by Nadia Shammas, Karnessa, Hackto Oshiro 🍉 Blood Orange by Yaffa As 🇵🇸 The ordeal of being known by Malia Rose 🍉 Decolonial Queering in Palestine by Walaa Alqaisiya 🇵🇸 Are You This? Or Are You This?: A Story of Identity and Worth by Madian Al Jazerah, Ellen Georgiou 🍉 This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers 🇵🇸 My Mama's Magic by Amina Awad

#queer books #queer fiction #queer #books #queer book recs #book recs #book recommendation #free palestine #save palestine #books to read #book blog #book lovers #booklr #bookstagram #batty about books #battyaboutbooks #sapphic books #sapphic romance

[sapphic-sprite]

Something that I’m passionate about is public libraries because of all the support and resources that they provide to their local communities. I know I’ve probably spoken on here before about how important it is to get a library card and use it because of all the perks it can give you (such as free access to online books, movies, and such). For those who are lower class it can provide them with programs, free wifi, free computer use, etc… Public libraries are just so overwhelmingly good for everyone.

In terms of the Global strike, I would like to suggest that people go to their libraries and recommend different Palestinian books. I’m not sure if it differs per state/per library on how you recommend a book, but I know if you use the Libby app through your library card that you can recommend books by tagging them “Notify me”. I know my library system is quite different as it branches out statewide and so I have access to statewide books. I would suggest filling out the forms that come up to recommend a book or talking to a librarian over the phone if you notice they are missing a Palestinian book that you would like to read.

Here is a list of Palestinian nonfiction books that I’ve found:

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe

On Palestine by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe

Except for Palestine by Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick

This Arab is Queer by Elias Jahshan

Blood Orange by Yaffa AS

Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y Davis

The Hundreds Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

Here is a list of Palestinian fiction books that I’ve found:

Where Black Stars Rise by Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger

Nayra and the Djinn by Iasmin Omar Ata

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

Salt Houses by Hala Alyan

Squire by Nadia Shammas and Sara Alfageeh

Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

Trees for the Absentees by Ahlam Bsharat

Something More by Jackie Khalilieh

Muneera and the Moon by Sonia Sulaiman

I haven’t been reading a lot lately because of my health, but a lot of these came recommended from people I trust to give good recommendations. Feel free to add recommendations in the comments and please contact your local libraries about acquiring the books you see here that they don’t have!

#Palestinian books #public libraries #free palestine #free Gaza #Palestine #Gaza #strike for palestine #strike for gaza #global strike

[lgbtqreads]

Can you recommend any queer books by Palestinian authors?

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

Guapa by Saleem Haddad

A Map of Home and Love is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar

#lgbtqreads

[fairycosmos]

you exist too much by zaina arafat

#you exist too much #zaina arafat #books #mmhm

[smokefalls]

“Your worries are like water,” she often said. “The moment one flows out, another floods in to fill the space.”

Zaina Arafat, You Exist Too Much

#Zaina Arafat #You Exist Too Much #quote #fiction #queerlit #2024 reads

[perfectlyripeclementine]

queer novel masterlist: Palestine edition

Found this list via @evereadssapphic on Instagram.

You Exist Too Much, Zaina Arafat

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: "You exist too much," she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East--from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine--Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings--for love, and a place to call home.

Haifa Fragments, Khulud Khamis

As a designer of jewelry, Maisoon wants an ordinary extraordinary life, which isn't easy for a tradition-defying activist and Palestinian citizen of Israel who refuses to be crushed by the feeling that she is an unwelcome guest in the land of her ancestors. She volunteers for the Machsom Watch, an organization that helps children in the Occupied Territories cross the border to receive medical care. Frustrated by her boyfriend Ziyad and her father, who both want her to get on with life and forget those in the Occupied Territories, she lashes out only to discover her father isn't the man she thought he was. Raised a Christian, in a relationship with a Muslim man and enamored with a Palestinian woman from the Occupied Territories, Maisoon must decide her own path.

A Map Of Home, Randa Jarrar

In this fresh, funny, and fearless debut novel, Randa Jarrar chronicles the coming-of-age of Nidali, one of the most unique and irrepressible narrators in contemporary fiction. Born in 1970s Boston to an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, the rebellious Nidali--whose name is a feminization of the word "struggle"--soon moves to a very different life in Kuwait. There the family leads a mildly eccentric middle-class existence until the Iraqi invasion drives them first to Egypt and then to Texas. This critically acclaimed debut novel is set to capture the hearts of everyone who has ever wondered what their own map of home might look like.

The Skin And Its Girl, Sarah Cypher

In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family's ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis' centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.

Decades later, Betty returns to Aunt Nuha's gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she's ever known, or should she follow her heart and the woman she loves, perpetuating her family's cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt's complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family immigrate to the United States. But, as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity, and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us--and wield even the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.

The Philistine, Leila Marshy

Nadia Eid doesn't know it yet, but she's about to change her life. It's the end of the ‘80s and she hasn’t seen her Palestinian father since he left Montreal years ago to take a job in Egypt, promising to bring her with him. But now she’s twenty-five and he’s missing in action, so she takes matters into her own hands. Booking a short vacation from her boring job and Québecois boyfriend, she calls her father from the Nile Hilton in downtown Cairo. But nothing goes as planned and, stumbling around, Nadia wanders into an art gallery where she meets Manal, a young Egyptian artist who becomes first her guide and then her lover. 

Through this unexpected relationship, Nadia rediscovers her roots, her language, and her ambitions, as her father demonstrates the unavoidable destiny of becoming a Philistine – the Arabic word for Palestinian. With Manal’s career poised to take off and her father’s secret life revealed, the First Intifada erupts across the border.

The Twenty-Ninth Year, Hala Alyan

For Hala Alyan, twenty-nine is a year of transformation and upheaval, a year in which the past--memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith--winds itself around the present.

Hala's ever-shifting, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body. Poems leap from war-torn cities in the Middle East, to an Oklahoma Olive Garden, a Brooklyn brownstone; from alcoholism to recovery; from a single woman to a wife. This collection summons breathtaking chaos, one that seeps into the bones of these odes, the shape of these elegies.

A vivid catalog of heartache, loneliness, love and joy, The Twenty-Ninth Year is an education in looking for home and self in the space between disparate identities.

Between Banat, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali

In Between Banat Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and nonnormative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film. Moving from The Thousand and One Nights and the Golden Era of Egyptian cinema to contemporary novels, autobiographical writing, and prints and graphic novels that imagine queer Arab futures, Shomali uses what she calls queer Arab critique to locate queer desire amid heteronormative imperatives. Showing how systems of heteropatriarchy and Arab nationalisms foreclose queer Arab women's futures, she draws on the transliterated term "banat"--the Arabic word for girls--to refer to women, femmes, and nonbinary people who disrupt stereotypical and Orientalist representations of the "Arab woman." By attending to Arab women's narration of desire and identity, queer Arab critique substantiates queer Arab histories while challenging Orientalist and Arab national paradigms that erase queer subjects. In this way, Shomali frames queerness and Arabness as relational and transnational subject formations and contends that prioritizing transnational collectivity over politics of authenticity, respectability, and inclusion can help lead toward queer freedom.

Belladonna, Anbara Salam

Isabella is beautiful, inscrutable, and popular. Her best friend, Bridget, keeps quietly to the fringes of their Connecticut Catholic school, watching everything and everyone, but most especially Isabella.

In 1957, when the girls graduate, they land coveted spots at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Pentila in northern Italy, a prestigious art history school on the grounds of a silent convent. There, free of her claustrophobic home and the town that will always see her and her Egyptian mother as outsiders, Bridget discovers she can reinvent herself as anyone she desires... perhaps even someone Isabella could desire in return.

But as that glittering year goes on, Bridget begins to suspect Isabella is keeping a secret from her, one that will change the course of their lives forever. (I believe this book is by a Palestinian author but not actually set in or about Palestine.)

#read palestine #qlit #queer literature #queer reading list #tbr #palestinian authors #SWANA authors #arab authors #qtpoc writers #qtpoc authors

[houseofpurplestars]

"Then I started to think of the question in terms of being Palestinian, and in terms of culture, and identity. As a Palestinian you exist in a space of constant longing for statehood and self-determination."

"Being a part of a diaspora can often feel like being a part of nothing. You are neither this nor that. It would be one thing to be Arab and living in the Middle East, or to be American and live in the United States, but to be both can be painful because you always feel called to the other."

#zaina arafat #free palestine #palestinian literature #palestinian writers

[readingsquotes]

" Despite all this, PEN America has declined to join other leading human rights organizations and United Nations officials in the demands for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

This failure is particularly striking in light of the extraordinary toll this catastrophe has taken in the cultural sphere. Israel has killed, and at times deliberately targeted and assassinated journalists, poets, novelists, and writers of all kinds. It has destroyed almost all forms of cultural infrastructure that support the practice of literature, art, intellectual exchange, and free speech through the bombing and demolition of universities, cultural centers, museums, libraries, and printing presses. By disrupting access to digital communication, Israel has also been blocking Palestinians from sharing what they have witnessed and experienced and telling the truth of what is happening to them. Everyone who uses the power of the pen and free speech to appeal to the conscience of the world is at risk.

In less than five months, Israel has killed nearly one hundred journalists and media workers, more than in the two-decade war in Afghanistan, and more than in the deadliest year of the Iraq War. Israel has also killed nearly one hundred academics and writers. If organizations like PEN America cling to the illusion of political neutrality in the face of a clear effort to destroy Palestinian lives and culture, one can only wonder whether there will be any writers left in Gaza to tell the story of their apocalypse, or to trust words and speech, when the killing finally ends. Or any record left of the history they have lived.

Scholars are increasingly reaching for novel words to describe the scope of Israel’s cultural genocide. Words like “scholasticide” are invoked to describe the elimination of systems of education and “epistemicide” to describe the erasure of systems of knowledge. In contrast, PEN America, took four and half months to utter the word “ceasefire,” then only with a vague “hope” for one that is “mutually agreed,” rather than a clear call. We expect more from an organization that exists for the express purpose of protecting freedom of speech and thought, and advancing a vision of our common humanity."

Equally concerning is PEN America’s history of condemning authors who choose to honor the Palestinian call for a cultural and academic boycott of Israeli institutions complicit in their oppression, accusing them of impeding “the free flow of ideas.” It seems to us that this violates several principles at the heart of PEN’s mission. To begin with, the idea that BDS, which does not boycott individual writers or scholars, can impede the “free flow of ideas” in Israel-Palestine assumes that such a thing exists there. In fact, it is a cruel fantasy so long as Palestinians live under a rule reliant on racial segregation and the implementation of ethnic hierarchies, siege and collective punishment, the very conditions BDS seeks to end.

Second, condemning authors who choose to support BDS contradicts PEN’s own mandate to protect freedom of expression, as it contributes to a neo-McCarthyite environment in North America and Europe, in which the growing support for BDS is increasingly criminalized. Third, opposition to BDS overlooks the long and proud history of the boycott as an effective, nonviolent tool of collective liberation. Just as boycott was a principal tool used to successfully end political apartheid in South Africa, so it should be accepted that some are free to adopt it as a vital tool in the nonviolent resistance movement against Israeli impunity today."

#palestine #free palestine #isreal #gaza #apartheid #genocide #colonization #us politics #american imperialism #pen america