The PEN Ten: An Interview with Zaina Arafat

The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, Jared Jackson speaks with Zaina Arafat, author of You Exist Too Much (Catapult, 2020).

Photo by Carleen Coulter

1. What was the first book or piece of writing that had a profound impact on you?
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.

2. How does your writing navigate truth? What is the relationship between truth and fiction?
Authenticity is one of my main goals as a person and as a writer. More than likeable, I want the characters in my writing to be authentic. This means that their choices and behavioral patterns must remain true to their past experiences, wounds and traumas, and aren’t overly-directed or controlled by me as the author. I think that leaving room for the characters and narratives to steer their own course allows you to arrive at truth in fiction.

“Right now, in the midst of global demonstrations against police brutality and racial injustice, I feel deeply inspired, especially as a Palestinian, where resistance is a way of life. We look to both the Black Lives Matter movement as a means of affecting urgently-needed change through peaceful resistance. This is what drives me to the page right now.”

3. What does your creative process look like? How do you maintain momentum and remain inspired?
My creative process involves finding a question I want to investigate and explore, then writing that question on a notecard, taping it above my desk, and allowing it to infuse the writing and drive the narrative. The question also marinates in my mind when I’m away from my desk. My process involves a great deal of reading across disciplines. It involves running and taking notes on my iPhone notepad as plot points and lines of dialogue come to my mind. To maintain momentum, I look to the world around me. Right now, in the midst of global demonstrations against police brutality and racial injustice, I feel deeply inspired, especially as a Palestinian, where resistance is a way of life. We look to both the Black Lives Matter movement as a means of affecting urgently-needed change through peaceful resistance. This is what drives me to the page right now.

4. How can writers affect resistance movements?
So much of what brought me to writing fiction was the desire to subvert dominant and reductive narratives about Arabs and Muslims. By creating characters that defy stereotypes and that offer three-dimensional depictions of oppressed individuals, my goal is to challenge misperceptions and assumptions, and in that way, to further the plight and resistance of Arab and Muslim communities.

5. What do you consider to be the biggest threat to free expression today? Have there been times when your right to free expression has been challenged?
As a Palestinian-American, I believe that one threat to free expression is the burden of representation, of being called upon as a member of an immigrant or diasporic community to tell a certain story that corresponds with an existing expectation, and thereby confirms and perpetuates a certain narrative to the exclusion of others. That threat entails being limited to the kind of stories one can tell based on one’s background and strong pressure to write only about the extremes of one’s culture or nationality because those extremes are what get shown repeatedly in the media. Once, in a piece, the editor struck the word “Palestine” from the text, and wrote in the margins, “Palestine does not exist.” That felt threatening to my right to free expression. In the end, I worked with another editor.

“As a Palestinian-American, I believe that one threat to free expression is the burden of representation, of being called upon as a member of an immigrant or diasporic community to tell a certain story that corresponds with an existing expectation, and thereby confirms and perpetuates a certain narrative to the exclusion of others.”

6. How does your identity shape your writing? Is there such a thing as “the writer’s identity?”
So much of my writing is informed by my identity as a queer woman of color and a desire to combat that invisibility and erasure by seeing queerness and biculturalism reflected on the page, without the need to reconcile intersections and overlaps. I’m not sure if this speaks to such a thing as the writer’s identity, but that is my identity as a writer.

7. What is the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words? Have you ever written something you wish you could take back?
My novel, You Exist Too Much, is the most daring thing I have ever put into words. I haven’t written something I wish I could take back; I try to be as careful as possible about what I put into the world, because once it’s out there, it stays!

8. Epigraphs open a door to a piece of writing, informing readers, in some way, about the pages ahead. The epigraph in your debut novel, You Exist Too Much, comes from Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.” How does this epigraph exemplify the text that follows? How does it speak to the themes and events explored in the novel?
The character sets her sights on the unattainable, romantically with women, culturally and politically as a Palestinian, and fills the space between possibility and actuality with fantasy. At one point in the novel, she imagines kissing an unattainable professor and tells us, “It was always somewhat awkward and not as exciting as when I pictured it in the abstract, devoid of hideous circumstance.” For this protagonist, possibility is a far more appealing—and safer—place to linger.

“So much of my writing is informed by my identity as a queer woman of color and a desire to combat that invisibility and erasure by seeing queerness and biculturalism reflected on the page, without the need to reconcile intersections and overlaps.”

9. Which writer, living or dead, would you most like to meet? What would you like to discuss?
Edward Said, who passed away in 2003. I’d love to discuss the way an Orientalist gaze has been projected onto the Middle East, especially through literature, in the years since the Iraq War, and the oppression and destruction that gaze has engendered.

10. Why do you think people need stories?
To see their realities reflected, often in order to make sense of them. A story takes you on a journey that allows you to process your own experiences and emotions through the lens of someone else’s, fictional or otherwise.

Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian American writer. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, VICE, and NPR. She holds an MA in international affairs from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa and is a recipient of the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East Fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts. She grew up between the United States and the Middle East and currently lives in Brooklyn.