Zaina Arafat: A conversation about Stereotypes, Asianess, and Everything in Between

Artwork by Siri Raghunayakula

Welcomed by the zebra-patterned wallpaper background of novelist Zaina Arafat’s Zoom screen, I began my conversation with the renowned writer with one very pressing question: “If you could be the face of any brand, what brand would you choose?” 

My witty question (at least, I thought so), earned a quick chuckle from the author and a murmur of approval before she went silent for several minutes, fully in deliberation of my question. She closed her eyes for a few moments, before confiding in me that the question had been harder than she’d expected. Yet, not one to give up, she finally landed on an endorsement deal with her local bookstore, Books Are Magic, in Brooklyn NYC – a fitting one, as many copies of her book grace their shelves – and reaffirmed her belief in the power of bookstores.  

Zaina Arafat is the author of the novel, You Exist Too Much, named one of Roxanne Gay’s favorite books of 2020, and the winner of the 2021 Lambda literary award. But despite this impressive list of journalistic credentials, she didn’t mind when I bombarded her, one after the other, with questions about her novel. When asked what inspired her to take up what many consider the laborious work of writing the aforementioned novel, she said, “I think the book was something that had always been brewing inside of me. I often describe it as a six year surgery, in which a book was extracted from inside of me… But the moment I really started to write it was when I was home on New Year’s Eve, one year. I had just had a rough few months, and I was in bed, with a sprained neck, feeling down, when I woke up on new year’s day, and wrote the first sentence… and then I just went from there, and wrote the first chapter, and then just continued and continued, until I had a first draft a few months later, and then just spent the next five years editing it out until it was finished.” 

Zaina, to her credit, seems like the kind of person who’s always doing something. Having given birth just four months ago, she’s kept herself busy, traveling overseas and promoting her book through talks all across America. She even let me in on some exciting new projects she’s been working on, like a possible film adaptation for You Exist Too Much. When asked who she would cast for the roles, she reiterated her desire of having an Arab actress play the lead, and the importance of visible representation in media. She said, “There’s this actress on The L Word, who’s Iranian, and her name is Sepideh Moafi. I’ve connected with her, and it would be great if she wanted to play the role of my lead.” For some of the other characters, Zaina chose fan favorites, like Pedro Pascal, to play the role of the heroine’s Argentine lover, and a possible Peneolope Cruz casting for the role of the mother. These castings excited the avid pop-culture lover in me, and only made me more galvanized to see what is sure to be an incredible story on the silver screen. 

You Exist Too Much, while being a story about the messiness of finding your identity in a world that would rather conform its inhabitants to the expectations of society, is also a love story about a mother and a daughter. I was especially curious to learn more on how the author navigated writing about the immigrant parent-child dynamic, as most of its representation in the media is fraught with negative stereotypes that portray immigrant parents as cold-hearted and cruel, rather than nuanced and complicated. Zaina answered, “There are a lot of stereotypes, but I do think they come from somewhere. For example, my mom has an entirely different set of expectations, experiences, and cultural norms than I do, because she grew up [in Palestine], and I grew up here. So to sort of understand and communicate between the generations, requires communication, and recognizing that those differences are not necessarily a bad thing… which is why it was really important for me to have this one chapter in the book, that was told entirely from the mother’s perspective, to take away that idea of the angry, homophobic, immigrant mom, and sort of show her humanity, and her experiences of growing up under occupation, and being brought to a country she didn’t want to come to.”

Being on the cusp of May, AAPI Heritage Month, our conversation also circled around the diverse number of ethnicities within the community, and what different ways the AAPI diaspora can combat limiting stereotypes of what being an Asian American really means. In response to the topic in-hand, Zaina highlighted her experience as the Asian American Communities coordinator at the Asian Americans Writer’s workshop, where her job was to bring various writers from Asian and Middle Eastern (a group not often considered Asian American within Western media) communities together. She said, “Creating that space for the vast amount of voices in the AAPI diaspora was something that I really wanted to do as an editor, when I worked for the Asian Americans Writers Workshop. It was there that I really worked to solidify the diaspora, and create a platform to elevate those voices. So yes, I feel that there is space for many voices within the community, but I also feel that we have to collectively keep creating that space for each other.”

My conversation with the incredibly intelligent and eloquent Zaina Arafat was a forty minute lesson in navigating difficult topics, through understanding and humor. Before Zaina left the cozy box of my Zoom window, I asked her one final question: “Are there any projects you’ve been working on?” Lucky for all of us, she revealed that she was working on a second novel that explores Arab immigrant communities that live in France. She said, “There’s a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment [in France], so I’ve been exploring this fictional family that’s living there, that is originally Palestinian, and what their experience living there is like, in the height of such… tensions.” 

You can find all things Zaina Arafat at zainaarafat.com. You Exist Too Much is on sale at Amazon, and anywhere you can find books. 

Zaina Arafat | Barnard College. https://barnard.edu/profiles/zaina-arafat. Accessed 30 Apr. 2023.