“The Arab American story is the American story — one of diverse backgrounds and faiths, vibrant tradition, bold innovation, hard work, commitment to community, and stalwart patriotism, all coming together to accomplish something greater than any one of us.”
A Proclamation on Arab American Heritage Month, 2023
So wrote President Joe Biden in a 2023 proclamation declaring April National Arab American Heritage Month. The sentiment echoed that of a preceding proclamation two years earlier, a 2021 letter that became the first presidential acknowledgement of NAAHM.
When over 3.5 million Arab Americans call the United States home — a population larger than the number of residents living in states like Utah and New Mexico — it was long overdue.
To celebrate NAAHM this April, we’re highlighting a few Arab Americans authors whose work and worldviews thrum through the nation, representing an ever-growing segment whose voices have historically remained remarkably underrepresented.
The child of a diplomat and a teacher, Khaled Hosseini’s literary practice bears the mark of their respective professions, at once intensely literary and intimately aware of his — and his characters’ — global context. Though born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Hosseini’s father’s work meant the family soon became global citizens. After the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, however, Hosseini and his family settled in California. It was in California that the young writer would attend college and cut his teeth as a hobbyist writer, all while spending long hours studying and, later, practicing medicine.
The Kite Runner, Hosseini’s first novel, found immediate acclaim for its stark portrayal of life under Taliban rule. His second work, A Thousand Splendid Suns, echoed this initial exploration, lingering in post-colonial questions of national identity, displacement, and independence.
As an Afghan American writer, Hosseini’s craft is marked by the duality of his own national identity, at once the child of a colonized nation and the citizen of its long-time occupier. Through his writing — and his humanitarian efforts — Hosseini brings awareness to the complex web of geopolitical and sociocultural pressures Afghanistan and its citizens face, seeking to balance the entangled individual and international realities he recognizes in his writing.
“It’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.”
Palestinian American author Edward W. Said was perhaps one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His work irrefutably evinced a global state of affairs that had gone unacknowledged — and therefore unresolved — for centuries. And, in doing so, he provided an essential lexicon for subsequent writers to detangle and define the complex relationship between Eastern and Western worldviews.
A professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, Said’s study of the intertextual relationships between Western literature’s imagination of the East and the Western world’s treatment of Eastern nations and peoples quickly became defining. Orientalism, his essential primer, became synonymous with the reductionist generalizations Western nations made about their Eastern counterparts. But more than just worldviews, Said argued these misinformed perspectives — honed through generations of textual reimaginations of the “Orient’s” mystique — informed policy. In doing so, they harmed real people, impacted real lives.
Said’s Palestinian heritage deeply influenced his life and his work. Passion for the plight of his nation and its people often informed his academic work, leading to Culture and Imperialism, a volume delving into the contaminated, two-way relationship between the two concepts. His work remains central, offering an illuminating lens that both students of yesterday and today still rely upon.
“It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human.”
Born in Switzerland, raised in Canada, and college educated in the United States, author Moustafa Bayoumi spent his early years tracing the globe, gaining a keen sense of international politics that would eventually inform his work. Through essays and articles, deeply personal interviews and intensely researched academic nonfiction, Bayoumi explores the interconnected, often at-odds worlds of his Arabic heritage and American citizenship.
Bayoumi’s two most notable works, How Does It Feel To Be A Problem (2008) and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (2015), Bayoumi adopts a compelling, almost journalistic stance. In the former, he records the lives and experiences of Arab and Muslim Americans navigating a country that, in the wake of 9/11, seems only to reiterate their otherness. In the latter, he investigates how the War on Terror has disproportionately affected Muslim Americans, relieving them of rights that are, constitutionally, unshakeable. Though unique in direction, both works drill down into the sociocultural image of Arab and Muslim Americans to explore why the “American” part of their identity is so often overlooked.
Bayoumi’s work ruminates on the division that is so often assumed to linger between “Arab” and “American,” questioning how and why it came to be — and, from there, how to bridge the gap between villainized image and reality.
“We are not statistics. We are real people with real stories, and we demand to be seen and heard.“
With Diana Abu-Jaber, we take a pause from nonfiction, returning to the familiar fields of fiction. They are, in Abu-Jaber’s case, deeply rooted in the visual and culinary trappings of her Palestinian and Jordanian heritage. Her work is rhythmic and honest, simultaneously beholden to the past while deeply rooted in the present — if it seems conflicting, it is because it often is.
Arabian Jazz — Abu-Jaber’s debut novel, published in 1993 — encapsulates this dichotomy well, lingering in the inexplicable inbetween-ness that its protagonist, Jemorah Ramoud, experiences. The daughter of a widowed first-generation Jordanian immigrant to the United States, Jemorah is acutely aware of the conflicting identities that her peers and her community demand she perform. Simultaneously too American in the eyes of Syracuse’s Arabic community and too Arab from the perspective of her American friends, she struggles to find a balance between external reality and internal being. Yet, ultimately, she finds balance amid the chaos, realizing that she is evidence that both sides can be bridged, that expectations and assumptions can be discarded.
But beyond Arabian Jazz, Abu-Jaber’s work finds the space between, seeking to reconcile her own heritage and all its trappings with the life she has, much like Jemorah, crafted for herself and herself alone.
“The first generation in this country, with another culture always looming over you, you are the ones born homeless.“
Before April comes to an end—and Arab American Heritage Month with it—be sure to investigate a title or two from our list. Even if you don’t have the time to dive into a full work, you check out our summaries for a comprehensive glance at its key elements.
For more heritage month content, check out our articles on Women’s Writing and Native American Authorship.
[…] for more reading recommendations? Check out last week’s post, Arab American Heritage Month: 5 Authors To Read This April, for a handful of titles to close out the month with, or dive last month’s recommendations in […]