For Arab Heritage Month, we are honoring and celebrating Arab authors and their outstanding books. We have curated a collection of important titles in Arab American literature and thought. Alongside some of the titles authors provide a glimpse into their work and share their journey as writers of color. Most of these books are available through the MVCC Library.
Stories My Father Told Me
Helen Zughaib & Elia Zughaib
The stories in this book recount events from Elia Zughaib's Syrian and Lebanese childhood in the 1930s and early 1940s, in what are now the Lebanese villages of Marjayoun, Zahle and Kfeir.
After sharing his stories in family settings over the years, Elia finally agreed to set them down in written form at the urging of his daughter, the artist Helen Zughaib, who contributed the title to this book. The accompanying art work was created by Helen.
The result is a collaboration of story and image by father and daughter, celebrating the richness of Syrian and Lebanese life and culture in a bygone era.
Dine in Palestine: An Authentic Taste of Palestine in 60 Recipes from My Family to Your Table
Heifa Odeh
This book is a means of shining light on Palestinian cuisine's beauty and preserving it for you all to enjoy. This is me sharing a part of history and Palestinian identity, which i hold dear to my heart. While some dishes are inspired by the flavors of Palestine, others are truly authentic and passed down for generations. I am so humbled to be able to share a piece of me with you-not just my cooking, but my roots.
Dine in Palestine is a curation of the delicious Palestinian meals of my upbringing broken into categories of breakfast, vegetarian-friendly meals, main dishes, desserts, and drinks.
Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire
Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Mike Merryman-Lotze (Editors)
Contributor Yousef M. Aljamal:
Imagining the future of Gaza beyond the cruelties of occupation and Apartheid, Light in Gaza is a powerful contribution to understanding Palestinian experience.
Gaza, home to two million people, continues to face suffocating conditions imposed by Israel. This distinctive anthology imagines what the future of Gaza could be, while reaffirming the critical role of Gaza in Palestinian identity, history, and struggle for liberation.
Light in Gaza is a seminal, moving and wide-ranging anthology of Palestinian writers and artists. It constitutes a collective effort to organize and center Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle. As political discourse shifts toward futurism as a means of reimagining a better way of living, beyond the violence and limitations of colonialism, Light in Gaza is an urgent and powerful intervention into an important political moment.
The Beauty of Your Face
Sahar Mustafah
Afaf Rahman, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, is the principal of a Muslim school in the Chicago suburbs. One morning, a shooter―radicalized by the online alt-right―attacks the school. As Afaf listens to his terrifying progress, we are swept back through her memories, and into a profound and “moving” (Bustle magazine) exploration of one woman’s life in a nation at odds with its ideals." (from Amazon)
Laith the Lion Goes to Palestine
Jameeleh Shelo
"Little lions of any age can join Laith in his flying crib and make new friends in sunny Palestine. Inspired by the author’s son, Laith the Lion Goes to Palestine encapsulates the spirit and connection many Palestinians feel towards their culture, ancestry and homeland. It’s a journey of discovery, pride, and warmth that your child will want to experience over and over again." - Jameeleh Shelo
Paper and Stick
Priscilla Wathington
Priscilla Wathington's debut chapbook, Paper and Stick (Tram Editions/2021), scrutinizes Israel’s militarized attempts to constrict Palestinian bodies and breath. The poems "sharply probe the way language both limns and shadows atrocities," writes Deema Shehabi. Relying on a strategy of documentary poetics, the collection draws source material from standing or recently cancelled military orders, news articles, archival texts, former Israeli soldiers' published statements, and statements from Palestinian minors who had been placed under Israeli military detention.
Arab Boy Delivered
Paul Zarou
Michael Haddad, the teenage son of Palestinian immigrants, comes of age during the tumultuous sixties, in his family’s neighborhood grocery store in New York City.
As Michael maneuvers through the working-class neighborhood delivering groceries, he enters the homes and lives of his customers. He’s confronted by the violence of racist bullies and falls for the radical college coed who teaches him about sex, love, and protest. Michael grieves with the mother whose only son died in the Vietnam War and is embraced by the first black couple who move into the neighborhood. They all shape him, and through the conflict of hate, acts of kindness, and his sexual awakening, Michael struggles to define his identity. But when he experiences a sudden, tragic loss, he must learn to get past his fears, come to terms with his heritage, and set himself free.
Bayna Bayna, In-Between
Zeina Azzam
Using the Arabic words bayna bayna as a nod to her Palestinian Arab heritage, Zeina Azzam’s poetry reflects on the feeling of being in-between home and exile, childhood and adulthood, wholeness and loss, and living and dying. Her poems express a bicultural and bilingual view of the world which is at once enriching, bewildering, and beautiful.
Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism
Nadine Naber
In Arab America, Nadine Naber tells the stories of second generation Arab American young adults living in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of whom are political activists engaged in two culturalist movements that draw on the conditions of diaspora, a Muslim global justice and a Leftist Arab movement. Writing from a transnational feminist perspective, Naber reveals the complex and at times contradictory cultural and political processes through which Arabness is forged in the contemporary United States, and explores the apparently intra-communal cultural concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality as the battleground on which Arab American young adults and the looming world of America all wrangle. As this struggle continues, these young adults reject Orientalist thought, producing counter-narratives that open up new possibilities for transcending the limitations of Orientalist, imperialist, and conventional nationalist articulations of self, possibilities that ground concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality in some of the most urgent issues of our times: immigration politics, racial justice struggles, and U.S. militarism and war.
The Wandering Palestinian
Anan Ameri
Anan Ameri’s book The Wandering Palestinian (bhc press 2020) is beautifully written in the tradition of Arab story telling. It’s humorous and poignant vignettes successfully interweaves the forty-year personal narrative of a free spirited Arab woman who arrives to the USA in1974, with the larger issues of migration, racism, sexism, and community building.
These are personal stories of love and a failed marriage, struggle with depression and therapy, as the author tries to adjust to life in the USA. They are also stories of activism and grassroots organizing that lead the author to play a leading role in the creation of the Palestine Aid Society in1978 and Arab American National Museum in 2005.
Birthright
George Abraham
Birthright is a book that balances the weight of place: the pride and shame and worth of homeland in diaspora. Here, Palestine is a homeland under siege and under scrutiny from a world that doesn’t occupy its borders. Birthright is a cross-genre account on the speaker's first and only return to Palestine, weaving together poetry and lyric memoir fragments. With a variety of broken and invented poetic forms, Birthright moves through landscapes from the US South, to Jerusalem, to a beloved red couch in Philadelphia, and pulls together all corners of the author’s pride in home despite the violent cycles of the American machinery of war. The process of Reading Birthright is one which asks: how can we dream of alternate mythologies of home, despite and against the colonial imagination?
Quiet Orient Riot
Nathalie Khankan
QUIET ORIENT RIOT is an exploration of the tendons of motherhood, its mutinies and munificences. It is also a book of births and the politics of birth-regimes. Recounting a journey to bear a Palestinian child in the occupied Palestinian territory, the poems conjure up maternity as forecast, tally, weapon; its many filtrations through liturgical command and demographic anxiety. Maternity is made possible through contingent access to Israel’s sophisticated fertility treatment infrastructure, and impossible as it coincides with Israel’s 2009 assault on the Gaza Strip. What kind of language, then, can hold a body inside a body through emergency, diminishment, and into resistance and bloom? What kind of language might hold precarious humanhood?
Looking Both Ways
Pauline Kaldas
Looking Both Ways is a collection of interlinked essays that explores family, language, politics, identity, and culture. These essays move across time and space, beginning in Egypt and crossing the ocean to follow the author’s travels and the challenges of adapting to American culture and creating a family in her new world. From recounting her attempt to retrieve a stolen nativity camel to relaying her sense of cultural indignation when her husband tells her to follow a recipe, these essays use humor to dive deeper into the experience of what it means to live as an Egyptian in the United States. This book explores culture, identity, and displacement, offering a unique vision into the Arab American immigrant experience.
Towards an Islamic Lunisolar Calendar: A Historical Account
Hisham Abad
The Islamic “Hijri Calendar” is the only calendar in the history of the past two millenniums which is characterized as a “purely lunar” calendar. Profoundly different from all the calendars of the major civilizations in history, it does not employ any scheme of intercalation to keep its moths synchronized with the climatic seasons of the solar year. My book discusses how a Quranic decree prohibited the intercalation method used in its predecessor, the pre-Islamic lunisolar “Arabian Calendar” which was in vogue in Arabia up to the death of Prophet Muḥammad in 632 CE. Relying on the intimate relation between the defunct Arabian Calendar and the pre-Islamic pilgrimage, I use simple astronomical measurements to establish that the main pilgrimage shrines in Macca were positioned in precise alignments with the sunrise and sunset directions on the Summer Solstice Day. I then uncover the intercalation scheme and the months’ placement of the Arabian Calendar within the solar year using two early sixth-century Byzantine reports, which indicated that the start of the pre-Islamic pilgrimage was always synchronous with the onset of the Summer Solstice. I describe in the book how the prohibition of intercalation was specifically decreed to ban Nasīʾ, the method used by the polytheist of Arabia because it was intimately associated with the worship of the Sun. I then propose introducing other methods of intercalation in the Hijri calendar which do not violate basic Islamic doctrine of monotheism.
"أنا عندي حنين"
“I have Longing”
Maha Sweis-Dababneh
The idea of this book was to revive the memory through the most beautiful time of our childhood games and songs that I would like to keep in the memory of generations.
These games mixed with songs are an intimate part of my memory, and the memory of many generations, not only in Jordan, but also in the Levant, and other countries whose children may play these games, and they repeat these songs in different forms.
The book lists part of my childhood memory that I would like to pass on for the "digital generation" to make them embedded in the soil of their countries and lands.
While this book is intended for children, it is also suitable for adults who hope to reflect on their childhood.
We can use this book as a supplementary material to teach the Arabic language for the intermediate high level and above.
Ali and Edi Al-Adha
Ghada Rafati
Ali and Eid al-Adha is a story about a little boy who is curious about the meaning of this holiday. As he learns about the history of Islam, he is able to appreciate the holiday, which is a day that brings all of his relatives together in celebration, exchanging gifts, and enjoying delicious food.
Secrets Under the Olive Tree
Nevien Shaabneh
"We are a people who tell stories, Layla. You will now have your own story to tell."
Layla Anwar is a young Palestinian born into a land plagued with war and an apartheid regime. She knows all too well what it means to be an outcast, second class in a country she calls home. But Layla is also an outsider within her village and family. Whispers surround her growing up... ones that mask the secrets her family has kept for generations.
Secrets and subjugation continue to plague Layla's adolescence and young adult life after the move to America, as the monsters of her past threaten to break the relationships she most cherishes. A lifetime of tragedy haunts her until she is forced to confront the truth and rectify the mistakes that have shaped her destiny. Layla uncovers the unholiest of secrets on her path to redemption as she discovers the truth of her family's history.
Secrets Under the Olive Tree is a haunting, mesmerizing novel that touches on the depths of the human spirit and unbreakable bonds that transcend tragedy. It is a story about the power of hope, second chances, and faith in the midst of life-altering tribulations.