The collection's title story Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a poignant elegy about a daughter's troubled relationship with her father as she searches for a meaningful place to scatter his ashes but instead ends up mourning her mother. The story, about an interrogation by a Turkish military commander of a Palestinian bird, a kestrel, which trace the violent politics of occupation in Gaza and beyond. An example of this approach can be seen in Testimony of Malik, Prisoner #287690. "I think of myself first and foremost as a fiction writer," she says, before adding "there's a lot of work that I put into creating my characters seem real". With the publication of Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, Jarrar hopes to expand the literary representations of Arabs. In 2010, just months before the Arab Spring, the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts, an acclaimed annual event in Wales, named her one of the best 39 writers of Arab origin under the age of 40.
“Me wanting to ‘come out’ as Arab in my writing is my way to reach my family, my community and it’s the stuff I wanted to read – growing up.” “I think of ‘hyphenated Arabs’, Arabs and people of colour when I am writing,” she says. This diasporic upbringing informed her critically acclaimed debut novel A Map of Home (2008), and in this new, beautifully crafted collection she moves seamlessly from Istanbul to Sydney to Seattle, with stories featuring colourful characters from a variety of Arab backgrounds. She was born in the US to a Palestinian father and Egyptian mother, and grew up in Cairo and Kuwait.
Jarrar, a fiction writer and creative-writing professor in Fresno, California, manages to imbue her stories and characters with unabashed satire and biting language, melded with an expansive, imaginative geography. “I want people to think that everything I write has actually happened,” she says, but adds: “I don’t know any half-goat people, sorry.” She laughs as she remembers the encounter. The unusual question came after she had discussed the last story in her provocative collection of short stories, in which she skilfully explores the burdens of growing up an Arab in America using a character who is half human-half animal. At one of the public readings of stories from her new book – Him, Me, Muhammad Ali – Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar was asked by a member of the audience whether she knew a woman who was half-goat.
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