Q&A with Massoud Hayoun, Author of When We Were Arabs

In his intriguing debut book, EPPY Award-winning nonfiction writer Massoud Hayoun tells his family’s compelling story as a means of engaging in a deeper re-evaluation of its place in a larger politicized history. As his grandparents’ lives unfold between Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles, the author reshapes existing narratives about Arabness, Jewishness, and the legacies of colonialism.

ZAMAN editors Sophie Levy and Evan Mateen contacted Massoud Hayoun to learn more about When We Were Arabs, which was released on June 25th.

ZAMAN Collective: Tell us a little about your background and who you are.

Massoud Hayoun: I’m from LA, born and raised. I went to UCLA and Columbia [University]. I’m Tunisian, Moroccan, and Egyptian-American. I am Jewish — I was raised in a faithful household and remain faithful, in a way that looks very different from that of my youth. I continue to pray, although mostly alone. I read psalms several times a week. I fast on Yom Kippur. I occasionally study Torah, also alone these days. I try to observe Shabbat and allow the restfulness of it to include watching television and using electronics that I find enhance my repose. I was raised by my grandparents, Oscar and Daida, while my mother worked very hard to support us financially. I am left-handed. I am into Beach House and Abdel Halim Hafez. I love Killing Eve, Pen15, Diary of a Chambermaid, Russian Doll, and Silence of the Lambs. 

ZC: When did you first become interested in Mizrahi historical / cultural affairs?

MH: I don’t think there was a particular moment when I became interested in my family’s history and belonging to our homelands. Those things were ever-present. When my grandparents who raised me died, the need to preserve everything that came before became so much more tangible to me, because it was clear that otherwise, entire universes would have ended with them. My grandfather Oscar died when I was a teenager, and that pushed me to interrogate this belonging. And then my grandmother Daida died when I was 30, and I began to interrogate things with even greater ferocity. I am 31. 

ZC: For people who don’t know too much about When We Were Arabs- Can you talk a little more about the book’s subject matter?

MH: When We Were Arabs is a decolonial memoir of my Jewish Arab grandparents — that is to say, it is a re-reading of their lives and what came before with a view to regain things that were robbed from us by various colonial projects and their enforcers. 

Photo courtesy of Massoud Hayoun

ZC: Why did you choose this title? Why in the past tense?

MH: The fact that you ask the question “why in the past tense” means that the title was successful. You’re meant to ask whether we — the readers and me — can suffer all of the universes in this book be relegated to the past. Or are the readers and I engaged in a discourse about the future? The dedication of the book is ‘To Our Youth’ — it is forward-looking. Paired with the title, the flurry of tenses upfront is meant to raise questions. I had hoped that people would find the title to be fundamentally wrong — to feel ill-at-ease with or suffocated by it. Suffocated enough for those uncomfortable feelings to become actionable. With this title alone, I challenge the reader to drag the universe and the people I describe into the present and future. To move forward with them in mind. 

ZC: Why did you decide to write a book in a pivot away from shorter-form journalistic articles? Why now?

MH: In my defense, I did write a lot of long-form articles, it’s just hard to make a living only writing a few big articles a year. I also didn’t pivot, per se. I’m still writing the same short-form journalistic articles, and I’ll keep writing them until I win the lottery, I guess. And maybe even still…

My grandma and I had something we wanted to say. We said it in a book, while my life and career continued on, pretty much as usual. I remain a journalist until now, and it gets tedious and daunting at times, but it’s still more fulfilling than other lines of work, precisely because I’ve worked for some exceptional publications that have allowed me to talk to people who are frequently disregarded. My short-form articles seek to help uplift voices — not just those of analysts and academics, but on many occasions of people who are systematically silenced. 

ZC: Why write about Mizrahiut through the lens of a family story? 

MH: I wouldn’t say I wrote about Mizrahiut. I say in the book specifically that I do not identify with the term Mizrahi, to be clear. I also never say that others from my background (even from my own family) shouldn’t identify as Mizrahi, but I have clearly explained in When We Were Arabs why that term is not one that I find empowering for myself.

I am also clear that I do not speak for anyone but myself and my family. At moments, I’m also careful not to speak for my own family, where I do not feel the closeness necessary to do so. In this book, I am writing about my own very human situation, in the hopes that people — Mizrahi-identifying and otherwise — will connect with some aspect of it.

ZC: What is the relationship between your Jewishness and Arabness? Are they two separate entities that coexist or are they more intertwined?

MH: Both are important components of who I am. My Jewishness governs matters of the spirit, for me. I do also stand with Jewish Americans in practical matters, particularly at moments when our lives, dignity, and freedom are under siege. But in this life, I am Arab first and last. Many similar people, like Moroccan human rights activist Sion Assidon, whom I interviewed in the book, have described themselves as Arabs of Jewish faith. That’s accurate to my experience, as well.  

Photo courtesy of Massoud Hayoun

ZC: How political vs how personal is this book? Is there even a sharp divide between these two qualifiers?

MH: Politics are personal — and the more people benefit from certain oppressive power structures, the less likely they are to notice (or to feel, rather) the degree to which all politics are personal. The book intertwines politics and the personal as a function of simply trying to convey lives, deaths, and their meaning accurately. You could not have understood anything at all about my family — especially not as we were in the 20th century — without understanding a great deal about world politics. I feel that’s universally true; it’s just less evident to some. 

ZC: In an NPR review of When We Were Arabs, Martha Anne Toll characterizes you as a “severe critic of Zionism.” How do you feel about having this issue brought to the forefront of your work? How would you describe your relationship to Zionism? 

MH: Martha Anne Toll’s characterization was accurate; I am a “severe critic of Zionism.” This issue is an important component of the work, but the project of claiming the Jewish Arab identity and preserving this lost world is paramount and must not be subsumed by this one crucial component. The beauty of Toll’s review was that she realized this was an important but not an all-consuming element of the project I undertook with When We Were Arabs. 

ZC: What’s the importance of reclaiming Arabness as a Jew, especially one whose family has relatively recent, politicized history in Israel?

MH: Reclaiming that Arabness has allowed me and my family to come to terms with a lot of inconsistencies in our and our community’s concepts of self. We empowered ourselves to answer a number of long-unanswered, uncomfortable questions: Why does the word Arab incense so many people? How many of the people whom the word incenses have actually spoken with Arabs about what Arabness means, particularly in the contemporary use of the term? If they haven’t undertaken to understand Arabness, how is that term at once so detestable and yet not important enough to try to fully examine its definition by modern Arabs? 

ZC: Ultimately, what do you hope that readers will gain from reading your book?

MH: I hope that readers will feel inspired to look at themselves and their understandings of certain belongings and relationships to humanity with a critical lens. Of course, I hope they look at all facets of reality with that critical lens too. There’s nothing about these times that doesn’t deserve to be turned on its head — including but not only [limited to] the Arab-Jewish divide. 

When We Were Arabs is available for online order at IndieBound, Barnes&Noble, Target, and Amazon. Click here for a list of independent booksellers that also carry Hayoun’s book.