My local independent bookstore has a corner devoted to what it calls “Palestinian Stories.” The small display of books, which went up in October 2023, is a grim collection of mostly nonfiction titles, such as Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 and Ben Ehrenreich’s The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. The smattering of novels are largely by Palestinian American writers, among them Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses, both bleak multigenerational epics of exile and grief.
You can feel the weight that these books have to carry, each bearing the “pressure” to tell “the human story that will educate and enlighten others,” as the British Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad recently wrote in her book Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Because Palestinians are a people frequently reduced to a problem, the impulse to testify on their behalf is natural. But art that begins with such a mission is not art that is likely to surprise or entertain. Didacticism often results in fiction mostly inhabited by heroes and beautifully tragic figures: the Palestinian grandmother who tightly grips the key to the ancestral home that she lost; the young Palestinian American woman who returns to the occupied lands and feels, for the first time, her people’s struggle; the deracinated doctor in Beirut or Kuwait or Paris, unmoored and overwhelmed by longing.
Especially in this past year of mass death in Gaza, writers want to humanize Palestinians. They need to humanize Palestinians. And maybe hoping, as a reader, to also encounter occasions to laugh is obscene. But a new debut novel by a celebrated Palestinian American playwright responds in a startling way to the burden that Hammad described—by shrugging it off. In Too Soon, Betty Shamieh isn’t trying to educate or enlighten. I was taken aback when, as we talked, she described herself as essentially writing “fan fiction.”
What Shamieh meant is that she creates stories to entertain herself, as a kind of wish fulfillment. Her plays—she has written 16—have something of this quality too. In Malvolio, produced by the Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2023, she took the tragic fool of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night—who is tricked into thinking that the noble lady he serves, Olivia, is in love with him—and gave him a sequel that ends in marriage and triumph over his tormentors. Shamieh has rejiggered Palestinian characters in a similar spirit in other plays, making them irreverent and flawed instead of avatars of victimhood, carnal where they tend to be portrayed as saintly. In fan-fiction mode, she plays with genre, which gives her a structure to complicate. With Too Soon, she told me, “More than anything, I wanted to create a Palestinian American Sex and the City.”
The novel, which opens in 2012, has all the beats (and some of the cliché and cringe) of a romantic comedy—one that unfolds partly in the West Bank. In Shamieh’s classic marriage plot, an indecisive woman is approaching her 40s and trying to pick between two men, each of whom represents a distinct path for her. Yet the protagonist, a theater director named Arabella who shares much of her biography with Shamieh, is an antihero. The daughter of Palestinian immigrants to America, Arabella is both confused and demanding. She wants to pursue Aziz, a man descended from her clan who is volunteering as a medic in Gaza and who offers her the prospect of being the good Palestinian, making babies for her people—a life decision that would also be politically sound. But she discovers that she has feelings for Yoav, an Israeli American theater friend she has known for nearly 20 years, who represents the independent life she has made for herself in New York City; he doesn’t want kids at all. Arabella is not an emblem of anything—she can be self-righteous, self-deprecating, petty, lustful. And she’s funny. I’m not sure how she would feel about being tucked among the other “Palestinian Stories.”
“Don’t we all know that we’re kind of terrible?” Shamieh asked me, as a Palestinian American Carrie Bradshaw might. “I’m just in touch with the fact that I’m that way.” But she wondered aloud whether other people know this about themselves too. “Sometimes I feel like I’m playing truth or dare, and nobody’s really actually telling the truth.”
I met Shamieh one day in early November at a French brasserie called Marseille in New York’s theater district, a favorite spot of hers where she had many post-performance glasses of wine during the two decades she spent working Off and Off-Off-Broadway after graduating from the Yale School of Drama in 2000. I expected her to be as brash in person as Arabella is on the page. “If you were thinking about hating me already, don’t worry. You’re in great company,” Arabella assures the reader in the very first paragraph. “Also, try as you might, you can’t hate me as much as I hate myself.” But Shamieh, a curtain of long black hair sweeping down one side of her face, conveyed calm and even a little shyness, explaining, “I’m older, and I’m a mother.” In her 40s, she has a 10-year-old son and now lives in San Francisco.
From the novel’s start, Arabella resists her Palestinian identity. She’s not one to sign petitions. She’d rather be recognized for her unique productions of Shakespeare: “I staged comedies as if they were tragedies and vice versa” (a good summary of Shamieh’s work as a playwright as well). When she is featured on the cover of American Theatre magazine and later learns that this was purely because the editor was looking for a way to honor Edward Said, the Palestinian American intellectual, Arabella is furious: “I was chosen not for the art I made but for the art I made while being Palestinian. I had done everything in my life to never feel I got a leg up because magnanimous liberal white people felt sorry for me.”
Asked to direct a production of Hamlet in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Arabella hesitates at first. “I have zero desire to return to Palestine,” she tells Aziz the first time they speak, after their grandmothers have set them up. She finally takes the job because she hopes to impress the British theater company sponsoring the project. And because she wants to test the chemistry with Aziz.
Arabella’s identity crisis is one that Shamieh understands. She was the first Palestinian American playwright to have a production premiere Off Broadway, and the responsibility of representing the Palestinian or Arab perspective on the New York stage felt daunting, she told me, especially as she worked throughout the War on Terror years. She certainly was not interested in producing “agitprop,” she said; instead she studied Neil Simon’s comedies so she could emulate them. Just before she started writing Too Soon, she had made a decision to try writing for television, like many of her playwright friends. She was ready to go for the money—until, that is, she found herself caught up in the story of Arabella, a single woman in her mid-30s who wants to settle down but can’t figure out who she is.
“The only way I could deal with my fear of being pigeonholed and limited and diminished by my ethnicity was to write about my fear of it,” Shamieh told me. “That’s the only way I can process it and laugh at it.”
The ribald humor, the over-the-top-ness that she brings to describing this struggle, reminded me—surprisingly—of mid-century Jewish American writers, especially Philip Roth, navigating between the poles of Jewishness and Americanness with a lecherous grin. I thought back to a hotel-room encounter at the end of Portnoy’s Complaint. Alexander Portnoy is in Israel, wrestling on the floor with a hearty young woman from a kibbutz. He is attracted to her strength and repelled by it, wanting to conquer her but also to be her—and, to make things even more Freudian, he realizes with a jolt that she reminds him of his mother. The scene, in all its violence and absurdity, reveals the subterranean tensions between Diaspora Jews and Israelis. In Too Soon, Arabella spends days in hotel rooms in Jerusalem and Ramallah with Aziz, having sex and eating takeout hummus and skewers of shrimp. At one point, mid-fellatio, she discovers scars from bullet wounds on both of his legs—the work, it turns out, of Israeli snipers. She wants to talk about what happened; he doesn’t want her to stop.
The novel is full of such moments, when Arabella’s own urges collide with a sense of obligation to something greater. She is drawn to the idea of Aziz, as he is to the idea of her—propagating and making their grandmothers happy. Shamieh told me how familiar this aspect of tribalism felt. Her family is descended from Christian Palestinian clans that lived for centuries in a village that eventually became Ramallah. During the decade leading up to the Six-Day War, in 1967, most of the members of her family scattered to a few different cities in the United States, including San Francisco, where Shamieh was born and grew up. But the descendants remained in a kind of “time warp,” Shamieh said, gathering annually at an enormous convention, in part for the purposes of pairing up young descendants. “I would say maybe 95 percent of my cousins married people who cannot speak Arabic and have names like Betty and are completely American, but are from our clans,” Shamieh said. She went too because “it seemed easier than dating.”
But she felt an inner conflict, which makes its way into the novel. “I lived in the space—that stasis—between being pushed and being pulled,” Arabella explains. It leaves an opening for self-aware scrutiny of the narratives that prop up a person’s sense of identity and community. One Manhattan scene, in which Arabella secretly seeks out the mother of Yoav, her Israeli American love interest, lands in an unexpected place. The mother, Indji, is an Egyptian Jew who was exiled from Egypt in the 1950s and found refuge in Israel before coming to the United States. To gain her confidence, Arabella pretends to be Jewish (a hokey contrivance that Shakespeare would have approved of), and Indji shares the story of her banishment. The tale tilts Arabella’s perspective. “I fretted over the plight of Palestinians only because I was one,” she reflects. “Had I been born Jewish, I would have been a Zionist, perhaps a militant one. I would have insisted we had a homeland. I would have wanted it secure. By any means necessary.”
It’s a vertiginous moment for Arabella—and for the reader, too, in a post–October 7 world in which both Palestinians and Israelis have rewound the tape on their own stories all the way back to their most elemental and least accommodating versions: the Nakba versus the Holocaust. “Inviting a competing history into your worldview is disorienting,” Arabella says. “It flips a switch in your brain and your vision suddenly becomes kaleidoscopic. The shards of your people’s history are true and clear, but they don’t coalesce into a neat picture of saints and sinners.”
In his book Orientalism, Edward Said famously revealed the ways that Western literature had depicted Arabs as exotic, backward, irrational, and in need of guidance—portrayals that served, consciously or not, to justify a colonial mindset toward them. But Said’s analysis also posed an implicit question that it didn’t answer: If these writers robbed Arabs of their full humanity, how can literature restore it—without, that is, simply creating characters who are the noble inverse of the ones Western writers invented?
Shamieh’s novel would be comfortable on romance-fiction shelves, but the longer trajectory of her dramatic work points to her deep concern with this question. She came of age in the 1990s, during the optimistic period of the Oslo Accords—a time, she told me, when Said and the conductor Daniel Barenboim could create an Israeli-Arab youth orchestra, for example. In 2003, Shamieh herself helped found a Jewish and Arab American theater collective called the Semitic Root. The defeatism that has come to define the way that many young people today perceive the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is not really part of her vocabulary. And as we sat and talked, I sensed an unwillingness to delve too deeply into the mess that is the region’s politics; that’s not what has motivated her.
What propels her instead is the idea of creating characters and stories that confound expectations—including, occasionally, her own. Early in her work on Too Soon, Shamieh realized that her marriage plot needed to be multigenerational, pulling her back toward what she had resisted as a fusty Palestinian genre. Interspersed between Arabella’s sections are the first-person narratives of her lively grandmother Zoya (who on the boat to America manages to steal a moment of transgression with a man named Aziz, actually the grandfather of the Aziz whom Arabella will meet—again, Shakespeare would approve) and then of her mother, Naya (who bridles at an arranged marriage, immerses herself in African American culture, and grows an afro). “I thought I was writing Sex and the City,” Shamieh told me, and then “it was as if Carrie Bradshaw’s grandmother shows up, and she’s like, ‘I survived the potato famine and I didn’t have a great time on the boat to Ellis Island being a single woman, and that’s why you like shoes and are obsessed with men.’ ”
These women are all antiheroes of a sort, especially when set against figures in other Palestinian works. Shamieh mentioned one largely overlooked 1974 novel by the Palestinian Israeli writer Emile Habiby, which she looked to as a rare precedent for its profanity and satire. The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist is a picaresque story of a Palestinian man stumbling through the wreckage of the 1948 war out of which Israel emerged. He finds himself in surreal situations (including an encounter with an alien from outer space), always trying to make the best of them—and somehow always falling deeper into a hole. “He’s trying so hard and doing everything and still failing,” Shamieh said.
This uphill-battle swashbuckling is what animates Shamieh in her dramatic work too, which pretty consistently features norm-breaking women who cause havoc. One of her most successful plays, Roar, appeared Off Broadway in 2004, starring Annabella Sciorra as a Palestinian woman named Hala. Like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, she incites quarrels and betrayals among family members who are driven, and often defeated, by unabashed sexual desire and a hunger to assimilate in bold ways (the teenage protagonist of the play, Hala’s niece, is a blues singer). “Roar has these women who are in your face,” Samer Al-Saber, a theater professor at Williams College who is compiling a selection of Shamieh’s plays into a book set to be published next year, told me. “They are funny. They are constantly discussing what potentially could be considered dirty laundry. They are fighting with each other, against each other, and for each other. And in that way, it is not the typical minority story.” By bucking conventions, Al‑Saber added, Shamieh is also resisting the demands of the market.
Shamieh told me that in writing such characters—her “crazy women,” as she put it—she also managed to avoid the traps set for her by the wider culture’s perception of Arab Americans. She could have done the expected, she said, and written plays about, for example, honor killings, a persistent problem in certain Arab communities. But she worried that she would be reinforcing stereotypes; by not creating submissive and oppressed women, she could upend them. At the same time, she was writing characters whom she not only knew—women like those in her own family—but was more comfortable sharing with a non-Arab audience.
Arabella also chooses a third way at the end of Too Soon, and (spoiler alert) her rejection of Aziz was particularly striking to read, because her rationale sounded like something Shamieh herself would say. “Unlike Aziz, I wasn’t searching for a point to life,” Arabella says. “I was looking to feel enthralled by it.” Shamieh actually did say something like this to me, though it was more grounded in the challenge and opportunity of being Palestinian. “I feel like my bent as a human being is towards joy, towards connection, towards optimism,” she told me. “But I happen to have been born to people who don’t have much at this point to be optimistic about.”
This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “A Palestinian American Sex and the City.”
The post A Palestinian American Sex and the City appeared first on The Atlantic.
