Ghassan Zeineddine’s Dearborn gives readers ten stories that provide a glimpse into the medley of people and experiences in a city that is often considered the capital of Arab America. The setting itself may be the most compelling character as it provokes intense and disparate responses in both its residents and readers, as we witness everything from the downfall of a white-collar criminal enterprise to the fear of retribution that Arab Americans felt following 9/11 in this short story collection.
In this conversation, Ghassan and I discuss the struggles and joys of living in a close-knit community, the creation of characters and stories, and the literary inspiration that a complex community like Dearborn continues to provide.
Lena Mubsutina: I was surprised to learn that you only lived in Dearborn for a few years because you capture it so well in the stories. Why did you choose this city as the setting for your collection?
Ghassan Zeineddine: I grew up in the Arab world and came to the States in 1990. As an adolescent I had heard about Dearborn, and I had a relative who attended the University of Detroit Mercy. A lot of his brothers lived in Troy, Michigan, which isn’t that far from Dearborn, maybe like a half-hour drive away. Every now and then, my parents would order a big box of baklawa from Shatila’s [a well-known Mediterranean bakery in Dearborn].
I knew that there was an Arab American community in Dearborn, but I didn’t really know much about it. I started to research Arab American literature and Arab American experiences when I was pursuing my Ph.D., and Dearborn would come up continuously in books like Diana Abu Jaber’s Crescent and Alia Yunis’s The Night Counter. I was just so fascinated by these references to a city that had a prominent Arab American community. When I started teaching creative writing and Arab American literature at Kenyon College, I would show my students video clips and slides of Dearborn, but I had yet to visit the city. When the University of Michigan-Dearborn had an opening for an English professor, I jumped on it because I had mythologized Dearborn for so many years before that and was eager to live there.
When my wife and I moved there, I was just really taken over by this city. I don’t want to romanticize it because, like any community, there are some wonderful aspects and some negative aspects to it. I just lost myself in the city, meeting people and interviewing people for my research; it was the first time that I ever lived in an Arab American community. It has the highest concentration of Arab Americans. The east side of town, the Arab part of town, you’ll see Arabic store signs, and the streets are lined with Arabic coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores, mosques, etc. You walk through the neighborhoods there, and they are predominantly Arab. I had never experienced that before.
Living in the D.C. area, my sister and I were the only Arabs at school; I never had any Arab friends until I was in college. But in Dearborn it felt like the first time in my life that I belonged to a community, that I belonged in America. I’ve lived for a long time in the Arab world too; I spent most of my twenties in Lebanon. I feel at home in Beirut, but at the same time I, like many others who are a product of two cultures, feel like an outsider there too because I speak Arabic with an accent. What was so interesting about Dearborn is that so many people have this identity struggle, and I felt this camaraderie. For all these reasons I started to write about Dearborn; it came from a deep love of this place.
Mubsutina: I can relate to that because, growing up in Fresno, California, while there is not much of an Arab American community, there is a small but significant Muslim community. In “Zizou’s Voice” and most of the other stories the characters bristle against how “small and provincial” Dearborn feels, and that’s familiar to me.
Zeineddine: In so many of the interviews I conducted with young Arab Americans in Dearborn there’s that same love/hate relationship with the city. They couldn’t see themselves living outside of it, but they are annoyed with the lack of privacy and anonymity. A lot of the characters in Dearborn who wanted to date would leave the city to do so and disguise themselves so another Dearbornite wouldn't spot them and report back to their parents. I felt that concern too, but there are things that I love so much about the city too.
Mubsutina: You no longer live in Dearborn, right?
Zeineddine: No, and it was so gut wrenching to leave because we loved it there. Professionally speaking, it was good to move to Ohio because I landed a dream job teaching at Oberlin College. The good thing is that Dearborn is only two hours away as well. I’ve already visited it since I moved, and my wife and I were hoping to spend about a month or so in Dearborn next summer so I can do more research and just be in the community. And we’re just so deeply connected to the city.
Mubsutina: Speaking of your research, the story “Yusra” was somewhat inspired by your ethnographic research, but you decided to go a different route with the titular character. What influenced your decision to make the character genderfluid?
Zeineddine: It just came in naturally. After I did that ethnographic research I tried to write a short story—the butcher was just a minor character—it was about a relationship between a father and a daughter, and they walk into this grocery store that has a butchery. I wrote like seven or eight pages, but I just could not go anywhere with it. I’ve also been interested in Hamtramck, a city within Detroit, and only about thirty minutes from Dearborn. It’s such an interesting city, so I was so intrigued by it. I was writing about Dearborn, but I was wondering how I could fit Hamtramck in the book. I was thinking that maybe a character who goes there for some reason where their friends and family would not be around, so I started to think about this butcher who is a bit rough and tough, but why would this butcher go to Hamtramck? Like is there something about his identity that he’s trying to keep secret from his family? And that’s where I thought that maybe I could write about his gender identity in depth.
Mubsutina: From the short story collection in general, I can see the diverse range of experiences that you depicted. How comfortable did you feel writing stories from multiple perspectives?
Zeineddine: I think we all include pieces of ourselves in our fiction writing because we draw on our own experiences, and we try to infuse our stories with some kind of life experience we have. For example, I had a similar experience to Zizou in “Zizou’s Voice”: I had been working on a novel for a number of years, and in my early thirties I found this really good agent. For two years we went back and forth on revising this manuscript, but it didn’t get picked up through two rounds of submissions. I didn’t hear back from the agent again. That was just really devastating professionally for me as it was for Zizou.
But at the same time, I have never been one to only write autobiographical fiction. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I have always loved creating different kinds of characters from various generations, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic classes. I think it’s just a matter of doing those characters justice and treating them with empathy and compassion. And that doesn’t mean that they have to be these good characters; they can be questionable characters but humanized.
I also do a lot of research before I write; I try to spend a lot of time with the characters in my head, and I take copious notes about them. I see what happens when I start writing. So for me, I feel comfortable writing from multiple perspectives. I approach it from a place of empathy; it’s part of the joy of imagining ourselves in someone else’s shoes.
Mubsutina: So in the case of “Money Chickens”—where the father hides money in frozen chickens—did that detail come from your imagination or was it based on something or someone you knew?
Zeineddine: I have a dear friend who told me this story that he knew someone who would keep their money in these frozen chickens, and it immediately sparked something in me. This same friend also inspired the last story in Dearborn, “Rabbit Stew.” He told me about this friend or relative who visited one day and slaughtered rabbits in the backyard to make mloukhieh [jute leaf stew] with rabbit. My friend was so horrified by it that he refused to eat the meal. Sometimes it’s just little anecdotes that inspire my stories.
Like “Speedoman,” which is mostly set in the Ford Community Center in Dearborn, is based on an image my wife and I saw in the fall of 2018. I wanted to join a gym, and we went into the Ford Community Center. I remember seeing a group of Arab men in the Jacuzzi and a group of Arab women in the swimming pool. It made me think of how gendered those spaces were. I thought, “What if one of the women wants to hop in the Jacuzzi?” There’s no way that they would do that with a bunch of men taking up that space. It stuck with me, and I had no idea if those women were their wives or not. It stayed with me for years. I knew I wanted to write a story that represented the voices of the men and the women, so I made them five married couples to connect them together. And then there’s the character of Speedoman, who is this mysterious stranger who appears at the community center.
Mubsutina: And I think that was very interesting to take on the two plural first person perspectives that show five wives having the same thoughts and juxtaposing that with the five husbands sharing a voice as well. I also noticed that though both the wives and the husbands are fascinated by the speedo-wearing stranger, the husbands could not admit to themselves that they found this other man attractive.
Zeineddine: Exactly. I wanted to play with that sense of masculinity, especially with that generation of men. The husbands are envious of Speedoman, and they are attracted to him. They feel so guilty about it that they start praying at the mosque, but they can’t put a lid on their desire.
Mubsutina: Speaking of taboo topics, several stories in Dearborn delve into issues such as domestic violence and anti-Arab racism, particularly “I Have Reason to Believe My Neighbor Is a Terrorist” where Badria calls the FBI on her neighbor Adel as a way to keep him from abusing his wife. I know from my own writing that depicting domestic violence in Arab and Arab American spaces can be tricky because of the stereotypes about abusive Arab men and submissive Arab women. How did you navigate that issue when writing this story?
Zeineddine: Unfortunately, domestic abuse is a problem in every community. I was fully aware of Western stereotypes of Arab men being physically abusive and Arab women being submissive and lacking agency. In the rest of Dearborn there’s a number of Arab and Arab American men who are not abusers, who are loving and see themselves on equal footing with their wives. I think it would have been a problem if all stories had featured domestic abuse.
I did want to speak to the Arab American experience in Dearborn immediately following September 11 with a domestic story. I remember being a senior in college in D.C. at the time, and my father called me and said even before we knew the ethnic identity of the terrorists, “Be careful. We’re Arab.” In “I Have Reason to Believe My Neighbor Is a Terrorist,” I thought about how to capture that 9/11 moment. I found it through the main character Badria, who attempts to help out a younger Arab woman by playing on the racial profiling that the FBI did of Arab men after 9/11. In Dearborn at the time, some neighbors actually did rat each other out, so I thought why would a fellow Arab report another Arab to the FBI? One reason could be domestic abuse; they are trying to save someone from that.
Mubsutina: Now that Dearborn is out in the world, what are your future writing plans? Do you see them connecting to this short story collection?
Zeineddine: There are so many other short story ideas I have about Dearborn, and I’m working on a novel that is set in the city. I’ve been completely obsessed with Dearborn; I see myself continuing to write about it. I did also have this idea about writing about peddlers because peddling was so important to the early years of the Arab American experience. My great-grandfather who came to the States in 1920 worked as a peddler for a number of years in West Virginia before he bought a cafe. I have been doing some research on it, but I don’t have that flame in me right now. When I think of Dearborn, I have this fire in me like I need to write about it.
Mubsutina: Just from visiting Dearborn a few times I can see how this is a place that has the potential to be a setting for multiple books.
Zeineddine: Yes, there are so many more stories that I wanted to tell. I’m Lebanese, but there are a lot of other Arab ethnicities within Dearborn, including Yemenis, Iraqis, Palestinians, and Syrians. Learning more about their stories and experiences is something I would like to do more of; not to write their stories but somehow incorporate it into the stories I am telling.
I am not done with Dearborn yet.
Ghassan Zeineddine was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in the Middle East. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College, and co-editor of the creative nonfiction anthology Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Ohio.
Lena Mubsutina is the author of Amreekiya, an Arab American Book Award winner, a finalist for the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, and one of Foreword’s “Four Phenomenal Debut Novels.” She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes.
Author photo: Austin Thomason/Michigan Photography