Alia Mnayer Profile: Seed of the Fruit

Alia Mnayer never knows what bubble to fill on demographic forms. Her skin is creamy, fair, and softly blushed. Her hair is a wild tangle of brown corkscrew curls. Oversized geometric glasses perch on an upturned nose, magnifying her soft blue eyes. Yet when she speaks, it’s in Arabic, words dripping like honey from her painted pink lips and sliding into my tape recorder.

Her father is Palestinian; her mother is Iowan. She is first-generation Arab American, learning about her heritage through her relatives’ folktales and hazy recollections. She retells her family’s stories in her own written way, shedding light on the experiences of Middle Eastern immigrants. Her most recent story, “Fruit of a Rootless Tree,” won the 2021 Iowa Chapbook Prize and describes her grandmother’s journey to the U.S. from Palestine.

“I’ve grown up in Iowa, and it took me a long time to even realize that being Arab means something and that my family is from somewhere else,” she said. “There’s a disconnect. My heritage is from the Middle East, but I’ve never been there. I am Palestinian, but I’ve never been to Palestine.”

Over 300,000 Palestinians were driven from their homeland in the wake of a 1948 civil war in which Palestine was split and Israel created. Alia’s grandparents were among the refugees fleeing al Nakba, the Catastrophe. Forty years later, Alia’s father moved to the U.S., having lived in Kuwait, Jordan, anywhere but his homeland. Growing up in Waterloo, Alia and her siblings connected to their Palestinian heritage through homecooked Middle Eastern meals.

This connection shifted from food to storytelling when Alia took an undergraduate creative writing class during her second year at the University of Iowa. Finding a newfound interest in creative nonfiction, she switched from an English and psychology double-major on the pre-law track to an English and creative writing major. She didn’t know what she wanted to do in the future, but she did know that she wanted to write about her family.

“I’m interested in ideas of space and place, and the idea of what it means to be from somewhere but not of somewhere,” she said. “My siblings and I weren’t taught Arabic growing up and we’re not Muslim, and one of the only ways we were connected to being Arab was through food. I don’t speak Arabic fluently, but I eat Arabic fluently.”

One of Alia’s first publications was “A Native Eater” with earthwords: the undergraduate literary review, where she talked about growing up and cooking Middle Eastern food with her father. While they cooked, her father told stories about his life in the Middle East, slipping between English and Arabic while he washed broccoli and plated rice. He still loves to talk about being born in Kuwait, his short stint as a DJ in Jordan, and his parents’ love story that began when they were children in Palestine.

“My dad is always excited to talk about it, and there aren’t records that I can look into to get this information,” Alia said. “Writing is a discovery. There’s not a trail that I can follow without my family.”

Now, her story “Fruit of a Rootless Tree” has been selected from around 100 submissions as a 2021 Iowa Chapbook Prize winner. This prize is awarded by the University of Iowa’s Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing to innovative writing that uplifts marginal voices in the literary community, according to their mission statement. Erica Crawford, a Chapbook editor, said she was hooked from the first sentence of Alia’s story, which reads, “There were orange groves in Jaffa, turning the air citrus sweet.”

However, it was Alia’s compelling message that made her story a front-runner during the selection process. “The story that is being told is very beautiful and very meaningful,” Erica said. “It’s not just the story of Alia’s family, but of other families who are immigrating to the United States.”

As Alia talks with me, she occasionally pauses and stares at the ceiling. Her eyebrows scrunch and her lips purse as she ponders her response, seemingly searching for the perfect words to describe her story. She is articulate, and she has been since she was a child. Growing up with an English teacher as a mother, Alia learned at a young age that every word matters.

“She’s very good at wording things,” said Jamie Mnayer, Alia’s sister-in-law. “And that runs in the family, her mom being an English teacher. All of them are very good with their words, very good storytellers.”

Alia’s mother is a white Iowan native; being multiracial has posed an ethical dilemma in her writing, Alia said, as she wonders how much of her family’s heritage is her story to tell. “I think white-passing is an important identifier,” she said. “People don’t know that I’m Arab unless I tell them. I’m an American, that’s very clear. I have a place that I can call home and a group of people that I know that I belong to in a way that my dad just doesn’t have.”

She began learning Arabic her first year at the University of Iowa and has since taken four semesters of formal Arabic and one semester of her father’s dialect. In “Fruit of a Rootless Tree,” Alia uses Arabic in exchanges between her and her father. Yet she is cautious to incorporate Arabic into her future writing. “As much as I am proud of being an Arab, I am not from the Middle East. I don’t want to do something like a gimmick,” she said.

Anna Correa, Alia’s best friend, understands the challenges that go into being multiracial in the U.S. As a biracial Indian American, she says that there’s a disconnect between her white-passing appearance and her internal connection to Indian culture. Despite this disconnect, she refuses to shed pieces of her identity in order to fit into normative white culture, and she encourages Alia to do the same through her writing.

“Alia is a part of her family regardless of the shade of her skin, the Arabic skill she has, or the taste she has for different Palestinian dishes,” Anna said. “You don’t have to shed pieces of yourself to fit into a standard that is white. I think writing for Alia is a way to explore parts of herself that may be uncomfortable to explore in a different way.”

Through her writing, Alia embraces her distinct cultural identity and builds a personal connection to her readers. Her goal is to create beauty and invoke empathy through writing, especially toward Arab immigrants in the U.S. American media reinforces negative stereotypes, characterizing our nation’s 3.5 million Arab Americans as potential terrorists, Alia said. She hopes to change this perception through her writing, starting with her family’s story. “Much of the bad of the world comes from people’s ability to not view people as human, which is all to say that this is a lovely story of a lovely family from Palestine. Lots of times, we are painted as the villains,” she said.

College, and the University’s creative writing program in particular, has allowed Alia to grow into her identity. Her brother and sister-in-law both say that Alia has become a force to be reckoned with – a confident woman and fierce writer who stands up for what she believes in. “She’s come a long way to be successful in college,” said Joe Mnayer, Alia’s older brother. “She’s been advocating for herself. I don’t see her trying to fit into anything, she’s just herself.”

Alia graduates from the University of Iowa in a month. Her future is undetermined. She had hoped to go to Morocco as a Fulbright teaching assistant, and although she made it as a semifinalist, she was passed over for the final round. Despite this missed opportunity, Alia has not lost hope. She is optimistic about having time to understand who she is as a writer and what she is passionate about writing.

“Part of next year – the dark abyss that is post-graduate – is figuring out what lanes I would like to pursue in terms of writing,” she said. “I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I know that I want to make the world kinder.”