I Was Told Back Home Would Be Beautiful (Nonfiction), New York, NY
I Was Told Back Home Would Be Beautiful explores how the inheritance of the Palestinian refugee experience shapes Palestinians in the diaspora and how they understand homeland, citizenship, and identity.
“Edward Said said that Palestinians have been denied “permission to narrate.” This remains true. As a Palestinian-American with refugee grandparents who fled Palestine in 1948, I’d like to change this.”
Elena Dudum is a Palestinian-Syrian writer whose work explores the boundaries of generational trauma and what it means to have an identity shaped by political narratives. As a grandchild of Palestinian refugees, her working memoir hopes to untangle the notion of “homeland” and how one can connect to this amorphous idea in the diaspora. Elena recently graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in Nonfiction Writing where she also taught freshmen composition. Her personal essays on Palestine have been published in TIME Magazine, Bon Appétit, and Cosmopolitan Magazine among others, and are forthcoming in The Atlantic.
Visit Elena’s website: elenadudum.com
Find Elena on Instagram: @elena_dudum