Petra in the Middle East: A Memoir, the debut book by Barbadian writer Petra Noel-Arthur, out this month (June) in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle. Told in thirty vignettes, the book is an account of nearly a decade lived across Türkiye, Iraq, and Jordan, and is “the rare Caribbean voice writing the region the West has agreed to misread.”
Description: On her first full day in Anatolia, Türkiye, Petra Noel-Arthur stepped out of a car onto a crowded street and watched an entire city stop moving. Strangers froze mid-stride and conversations died. “Time stood still,” she writes because many of them had never seen a Black woman before. What happened over the next nine years is the subject of her debut memoir, Petra in the Middle East, publishing in paperback, hardcover and Kindle this June.
Told in thirty unflinching, often funny, frequently breathtaking vignettes, the book follows Noel-Arthur from Barbados to Türkiye to Iraqi Kurdistan and Jordan through a hammam where she stood naked among twenty-five strangers and felt free for the first time in her life; through Istanbul’s coldest day in a century; through a taxi ride that turned dangerous because of the colour of her skin; through the tomb of a Sufi mystic where the lights went out and she wept with women whose language she did not speak; and through a Kurdish mountain landscape so biblical that people called it “Moses country.”
The result is a book that has almost no precedent: a Black Caribbean Christian woman’s almost decade-long account of life inside the world’s most misunderstood region, not as a war correspondent, not as a tourist, but as a neighbour, a colleague, a customer, a friend. Noel-Arthur arrived carrying the West’s version of the Middle East. The Middle East, she writes, returned the favour: it handed her back a truer version of herself. “I left it, at last, not with a degree in survival, though I earned that too, but with something rarer: a degree in myself.” “The Middle East is the most misread region on earth, and as a Black woman, I am among the most misread people in it,” says Noel-Arthur. “This book is what happens when those two misreadings meet and start correcting each other. I didn’t write it to defend the region or to condemn it. I wrote it because no one who looks like me, from where I’m from, had told this story.”
Petra Noel-Arthur is a Caribbean writer and memoirist. Born in Barbados, she ‘came of age’ between the island and the Middle East, where she lived, worked and travelled for almost a decade across Türkiye, Iraqi Kurdistan and Jordan. She holds degrees in English and Caribbean Studies and in corporate communications, and has spent over fifteen years working in journalism, teaching and executive event production. She enjoys creating meaning through design and long-form narrative. She lives in Barbados, where the mornings are calm and slow and there is almost always a book within reach. Petra in the Middle East is her first book.
For more information, see https://www.amazon.com/Petra-Middle-East-Memoir-Noel-Arthur/dp/1-1
Petra in the Middle East: A Memoir, the debut book by Barbadian writer Petra Noel-Arthur, out this month (June) in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle. Told in thirty vignettes, the book is an account of nearly a decade lived across Türkiye, Iraq, and Jordan, and is “the rare Caribbean voice writing the region the West has agreed to misread.”
