S. Zainab would like to think she bleeds ink but the very idea makes her feel faint. She writes fantasy and horror, and is currently clutching a manuscript while groping in the dark. Find her on Twitter: @szainabwilliams.
This year, I’ve read books that speak to contemporary global and U.S. issues, but none as urgent and important as the title I’m shouting out today. This is a nonfiction debut from an author celebrated for his sharp, prescient fiction about refugees, American policy and violence, and national and global crises. It’s the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza that brought this novelist and journalist to nonfiction to deliver what is aptly described as a reckoning–with being a member of Western civilization, a liberal, and silently complicit. The title of this book began as and continues to be a call to pay attention, right now, to the history we’re making, and a critique of our tendency to look back with feckless remorse on the chaos and destruction to which we silently bore witness or even endorsed.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
I had to brace myself before picking up this nonfiction debut from the author of American War, and I will tell you right away that El Akkad is not here to spare us the details of the atrocities inflicted on the civilians, the women, the children in Gaza. Quite the opposite. Facing the unthinkable and unimaginable is the point. Tearing down the ways we dissociate the very real and gutting savagery of a war that does not discriminate between soldiers and infants is the point. El Akkad casts a critical gaze on all our progressive facades in the literary world, in the signs on liberal lawns, in our educated social circles to say that history will remember who remained silent and who was complicit while Western leaders posed with bombs and countless families were murdered.
El Akkad writes from a personal place. He speaks as an immigrant born in Egypt, raised in Qatar, and as a citizen of the U.S. He pulls from experience reporting on war in Afghanistan as well as Black Lives Matter to contextualize what’s happening in Gaza with a broader, appropriately scathing critique of the West’s approach to civil unrest, protest, and Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. He writes as a parent grappling with the knowledge of Palestinians forced to face horrors beyond a parent’s worst nightmares and reconciling the privilege of raising a child in the West. This book spoke to my own disillusionment with liberalism and frustration with the fear tactics often successfully used to stifle dissent. But El Akkad also champions those who call for cease-fire at great risk to their careers and even their lives, celebrates the Jewish activists organizing for peace, and points to those vital moments where we take a stand in large and small ways. This book is a reckoning and a reminder that humanity is not lost but something we must work for, claim, and reclaim every chance we get.
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English (US) · 