The Complicity, Distance, and Language of Genocide
Renowned author and journalist Omar El-Akkad sits down with John Freeman to discuss his new memoir and what it means to be on this side of the bombs.
Authors Omar El-Akkad and John Freeman visited Buffalo to speak at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center on March 31st. John is the executive editor for Knopf publishing company, which printed Omar’s book. Their conversation was a sequel to their previous visit in November of 2023, this time centering on Omar’s new book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This published earlier this year. The audience spilled over into the standing room as this time was much different; over fifteen months had gone by since their previous talk, and the reality of the Palestinian genocide is now undeniable and ever-present. Omar’s work is potent and unforgiving but captures two distinct perspectives: one of a person living in the affluent United States with distance between themselves and the bombs and that of someone in the global south who knows what it’s like to live on the receiving end of Western oppression. This was their conversation:
John: It’s so nice to be back here. So, don’t burst my bubble; did you write this all in Berlin on our residency? And it wasn’t Buffalo at all?
Omar: They’re never letting me into Berlin. [laughs]
John: I joke, but it was so meaningful to come here in November of ‘23, and Omar and I were not in that letter. We had an event in October of ‘23 where it was very clear what was about to start happening, and we sat here before an audience like this, and we blinked. We didn’t address the topic of what was about to happen to Gaza. We deeply regretted this. So we came here and we had the conversation even though the book we were here to talk about had a short story that had nothing to do with the book we were here to talk about in it. I think Hollywood movies, when it has the montage of the [writing sounds] and the paper falling on the floor, then suddenly a book is done. The montage that this book would come in is a montage of horror.
I want to start by talking into spaces which make things possible because the room that we had in our previous conversation, seemed magical, where people were willing to suspend what they think in order for someone who didn’t know what he thought to talk it through.
Re-reading the book on the way up here, I was amazed how much of the book begins and has to do with children: taking care of children, being a father, being a son, being a son to your particular father in his stories. I feel like that entry point is not simply to talk about the children who’ve been killed in Gaza. It’s not simply to talk about the children as a more valuable instrument of humanity. But it’s because once you’re talking about children and mothers and fathers, grandparents, cousins, you’re in a space in which care should be an absolute value. What you’re writing against is a world in which those values have been thrown out the window through power. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that aspect of the book, it being a book about family, about your family, and about assuming the same principles about families as you do about your own.
Omar: Thanks so much for doing this. I appreciate it. I’ve been on the road now for about two months and change. I always begin by thanking my conversation partner, knowing that I’m probably not going to see them ever again. ‘Thank you for doing this’ feels so silly because this is your book. There’s so many things to thank you for. Yeah, John is the reason this book got written. Not only because he encouraged me to sit down and take these thoughts that I was putting on paper in a very haphazard way and try to make something more coherent out of them. But also because I didn’t think this thing had a chance in hell of getting purchased and published. I mean, it was the furthest thing from my mind. One of the things about John, if you don’t know him, he’s one of those people you sit down with him and you’ll be like, “Can you tell me you’re five favorite Nepalese poets?” and he’ll be like, “Just five!?” The breadth of this man’s knowledge of literature and his love for it is immense.
So Knopf picks up on this and hires him, and the very first book he purchases ends up winning the National Book Award. So he walks in and immediately has some leverage, and then he uses all of that and all of his goodwill to get this thing through. I still don’t know why the hell you did that, but I’m grateful for it.
One of the epigraphs is this poem from Vietnam, a very short poem, only five or six lines. It’s someone on the other side of an atrocity being asked a series of questions. ‘Do you know where you are?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Whose house is this?’ ‘I don’t know.’ The answer is ‘I don’t know’ to all of them except the last line: ‘Are these your children?’ ‘Yes.’ There’s a number of reasons I think that I go back to that place, childhood. I think, first of all, I do it in almost all my stories. I go back to that place because I tend to write about the things that make me angry. The things that make me angry tend to be institutional and tend to be systemic. They tend to be predicated on this foundation of lies. This completely horseshit narrative that we’re all supposed to bite into. Childhood I think of as being this sort of bastion of honesty in our lives, before all the compelling forces of adulthood kick in and all the lies we have to tell ourselves to get through the day. So I tend to collide those things. I do it in fiction, and I do it in that short story that has nothing to do with anything we talked about when we came here in the anthology; I do it all the time. So I have a sort of magnetic pull to that place to begin with.
There are a couple of other reasons that are specific to this book. I think the first is that… I’m a different person on the other side of the past year and a half; I just am. And the moment specifically that broke me the most were related to children, right? You wake up, you open the computer, and here’s the worst thing that a human being can do to another human being. And the human being is having it done to them as a child. So you get to a place where you’re conditioned, right? Like I often say, over the past year and a half, I became conditioned to the idea that if I open my computer and I load up whatever social media I was on, and there’s a picture of a smiling Palestinian kid, it’s because that kid got killed, right? That’s why it’s showing up. And I can’t get away from that. I just can’t.
The third reason is complicity. This notion of; you often say there’s not a thing in this book that I indict or autopsy or interrogate that I’m not deeply complicit in. This idea of how you talk about children in the middle of an atrocity, I think, is one of the examples of that. What I mean by that is, over the past year and a half whenever I’ve gotten into these conversations, these arguments where I’m trying to get someone to give a shit about something that I think they should give a shit about by virtue of being human… I find myself retreating into that place where I’m making an argument that I think is going to persuade them, but if I think about it just a little bit more, I realize how much moral ground I’m ceding. Essentially, this notion of like, ‘Hey, these are kids.’ That in and of itself should be enough. But what you’re not saying, but really saying is, ‘Yeah, these guys are all terrorists. The men are all terrorists. The women are probably all terrorists.’ So I’m going all the way over here. You’ve sort of lost from the beginning, right? It’s the same thing with like, ‘Imagine if those pagers have been on planes, the quadcopters that are being used to snipe these kids, the police forces on the other side of the planet are going to get them soon, right?’ What you’re really saying is, ‘Yes, right now it’s happening to people who are subhuman, and that’s what happens to those people over there. But it’s going to happen to someone who’s sufficiently human soon! And that’s why you should oppose it!’ Well no. If that drone kills that kid and then does nothing else ever again, it doesn’t make it any less evil.
So there are a whole bunch of other reasons why I sort of gravitate to childhood, but not all of them are admirable, and not all of them are ones that I’m particularly proud of.
John: Talking about complicity, there’s a scene early in the book where you’re sitting at your computer, you have at least twenty different tabs open, and your daughter is making a kind of playground, a little mini civilization. You kind of use that as an excuse to meditate on your own complicity because you talk about your name, and you’ve decided to give her a name that sounds more white, that doesn’t lean toward Egypt. When you talk about complicity, you’re not always saying, ‘I am complicit with the pain for the weapons and the bombs.’ Sometimes what you’re talking about with complicity is, ‘I am complicit because I tried to hide in plain sight. I tried to belong.’ I wonder if you could back up a little bit and talk about the long history that this book encapsulates; you coming from Qatar to the United States when you were 16, what you thought it was, what you thought you had to do, what you passed onto your own family in order to fit in and how that is falling away in the last 18 months.
Omar: In my last year in Qatar, which would have been ‘98, the movie theatre opened up. There was nothing to do in Qatar in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Nothing. You went to the Pizza Hut, you went to the Dairy Queen, nothing. Then the theatre opens up, and plays one movie for the entire year. It’s Titanic. I saw Titanic 6 or 700 times. [laughs] Fast forward a few years later, I moved to Canada in college, and my then-girlfriend, now wife, and I were going to go out to dinner. The kids on our dorm floor had a movie night once a week, and they were showing… [laughs] You’re correct… [laughs] They’re showing Titanic. So I tell my girlfriend, ‘I have lots of nostalgic memories of Titanic. We should watch it real quick, and we can go to get dinner.’ She’s like, ‘What’s wrong with you? That’s a three-hour movie, I’m not going to watch it real quick.’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about? It’s like an hour maybe, tops.’ [laughs] It didn’t occur to me that the version we saw in Qatar was so incredibly censored. I thought it was just a short but very badly edited movie [laughs]. I bring this up because that’s sort of what my early days of consuming culture for the first 16 years of my life, that was it. I still have my two Nirvana CDs. I have In Utero, and the other, there’s just a black box floating in a pool. [laughs] Yeah, there’s Nevermind, where it’s a black box instead of the baby, and In Utero, where it’s just a pair of wings and a black rectangle. I don’t know how many people get these references. But essentially, there was some sort of insidious force somewhere that was deciding what was too dangerous for me to consume, to read, to listen to. I was so furious at whatever that was. I later learned that the chief government censor at the time was my friend’s mom. She was like the nicest lady, and her day job was like… [laughs]
The reason I bring this up is because when you grow up in a part of the world where you have this kind of environment where there’s a sense of simply engaging in art is a dangerous thing, which is true, in some respects. In a concrete sense, where I grew up, you don’t look at the West and the US and think of an active space; you think of a negative space. It’s not so much what this is; it’s what it isn’t and what’s not going to happen here. I got to Montreal, I remember I went to this party and some guy talked my ear off about Naked Lunch. ‘You gotta read Naked Lunch!’
John: Everybody went to that party. [laughs]
Omar: This guy had his head up his ass, it was exactly the kind of book you’d expect a twenty year old guy to talk your ear off about. So I go to the library, I go to ask for this book and I’m terrified. I haven’t shaken off that idea that if you’re caught with the wrong book. So all of this to say that, well before you get to this part of the world, you superimpose what you need it to be onto it. That becomes way more important than what it actually is. Then the process of getting here and living here is the process of slowly lifting up that projected reality that you’ve put onto it and finding out what it really is. I think for me and my parents’ generation, those are two very different processes. My parents were rooted somewhere, and that’s what they felt they had to get the hell out of. I’m not rooted anywhere, right? From the age of five, I’ve been living on someone else’s land. So the process of dismantling what you need the place to be and replacing it with what the place actually is, I think, is very, very different generationally.
John: You’ve mentioned at one point that the house you live in is the 16th or 17th home you’ve lived in. That was very different for your father and mother, especially. Can you talk about the Egypt that your father grew up in and maybe read a little bit of when he knew it was time to go?
Omar: My dad was born in ‘54. He lived in Al-Basatin, which is a fairly old part of Cairo. If you go there now, it’s a bit tourist-trappy. A lot of people will try to sell you silver trinkets and stuff. You should buy the silver trinkets; they’re very well made. It’s a part of time and history.
The very first story I ever heard about literature in general was about him when he was a little kid sneaking into this coffee shop. I think it was on Thursday nights. But it was the cultural luminaries of Egypt who would descend on this place. Chief among them was named Mafus, who would hold court, and my dad and other kids would hang around until things got a little too profane, then the person who ran the place would shoo them away with a broom. My dad loved Egypt. I don’t think, left to his own devices, he would’ve ever gotten out of there. I think the place could have burned up around him, and he would’ve stuck around. But he had a wife, he had a new child, and the economic situation was miserable, the political situation was miserable. This was the early ‘80s, right after the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and this was right around the time I was born. This, I think, was the moment that my father decided that he needed to get the hell out. Let me read a part. It’s a scene right in downtown, not far from El-Tahrir Square:
Four years earlier, my father, then only thirty-one and working in the accounting department at the Cairo Sheraton in Egypt, was leaving the hotel one night when a couple of soldiers decided to give him a hard time.
The country was still sleepwalking through the ugly years following the assassination of President Anwar El-Sadat. After signing the Camp David Accords, formalizing peace between Egypt and Israel, Sadat was shot to death during a military parade in 1981 by an Islamic fundamentalist military officer. Of the few impressions of Egypt I suspect I share with my father, who has been dead now more than a decade, there is this sense that, more often than not, for people who are from the places we’re from, power changes hands this way: a killing, a coup, a successful revolution, a failed revolution. My father loved Egypt. He knew it for exactly what it was and loved it still.
Shortly after I was born, in 1982, the man who killed Sadat went before the firing squad, and for years the whole country lived under the suffocating gravity of martial law. To be outside at night required a formal reason, or else one risked harassment by the soldiers who seemed to make a military checkpoint out of every intersection. It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.
It was late, my father was done working for the night. Because he was technically part of the tourism industry, and the Egyptian economy has for a very long time depended on tourism to ward off complete collapse, he was afforded special dispensation to be out during curfew hours. The soldiers on the corner did not know this. Young, bored, tasked with what authoritarian regimes have ordered young, bored soldiers to do since time immemorial—stand there projecting the violent underpinning of political power—they also didn’t care. One of them stopped my father.
Your papers, he said.
My father pulled out his paperwork. Without reading it, the soldier tore it in half and threw it on the floor.
Your papers, he repeated.
In the forty or so years since that day, I have thought about this moment more than anything else in the stories my father told me. I’ve thought about it while shuffling my passport across the counter at border crossings; while running from RPG attacks in the dead of night; while sitting in a guesthouse in Kandahar listening to two Taliban officials explain, with utmost confidence, how the world should be run; while sitting in a courtroom in Guantánamo Bay watching highly educated men and women assign legitimacy they know is unearned to an ad hoc, hopelessly compromised legal system. It has been, for as long as I can remember, the memory that anchors my overarching view of political malice: an ephemeral relationship with both law and principle. Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.
John: You seem to be between three threads, one of which, a retroactive moving forward through the history of your family, coming from Egypt to Qatar, and your father went because he went to the airport and was stopped. He was on a no-fly list with a guy with a very similar name. Instead of going to Libya, he goes to Qatar and lives there. Circumstances change, Montreal when you were 16. Sometimes, in telling that story, you begin to hear your story, how you decided ‘I’m going to do some deliberate things. Instead of doing things by accident or having them done to me, I’m going to live in the West. And when 9/11 happens, I’m going to go out and report on it and write on it.’ Because what we do is act and react actively to things in the world; you don’t let them act upon you.
There’s two things that happen in that second thread, which is the thread of you becoming a reporter, traveling the world, going to all the sites that are mentioned in the piece of the book we read: you go to Guantanamo, you report on Katrina, Ferguson, the Arab Spring, Egypt, Afghanistan. It’s not just the world that is changing, but you’re changing. Your realization that your ability to enact your will upon the world is just as compromised by all the things you’re witnessing.
Then the third thread is, of course, what happened between November of ‘23 when we were here last and it’s still ongoing to this point, the genocide in Gaza. Your prescription of watching it, the media cover it, and your faith drop out from the media. You’re watching the US sign on to more and more weapons and breaking international law, if you believe that was actually law.
Amongst those three threads, one of the things that is the most terrifying for me is your rift and your continuing rifts on language. I just want to quote something that you say, “Words exist only in hindsight,” and then later on, “Language is never sufficient. There’s not enough of it to make a true mirror of the world.” Between those two things, I think at the core of the book, there’s a very key argument with language and meaning that you’re enacting, that you’re wrestling. That’s whether language can catch up to a catastrophe, and can it encapsulate what we are. I wonder if you can talk a little about that in the context of this where we just mentioned, about family, about your own orbit, your political awakening, and in watching a catastrophe that seems to be beyond language. There’s also using manglements of language in order to skew the online imprisonment.
Omar: I grew up in Qatar, and I was back there recently, in November. Every time I get invited back, I always say yes, even if the flight is a nightmare, but I get to see my high school friends and the house I grew up in. I was driving around with a group of high school friends of mine, and I realized I felt comfortable in my own skin for the first time in decades. It had nothing to do with the place… I think it had to do with the language. I think it had to do with the fact we were sitting there talking in this weird mashup of English, Arabic, and like Qatari curse words from the mid ‘90s that if you didn’t go to Doha College from like 1989 to 1998, you wouldn’t know what the hell we were saying. It was precisely for that reason: the language. Even now, as I’m saying this, this isn’t sufficient for me; I can’t get my thoughts across. I think that’s the hallmark of being a writer is obsessing over exactly that. These thoughts are crystal clear in my head and somewhere in the translation process onto the page. They turn to mud, and then when you try to bridge that gap effectively, that’s writing for me. That’s what writing is, is an act.
When I was living in Qatar, we had this word ‘fanish.’ If you’re not from the country, which 90% of the population isn’t, including my parents that came there to cash in on the oil and gas money. They don’t hand out citizenship because they want to protect that. If you’re part of the non-citizen component, you’re there on Kafala, a sponsorship. This sponsorship is at the pleasure of a local company or a local individual, and the day it’s revoked for some reason, you have to get the hell out. That’s what ‘fanish’ relates to. It’s like ‘What happened to Muhammad?’ ‘Muhammad h’fanish,’ he got the hell out because his sponsorship got revoked. My whole life, I was like, ‘This is an Arabic word.’ Then a while later I was talking to somebody and they’re like, ‘No, man. That’s just a corruption of the English word for finished.’ [laughs] That’s what happened there. That’s a very specific example of language coming very close to describing what language needs to describe. It doesn’t exist in any dictionary or anything like that.
I think language, for me, in addition to being what I do with my life, the only thing I’m half way good at, is also a proxy for the glaring asymmetries of the world. And this exists across the books, across everything I’ve seen, especially over the last year, but across my entire adult life. We’re supposed to use this stuff to make meaning; that’s what we’re supposed to do as writers. Also, as human beings acting in good faith generally. So to see it used for the exact opposite of that is an incredibly jarring thing. I mean, there are so many examples that come to mind. One of them that made the book was when I was watching a British news report; Israeli soldiers killed a four-year-old girl at a checkpoint. The way the guy phrased it was like a bullet found its way into the van at a checkpoint and hit a four-year-old young lady. What the hell is a four-year-old young lady? I defy anyone to tell me what a four-year-old young lady is, right? But it’s doing work. It’s still doing work. It’s still doing immense work. It’s just doing it for the exact opposite of what language is supposed to do. You can’t see that and claim to work with words for a living and not at the very least acknowledge it. If not, stand against it in some way. I think everywhere you find these asymmetries, anywhere you find this immense imbalance of power, you’re going to find a linguistic component.
I don’t know how many of you saw that show Homeland. At one point, they were in like, ‘Generic Terrorist Town Number 12’ or whatever, and they hired a couple of Arab artists and they said give us some Arabic graffiti on the wall. The artists are like, ‘What the hell do you want? Anything more specific?’ They’re like, ‘No, just Arab stuff.’ So they wrote in Arabic ‘Homeland is racist.’ [laughs] And so few people on this production spoke Arabic that nobody noticed, and I’m pretty sure you can find this episode where the characters are walking past the wall, and it just says ‘Homeland is racist’ on the side. It’s a proxy for agency. It’s a proxy for who’s in the room. That Homeland thing is a faraway example. In this book, on the first few pages, they are the only Arabic words in the book. There’s ‘Allh’ ash am(ﷲ ءﺎﺷ ﺎﻣ)’ and ‘Ramqla Yiz(رﻣﻘﻟا يز),’ which I wrote out in Arabic, and I sent them to the typesetting folks. They would come back with the PDF, and they’re like, ‘Like this?’ And it’s backwards, and the letters are disconnected. I said, ‘No.’ We did this for a few months, and at one point, I’m talking to Nicole, my agent, and I was like, ‘Is there not an Arab that is involved in this?’ And she laughed at my face. It’s one of the things about those threads and the reason the book is structured the way it is. Maybe there’s a better version of the book, but the reason I had to write this version of the book is because this shows up in every stage of my life.
On the very personal side, I cannot begin to explain how much I’ve been rewarded for sounding like this (Omar has a perfect North American accent). For the fact that from the age of five, I started going to British schools and American schools. I have relatives that have the same names and who look the same who don’t have this accent, and they’re in secondary every time they cross the border. It’s an incredible reward to have made yourself close. To have obliterated that distance. You might read this book, and you might hate it. You might think it’s a complete piece of shit but what you won’t think is that it’s far away. Because I’ve spent so much of my life figuring out how not to seem far away. I’ve been rewarded for it endlessly, so it shows up in that.
It shows up as a journalist in the sense that when I go to a place like Afghanistan during the invasion, I see the physical layer of warfare. I see what the mines do, what the missiles do, what the bullets do. But that layer of physical violence can’t exist in a vacuum. It needs to be held up by other kinds of violence. I go to Guantanamo Bay, and I see the other kinds of violence, and one of them is linguistic violence. There were never any interrogations in Guantanamo Bay. Of course, people were interrogated left, right, and center, but they didn’t call it that. They called it ‘reservations.’ There were no prisoners. There were only detainees. So, Detainee 8654 had an 8:30 pm reservation, which meant that the guy was going to be taken into the interrogation shed. All of that is language is doing work. Insidious, bad faith work.
It shows up over the last year and a half. When I’m looking at these headlines where the thing is torqued in such a way that, if you just read the headline, you’d think that a package of food aid got up and killed a Palestinian guy, right? The structure of all of this is load-bearing, and it’s necessary. There’s no way we get to the mess we’re in today. This, I think, applies across history, not just the past year and a half. There’s no way we get here without an incredible, insidious infrastructure in which to hold it up.
John: One of the things I love about the book is it operates as a kind of moving lexicon in which Omar takes phrases which have been hollowed out and looks at them. You also take phrases which have been lingering in plain sight and bear down on them. Words like ‘empire,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘liberalism,’ that you push into and redefine on your own terms. I’m wondering if there’s any kind of redefinition in the course of the books that is especially important to you in the course of writing that allows you to form your thoughts together.
Omar: That’s a really fascinating question; it’s not one I’ve been asked before. I can tell you when [the book] became public facing, there were the same [questions] over and over again. The argument over the use of ‘genocide’ is, for example. Every media interview, and the bigger the media outlet, the more likely that was going to be the thing that we spent most of our time on. That was fascinating to me, just conceptually being in that situation.
I got asked by my old newspaper to write an op-ed in the middle of late last year. I said, ‘Listen, I’ll save you sometime, you’re not going to run this thing. Because I am going to call it a genocide, and I’m going to say Western governments are complicit.’ And the editor, who’s a friend of mine, said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ Then in January, I was asked to write an op-ed by my old newspaper, and I said, ‘I’m going to save you some time. You’re not going to run this. I’m going to call it a genocide, and I’m going to say Western governments are complicit.’ And the same editor said, ‘Yeah, go for it.’ So, what has changed? I have it narrowed down to a couple of things. I’m not sure. Maybe the bodies piled up so high that it made it impossible to maintain that form. Maybe someone braver than me pushed harder, rather than me saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to save you some time, let me back out.’ Maybe someone had more guts than me. Or maybe they have things they could offload responsibility onto, right? Like when that thing finally runs, the word genocide in the web article is hyperlinked to the Amnesty International report just so the paper can be like [puts hands up].
But something is changing, right? You see it, and I can’t help but think: I can attach a body count to this. I can look at the death toll here, and I can say it took this many dead folks to get me to this place. And that’s a horrifying implementation of the transactional onto what should be an issue of basic humanity. For me, though, the word I kept coming back to, and I don’t know if I redefined it, was the word ‘complicity.’ What does it mean to be complicit? Because I am, in a very real sense, killing those kids, my tax money is doing that. You and I are sitting here talking, and not to be presumptuous, but I don’t think either of us are seriously concerned about a bomb landing on this building right now. We’re having this conversation now, and I can be as empathetic or as concerned or as horrified as— but I still live on this side of the bombs.
I was talking about this at Georgetown. I was at this symposium run by a Lebanese American writer, an incredible writer. I was talking about this idea of complicity, of knowing that I had done this. Afterwards, we were at this dinner thing for the panelists, and this guy came over, very well-meaning guy does a lot of incredible work, but this white dude says, ‘Look. No, you’re not complicit. You’re not. You need to put distance from that.’ And the writer is sitting there saying, ‘No, I am. I am. I’m paying to kill my own family member.’ You could see that distance. Both these people would agree on 99% of issues. They weren’t having an ideologically opposed argument. It was a relationship between the idea of complicity and personal distance from the horror. I think that was the only distinction between them. I think otherwise they were in full agreement, except one of these people had the privilege of putting enough distance. From a purely Machiavellian point of view, that white guy’s argument is the one I should have tried to convince myself of because it would have been less debilitating. You can do the work, but you don’t wallow in it. Then you sit there, and you know he was watching his own villages, right?
John: He’s from Beirut, and you know, the last 18 months… if anyone has ever moved a house, you think of all the effort it is to pack up the house and make sure nothing breaks. Then you think about how quickly something that took your entire life to assemble can be demolished like that and everyone in it taken from it. I think if we keep watching this over and over, the news is telling us that it’s not what it seems. My partner is from Beirut, and she has two elderly aunts who live there and are in their 90s. During the bombing of Beirut, which started in the fall of 2014, they stayed in their apartment building. She was able to reach them, and they said they had water and snacks. Meanwhile, you could see from the map of what was happening that the bombs were dropping all around them. It’s a completely unacceptable thing to do to people. Yet, it’s become a normal aspect of living in America, ‘airstrikes’ are a very familiar term. Because there had not been airstrikes, except for 9/11 if you consider that, in the United States. So much of the spectacle, the drama, the description of what a bomb does or what a drone does or what a missile does is scenery. It’s abstract.
As you were talking about language, specifically in Arabic, one of the things that occurred to me as you were writing this book, in my most hopeful moments, I feel like American literature is a story of liberation. If you read American literature from the beginning through till now, hopefully there’s a story in which more and more people begin to be considered fully human because their language, their culture, who they are, is represented in and told in stories that are considered part of the American story. So that’s the hopeful version. It occurred to me that there is a giant exception within America for people who are Middle Eastern and who speak Arabic. I still remember being at an event where Elias Khoury, a Lebanese novelist, was up for a prize, and I had a quote from his book. So I put the quote in Arabic on the screen as I was making a comment, and the audience gasped as if I showed something dangerous. And throughout the last 18 months, the tropes of racism against Middle Eastern people are so incredibly obvious, not just the ‘human animals’ thing, but the fact that it’s completely okay to call a group of people terrorists. I wonder how you wrestle with writing in a language in which there are dozens of racist tropes that you can’t simply denature or you cannot get too distracted in subverting, making the argument that this book makes.
Omar: There’s this really famous story, all I’ve heard of American writers at one point or another, about Edward Said going around and trying to get another writer’s work translated into English. Everyone turned him down, saying, ‘This is really good.’ Finally, one of the editors at a big publishing house says, ‘It is really good, but you know, Arabic is a really controversial language.’ And I think about that a lot. What does it mean for a language to be controversial? How much power do you assume over not just the language by the people who speak it when you are free to make that designation without any pushback?
I don’t like to divide the world up into these neat binaries. I don’t think that’s how the world works. But I am somewhat convinced that you are either someone who thinks that liberation is interconnected or you believe in silos. If you believe in silos then you will always be especially susceptible to the argument that is made on the heels of every one of these atrocities, which is, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only happening to those people over there.’ By the time you realize there is no ‘those people’ and there is no ‘over there,’ it’s too late. To the best of my knowledge, this country has dropped a bomb on its own citizens, on its own land, on black activists in Philly. I suspect in every one of these moments there was the silo argument being made, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just those troublesome people. It’s just this troublesome moment.’ It always proves to be bullshit and everyone knows that it’s bullshit. Again, this comes back to the notion of complicity. I find myself drawn to making that argument of like, ‘They’re coming for you one day!’ Even if they don’t, it doesn’t make this any less evil. To use a language as a means of imposing those silos and imposing that distance seems to me to be a particularly insidious thing because language is supposed to do the opposite of that, it’s supposed to be a bridge across this distance.
I adore what my little Arabic gives me as a writer predominantly in English because Arabic has an entirely different flavor. I was listening once to this translator, she was translating from Arabic to English talking about a phrase as an example ‘winebi.’ So if you and I are having dinner and I want you to pass the salt, I say, ‘winebi can you pass the salt.’ She said there’s two ways to translate this, either translate it to ‘please’ or you can go real literal on it in which case I would say something like ‘I conjure the spirit of the Prophet Muhammad to command you to pass the salt.’ [laughs] That’s a very, very different text. Depending on how you view it, that’s a superpower in terms of the texture that it gives you. If you can incorporate something that operates in a mechanically, psychologically different way into the weird vulture language that is English with its very sort of refined Latin, guttural Anglo– you know. But it can be used for the exact opposite purpose. With the ‘there be dragons’ type thing; ‘Look at those far away people and their far away sounds.’ On a personal level, I’ve become accustomed to operating in their weird space, always introduced as Omar El-Akkad, that is not my name. It’s Omar Muhammad El-Akkad (said with Arabic pronunciation) but El-Akkad you cannot pronounce because it had ayn (ع) and Akk-ed but you doubly can’t pronounce it because it has ayn but also should be Akk-ahd but I’m from Egyptian and Egyptians skip the qaf (ق) sound and there’s this entire— it’s Omar, right? It saves a lot of trouble. So I’m very used to existing in this space. I have fewer guides on how to do that responsibly and I fuck it up left right and center a lot of the time. But it’s one of the few spaces where I feel comfortable in my own skin as a writer. So to see it used as a tool of distancing and used as a pre-justification for all the horrible stuff that’s to follow is especially painful.
John: The book is about ten chapters and if I read the titles you get a sense of the arc of the book, ‘Departure,’ ‘Witness,’ ‘Values,’ ‘Language,’ ‘Resistance,’ ‘Craft,’ ‘Lesser Evils,’ ‘Fear,’ ‘Leave Taking,’ ‘Arrival.’ We start with ‘Departure,’ and in the opening scenes, it’s about a child you saw being taken out of a bombed building. She survived while the others had not, and the paramedic carrying her tells her she’s as beautiful as the moon. One of the things that travels throughout the entire book is the power of language, against what I’ve described, the reduction of language being used as a weapon, language becoming monophonic. You’re constantly pushing it back into more symphonic forms. ‘Departure’ and ‘Arrival’ are the most symphonic, you departing from where you were from to come to the West, the distance you’ve made to live in the West, or it could be the departure from the rules-based order. ‘Arrival’ is the most complex one because you have not simply arrived at what you thought; you arrived at a new series of understandings. If you could talk a little bit about what you think leave taking means and also what you believe is lesser evils.
Omar: For this tour for the last two months, it’s been very different. My average crowd size is three people. I honestly don’t think it has anything to do with the book or anything to do with me. I think it has to do with the space. It has a lot to do with the people believing that they’re losing their minds. Almost every signing, someone comes up and gives me some variant of ‘This is the first time. If I talk about this at work, I might lose my job; if I talk about this with my friends, they might stop being my friends. You feel like a steam vent, like I’m not crazy.’ There’s been so much love and so much antagonism; everything has been amplified. When it got bad, it got to protests and legal threats, and I had to check into a hotel under a fake name, which is the dumbest interaction I’ve ever done. First of all, the name was ridiculous, it was ‘Mark Cad.’ [laughs] So I show up to this hotel at the dead of night like Jason Bourne checking in as ‘Mark Cad.’ The lady at the check-in desk has no idea what I’m talking about, and she looks at the computer and says, ‘Oh is it Omar El-Akkad?’ [laughs]
I think the reason it has invoked these immense responses is because it’s a book that sort of barges in the door, pretending like it wants to throw a lot of punches. I say this in the book: I’m not interested in arguing with anyone. We did that event in Brooklyn where she talked about October 2023, November, December; she’s paying a lot of attention to what people around her and people she admires are saying or not saying. She’s looking at people’s Twitter feeds, and she says, ‘A few months in, I stopped.’ And I was the exact same way. I’m not interested in arguing or changing people’s minds. To me, the defining aftertaste of this book is a deep kind of uncertainty. It’s this interrogation of this bland centrist liberalism. I was that guy. I benefited greatly from being that guy, and I’ve become untethered, but I don’t know who the hell I am on the other side. I genuinely don’t. I’ve spent forty years of my life working myself into becoming a certain kind of human being and finding that identity is largely hollow for me. I think about that in terms of departure and arrival. There’s a relationship between privilege and the affording of a cohesive departure and arrival story as opposed to a story of endless departures. I get to the end of the book, and I’m thinking ahead to the ways I can’t be a coward anymore. Cowardice is my home base. I live there most of the time. One of them is that I would happily quit, and I would happily give up. I’m very spineless in that regard. I think that there’s something even someone like me can’t accept about quitting and abdicating responsibility on someone else’s behalf. As much as I’ve become disillusioned about the load-bearing institutional beams in this part of the world— political, academic, journalistic, cultural. I’ve been so incredibly inspired by what some people are doing individually and in solidarity with one another. You wake up every day, and someone is chaining themselves to a weapons manufacturer. These kids at the colleges, I call them kids because they’re half my age… I think the reason there’s been such a brutal response to that is because there’s a sense, institutionally, there’s a betrayal. It’s like, ‘We gave you the key to the kind of life where you especially don’t have to think about any of this. And you’ve decided to hand it back?! To stand up on behalf of the people who can offer you nothing in return?!’ There’s a real element of just vindictiveness. Because these universities, their number one priority isn’t to educate these kids, it’s to keep them safe, that’s got to be ahead of everything else. And that you’ve so willingly thrown that out the window, there has to be an element of vindictiveness that kicks in. Yet, every morning, I wake up, and there are a million different places where someone as spineless as me can leech courage. I think of this as the most hopeful thing I’ve ever written, granted that’s not hard to do because I write stone cold bummers. [laughs] They’re super, super depressing novels, so it’s not a high bar to meet.
This is a dark fucking time. It’s really, really dark. And it’s been dark for a while; maybe it’s just more overtly dark. I did an event three days ago where at the signing, one of the women who came to the table, she’s a student who’s friends with the Turkish PhD student who just got disappeared. This woman was terrified; I mean, she was shaking. She tried to explain to me what the last few days have been like and what the next few days will be like, and she broke down crying. And… She’s terrified. So it’d be really flippant of me to sit here and tell you how hopeful I am when we’re in this environment… where my reference point to figure out what the hell is happening in this country is the early chapters of the book– what was happening to my dad on the streets of Cairo forty years ago. I don’t for a second believe we’re going to wake up tomorrow and everything’s going to be magically better. Especially when the fundamental political force that is supposed to stand up to this in a two-party system is doing things like wearing pink suit jackets to the State of the Union address and saying, ‘Well, that’s our resistance.’ This is troubling. I have immense faith in the number of people who could’ve easily coasted on silence, the privilege of silence, and decided not to. And that, to me, is the one thing I hold onto for dear life. Because if I held onto these institutions, they would sink and take me with them… So, it’s not the most hopeful message, [laughs] but I’m also not going to lie to you.