no. 85: the fiction of moral convenience
notes on omar el akkad’s breakup letter with the west
Every year, around the Fourth of July, I contemplate whether or not I’m going to write something. This year, fortunately, someone else wrote something, and then I found it and read it and fell in love with it, so I’m instead going to talk about his writing and what stuck with me about it, instead of trying to produce something on my own.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is possibly one of the best books I’ve read. In a year mostly defined by an attempt to shift my reading practices from nonfiction to fiction, I decided to pick up Omar El Akkad’s memoir and read it in a day before discussing it at a book club, and despite a fruitful and rich conversation there, I still feel compelled continue talking about it. The book is a journalist’s memoir, where he talks about moments and events in his life in a chronology and uses that to extract lessons that his career as a journalist has also reaffirmed. In a way, it felt comfortable to read because I think it’s frequently the way I think about writing, in identifying personal experiences or anecdotes and lacing them with things I’ve learned from school, work, media, and the world to make sense of those experiences or derive some meaning or lessons from them. But it was also just a tremendously timely book to read – between his experiences as an immigrant working in a field that toes between objective presentation of fact and personal narrative and style, to how he perceives the faillings of the American (and broadly Western) political system and set up especially with the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza, I have rarely felt as in a flow state reading a book as I have this one. Plus, it’s one I’ve recommended to so many friends now, and that’s usually an indicator that it’ll continue to be a notable read and centerpiece on my bookshelf for a while.
In truth, I started writing this review by pulling quotes from the book that were particularly meaningful and resonated with me, and that list was nearly 9 pages long (a testament to how much is interesting in the book), so I’m choosing to write this piece on a few highlights of themes that stuck with me. There are also several chapters – particularly Seven: Lesser Evils and Nine: Leavetaking – that I almost entirely don’t talk about here because of how much so many other things spoke to me more. Those chapters, however, were also deeply uncomfortable to need to reflect on and reckon with – hitting close to home on questions of political engagement with the lesser of two evils, what disengagement looks like, and where the bounds between resistance and cynical nihilism reside. More comfortable yet impactful were the discussions on what the difference between ultimate and penultimate consequences is, in our tendency to pretend everything is the worst thing ever rather than just another consequence, and the discussion of expectations around resistance in colonialism and empire, the core of the construction of the West as a fictionalized entity of power. Those chapters alone are worth reading the book for, since no summation or highlights of those chapters will do the way El Akkad discusses them justice or aptly convey how meaningful and striking they were.
So, my biggest takeaways on this exceptional book, with the hope it’ll prompt some thought or convince you to read the book as well.
To what extent should we care about and speak out against racist language, slurs, and appropriation, short of violence? Racism is a flaunting of permission - it’s where the initial threads of violence and theft start. Treating immigrants as subhuman and implying they should stay in their lane and know their place seeks to dehumanize them and create a separation between their humanity and the conditions they are subject to. This isn’t just in the biggest of issues, but is evident when the New York Times publishes op-eds comparing immigrants and people of color to vermin and other animals, when people appropriate and disrespect elements of other cultures as if to indicate that theirs is always there for taking. It’s a continued message of “I can get away with this without consequence due to my privilege”, the consequences continuing to be nonexistent as the transgression inches towards increased violence.
As Chapter 1 (Departure) asks us to ponder - Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated? That nonexistence starts in the smaller offhand language and events that we’re willing to dismiss as “no big deal” and “there are bigger things to worry about”. I ponder this question frequently as the discourse goes around brown communities between people who only care about cultural appropriation when wars are going on, and those acting as if cultural appropriation is not something to even care about or speak out against, and I felt compelled by the explanation that while war is important and should still have the driving force of energy, speaking out against smaller offenses does still matter.
What is the role of writing, language, and storytelling in this world? Much of the book, as you’d expect, delves into the role of journalism as both a craft and a means to express a narrative and tale in employing certain specific language. But this is where some of the best writing comes from – his own experiences as a journalist. On one hand, there’s the sentiment that his best education has come from being in journalism, understanding how the world works, rather than in common immigrant-entered fields of law, engineering, and medicine. But he also critically reflects on journalism being an observation of the misery of others with the privilege to get to leave, the way that journalism is so frequently used to mask or obscure ills, or weaponize narratives towards those who are oppressed.
As someone with a growing interest in ensuring writing continues as a mainstay in my life and hopes to grow in it, I had two particular takeaways from El Akkad’s message, particularly in Chapters 4 (Language) and 6 (Craft).
Firstly, language is frequently (as he says) employed for the opposite of language’s purpose – the unmaking of meaning. Language obscures a tremendous amount of meaning and reality behind it, a distraction often from the material existence of trauma and tragedy. There’s this question of how the privileged get to decide what certain words mean, even when they are in the languages of the oppressed. Language, tense, tone, and voice are employed differently for those who are victims of empire, compared to victims of empire, a drastic difference between the hold that the privileged hold on the language used to uplift and protect themselves, compared to the language used to oppress others. Language shifts a narrative to demand the perpetuation of atrocities, where the weight of indictment is on those who have been harmed rather than accountability on those harming. Language and facts and narratives are almost destined to be contested.
Secondly and perhaps most importantly, language is never sufficient. The effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words, but in our proximity to what those right words might be, our intimacy with the thing to enable us to understand it with a precision of language. Or as El Akkad puts it – “In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power – the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.” (Chapter 4, Language)
A quote that stuck with me most on how language and narrative are manipulated – “Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense.” (Chapter 8, Fear)
There’s this lingering sentiment that I’m left with of the what-if, the summation of movement, the notes of what life looks like as someone who moves and moves constantly looking for a place to call home. In discussing his father’s funeral, he speaks of the people who are there with who he feels a distance and stiffness – “Outside, dozens of our relatives stand waiting, people I love similarly and who love me and with whom, in another life where we never left, I would have shared the normal bonds of family. Instead, they appear to me now as foreigners, because we did leave.” (Chapter 6, Craft) Or, in talking about his father and his movement journey from place to place seeking work. “The immigrant class, which in one form or another describes most of the world, is segregated by many things, chief among them narrative. Some are afforded the privilege of an arrival story, a homecoming. Others only departure after departure.” (Chapter 3, Values)
There’s a question about what fear of immigrants looks like. In the way he talks about condemnation, the way that there is some obligation that certain people constantly have to condemn certain actions they are automatically associated with and continuously assumed to be: “No well bit of condemnation is adequate - on constantly proving you’re american enough - In reality, it doesn’t much matter what or how vigorously I condemn. I am of an ethnicity and a religion and a place in the caste ordering of the Western world for which there exists no such thing as enough condemnation. This is what we are to do, always and to the exclusion of all else: condemn, apologize for, retreat into silence about any atrocity committed by anyone other than those to whom we are perpetually assumed allegiant.” (Chapter 8, Fear)
Or, the visceral response that seeing large American flags tends to bring up, the discomfort from the brazen patriotism, while also mentioning the lack of similar fear or discomfort he feels at the hands of flags of Arab nations – “Less than nothing – the majority response I expect from admitting my wariness of large American flags on the backs of pickup trucks isn’t some nuanced discusison about the fermentable nature of patriotism, but rather the insinuation that this isn’t fear at all, but hatred, ungratefulness: Well, leave, then. You don’t like it? Leave. Fear obscures the necessity of its causing.” (Chapter 8, Fear)
There’s a hard reckoning with immigrant privilege done in this book, that forces the questions about how the roots of that privilege arise in the first place – for example, the flawless English accent, ability to navigate systems, cultural fluency, ability to pass, that grants even some immigrants a leg up in not experiencing pain and anger in the ways so many others do. Even if brown and not white, even those individuals experience some level of privilege and therefore a ceiling on consequences compared to those even worse off. For the author, the roots of it come at the beginning of the book itself: “For every victim of colonialism who resisted, there might be another who looked at the colonizers and thought: this is what winners look like. These are the languages they speak and these are the customs they practice and if our own children are to have any chance at all they must become fluent in these things because anything less than fluency is a sentence to a life of something lesser. It is in this impulse, to give your child a fighting chance at privilege by immersing them in the myriad languages of the privileged world, that makes me who I am.” (Chapter 2, Witness)
Another notion that stuck with me on the hypocrisy and double standard in gated communities and walls between immigrants and locals: “Immigration is barely a phenomenon of physical or cultural geography; the landscape marks the smallest change. North Americans/Europeans arrive and immediately cocoon themselves, could spend decades in the Middle East, and only briefly contend with the inconvenience of their host nation’s ways of living. When I came to the West, this precise thing was a routine accusation lobbed at people from my part of the world. We simply did not do enough to learn the language, the culture. We stubbornly refused to assimilate.” (Chapter 2, Witness) Going on in the chapter, El Akkad discusses the psychological change of someone who leaves home: a relative distance between the person one is and the person they must become, and highlights the routine indignities that become the normal workings of the days. The ordinariness that is worthwhile in movement and change, where we can find safety and comfort, and ultimately a home.
In our book club last week, the facilitator asked us what stuck with us most in reading the book, and these two quotes were the first thing I went to. I am deeply nostalgic and sentimental around so many components of the immigrant experience, and so much of the book, in the bridges between his narratives and his hypothesizing about the world, where he drops himself and his emotions and life into the thesis he strives to make, made me catch my breath. The smallness is something that I frequently have reflected on – things like fruits and vegetables available consistently even when not in season; the orderliness of lanes, and traffic lights, and not worrying for my safety and stomach every time I get in the car; being able to turn on the tap and fill my bottle up straight from it. So much writing about the immigrant experience talks about the bigness of movement and change, but El Akkad’s writing of the smallness of it was what made it feel more familiar.
The question I’m still left pondering: Who has a monopoly on language, storytelling, narrative, consequences, resistance, and revenge? Even a follow-up question posted by El Akkad in the book – What is the statute of limitations on resentment, on rage, on revenge? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, learning about, reading about, studying terrorism, and this is almost always what it comes back to – what has been done in the past that justifies current action, how many generations continue to take up the arms of prior ones to right wrongs that history and power structures have deemed unfixable. I don’t know if I believe there is a statute of limitations, but that feels as unsatisfying an answer as believing there is a hard-established one.
Lastly, is the image of the West something that exists to chase? Much of what I came into this book club with was contemplating something core to the author’s argument: that the West as a place and governance system represents these specific values that they have deprived much of the rest of the world, this imaginative future of solutions to expand liberties and uplift people in freedoms. But it becomes evident through the book that while he starts in regarding the West as a literal place as holding those freedoms close, he grows to recognize those freedoms and norms as things he envisions a place being able to emulate and model in the future, while recognizing that they do not exist in the West.
What we do have is a system that constantly says, “there is nothing better than this”, that there is no worth in dreaming bigger or interrogating more pointedly. That without a huge shake in the system, there is no future asking “what can be better” with an increasing capacity for better, but rather “how much worse can it get” as our tolerance for harm continues to grow. That people, particularly immigrants, should be thankful for whatever they do get, with perpetual gratitude for a country that didn’t have to do anything for them, still taking them in, without any nuance for what that gratitude looks like, whether earnest and bountiful, or emotionless and pragmatic. A system that politically is not meant to work for us, but in elections and politics, “as a magnanimity…you may choose the degree to which it works against you.” (Chapter 7, Lesser Evils)
Nearly every one of us wants for that world where we believe there is an existential kind of freedom; it just comes to be growingly evident that the world isn’t here now. The book mirrors this, growing from connoting the West as a physical land and place of freedoms, to a set of ideals and imagined beliefs. Maybe we cannot find a land in which our ideals manifest and exist, but if we can imagine them, perhaps they are things we can build.
Something else I took away – there a tendency I have when I read nonfiction to only read memoirs of a particular group of authors with identities that I also belong to (so typically South Asian and/or women, with a focus on queer authors), because I conceptualize those as being the people whose lives and learnings I would take the most away from. But evidently, this book did not fit into either of those categories, and still was massively impactful to read, which serves as a good reminder of not necessarily restricting books I read on the basis of presumed alignment with the author based on identity.
A lot of what I hoped to write about when I first started writing this Substack was book reviews, things that lingered with me in what I read, and I’m glad that I’m finally going to get to do more of that this summer. But more importantly, I’m excited that this was the first of what I hope is a summer of mindful reading – dedicatedly setting time aside to read, with the intent of it becoming a discussion or a piece at some point. And not just the nonfiction that I most frequently gravitate towards, but also a new realm of fiction that actually has depth (even if I still often love a beach read). I’m excited about the next three books in my lineup that also have the vibes of “memoir meets manifesto meets essay collection”, and to write more about those too – hopefully a summer of books with tremendous depth and opportunity to shape thinking processes, dialogue, and discourse, as I’ve always aspired one day for my writing to get to do too.
There are two last quotes that I will leave here. They’re two of the lines that were most impactful in reading, and that I hope I can leave other people with, both from Five – Resistance:
“You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Forget pity. Forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.”
“As a matter of tactics, it is instructive to know that Western power must cater to a sizable swath of people who can be made to care or not care about any issue, any measure of human suffering, so long as it affects the constant availability and prompt delivery of their consumables and conveniences. AS a matter of moral health, the same knowledge is horrifying.”
This is either food for thought for some of you, or it’s a prompt to read a new book, or it’s a new way of thinking about something that might have been at the tip of your tongue forever. I know for me it was all three, and a great reaffirmation of the value of book clubs in prompting me to read things that I otherwise would not commit mindful time to working through. And if you do read it, or find this all interesting or meaningful, I can’t wait to talk about it more.
P.S. Bookshop.org is running an anti-Amazon sale this week with free shipping on all books, countering Prime Day. I know I’m planning to buy the rest of my summer reading list off there later today, so if anyone is looking to pick up this one or any other books, a great chance to support independent bookstores and rail against the Bezos machine! Or, of course, continue to support your local libraries <3