In his dystopian debut novel, “American War” (2017), Omar El Akkad describes a massacre at a refugee camp with calmly horrifying precision. “The bodies made damp pools in the dusty ground,” he observes, through the eyes of a woman called Sarat. “There was a heat to them. Sarat felt it against her skin, damp and real as steam from a boiling pot. She knew what it was. It was the heat of life extinguished. The heat of something leaving.”
The twist is that the camp is on the border between Mississippi and Alabama. It is 2081 and the United States has imploded into civil war. El Akkad, who was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in Oregon, is visiting on an imagined America the horrors that ordinary people experience in the part of the world where his family originated.
The site of the slaughter in the novel is called Camp Patience. In Arabic, patience is sabr; the name echoes the Sabra refugee camp in Lebanon, the scene of a mass killing of civilians, most of them Palestinians, by an Israeli-backed militia in 1982. But rereading the chapter now, it is impossible not to think also of the Hamas-perpetrated massacres of Oct. 7, 2023, in southern Israel.
In “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” his fiercely agonized new book about American and European responses to the devastation of Gaza, El Akkad is trying, in a very different way, to do the same thing — to force American readers to think of Palestinian victims not as “them” but as “us.” If, in the novel, he is attempting to close the cognitive gap between America and the Middle East, in “One Day” he is raging against the widening of that gulf, the way, at least in official discourse, the immense suffering of civilians in Gaza since Oct. 7 is kept at bay, confined to the outer darkness of things that happen to people who are not quite human.
At one point in “American War,” Sarat considers that “perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence — a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?” It is a thought that recurs in “One Day” when El Akkad recalls his own first memory of war, which is of watching CNN as American bombs fell on Baghdad during the first gulf war, in 1990: “It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people: They became balls of pale white light. What mattered was, it wasn’t us.”
In the novel, El Akkad disturbs his readers by projecting America’s present into a terrifying vision of what their familiar homeland might look like many decades hence. Here, he seeks to discomfit us by doing the opposite — asking us to look back on the present from an imagined future: “One day it will be considered unacceptable, in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness. … One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence.”
Yet El Akkad himself is struggling against silence — not the taciturnity of indifference or cowardice but the near muteness imposed by the inadequacy of language in the face of mass obliteration. “One Day” reminded me of Samuel Beckett’s statement about having “no power to express … together with the obligation to express.” Whatever one thinks of its arguments, the book has the desperate vitality of a writer trying to wrench from mere words some adequate answer to his own question: “What is left to say but more dead, more dead?” It exists in the abyss between, on the one hand, the emotional overload of following daily live reportage of atrocities and, on the other, the future accounting that has not yet arrived. “Maybe,” writes El Akkad, “this is the truly weightless time, after the front page loses interest but before the history books arrive.”
To give some weight to words in what he describes with typically elegant irony as “this mandatory waiting period” before one can speak of the unspeakable, El Akkad devises a form that might be called polemoir, a fusion of polemic and memoir. Though perhaps it’s not quite a fusion; the personal and the political do not always cohere. His memories — of family, of displacement, of being a suspect Muslim outsider in North America, of his years as a journalist with The Globe and Mail covering, among other things, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — are wonderfully evoked. They have the refined coolness of experience filtered through time and reflection.
The book’s polemical side, forged in the raging heat of appalling violence, is, understandably, more disoriented. Polemics seek to persuade but El Akkad writes at one point that “there are no arguments to be had anymore.” His “obligation to express” within the world of mainstream American publishing is at odds with his conclusion that there is nothing to be salvaged from Western liberalism.
He does not see the killing in Gaza as a betrayal of democratic ideals but as proof that those ideals have been lies from the start: “It has always been this way.” There is, he suggests, nothing to be done but “negative resistance,” a walking away from what he consistently but rather vaguely calls “the empire.” He is clearly not alone in this — a similar despair contributed to Kamala Harris’s defeat by Donald Trump in November. On a surface level, “One Day” can be read as a kind of retrospective manifesto for those who refused to vote for her because of the Biden administration’s policy of arming Israel while decrying the worst consequences of doing so.
And yet, “One Day” is much more than that. At its best, it is a probe into the murky depths of a collective consciousness shaped by the need to evade the daily evidence of political and environmental catastrophe. Reading it while watching Los Angeles burn, and viewing the drone footage in which it looks eerily like a city bombed from the air, I was struck by El Akkad’s insight that “when the bigger wildfires come — as they already have — the industries whose callous disregard helped bring this about will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for calamity.” His book is a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people’s calamities.
The post How Will the West Look Back on the Crisis in Gaza? appeared first on New York Times.
