There is a scene in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes where the arena is bombed and the children inside it are buried under the rubble, and I had to put the book down and sit with my hands in my lap for a while because I could not tell anymore whether I was reading fiction or remembering footage, whether the children being crushed were Suzanne Collins’s invention or the ones I had watched being pulled from the rubble in Gaza for the past three years, whether the arena was Panem or the Al-Ahli hospital, whether the Capitol had always been Washington or had only recently become it. I picked the book up because someone told me it was an escape. They were not wrong about what it was. They were wrong about what I had become.

 

I have been trying to read my way out of the world since October 2023. I mean this literally. I have carried books onto trains and into waiting rooms and to bed at midnight when sleep has become another thing the news has taken from me, and I have tried to do the thing reading used to do, which was to slip me out of my own life for a few hours and set me down somewhere with different rules. It stopped working around the time I started keeping a running count in my head. Fifty thousand. Sixty thousand. Seventy-two thousand and still going. Now I open a book and I bring myself with me, the whole unbearable weight of it, and the book opens back and shows me the same thing wearing different clothes.

I read 1984 last winter. Not for the first time, but for the first time since the word voluntary started doing the work it is currently doing, since a country began announcing in official government statements that it was going to thin a population by half through voluntary emigration from a territory it had just spent two years making uninhabitable, since the institutions whose job it was to notice this competed to find more careful ways of not noticing it. Orwell understood something about this that I keep wanting to be wrong about, which is that the corruption of language is not something that happens after political violence, it is what political violence requires before it can proceed, it is the advance work, the softening of the ground. You cannot bomb a people into extinction without first making the language agree to something. I read it and felt recognized and then felt worse for being recognized, because recognition is not the same as escape, and what I had gone looking for was escape.

I tried Crying in H Mart because grief, I thought, could be a door too, the specific grief of watching someone you love move toward death without being able to stop it, the grief that is also a form of love, of closeness, of staying. Michelle Zauner’s mother gets to be mourned by her daughter in the same country, in a kitchen that still exists, in a language they share. I read it and thought about every Palestinian grandmother who spent her final years in a refugee camp in Lebanon or Jordan, who died with the key to a house that does not exist anymore on a nail by the door of a house she was never supposed to be living in, who told her grandchildren the color of the kitchen tiles and the name of the tree in the yard and the way the neighbor’s voice sounded through the window on summer nights, who kept saying next year, next year, until there were no more years. Zauner’s grief is real and I felt it and it slid immediately into a grief I was already carrying that is larger than any one book was written to hold.

Heart of Darkness I read because I needed someone to have already said the thing about the man who arrives somewhere with guns and a civilizing mission and discovers, too late, that the civilization had only ever concealed what he was capable of rather than changing it. I needed Kurtz’s horror to be useful. What I found was that the horror always comes too late, that the recognition arrives as an aesthetic experience rather than a moral one, that the West has always reserved its most exquisite guilt for after the archive is complete, after the mass graves have been mapped, after everyone who needed someone to act is already in the ground. One day everyone will have always been against this. I needed them to be against it now, while there was still something to be against.

East of Eden I read because I needed timshel, thou mayest, the idea that the individual choice to be different from what history has made you still means something, still changes something in a world where the accumulated weight of inherited violence and structural cruelty keeps reproducing itself in every generation. Steinbeck believed this. I wanted to borrow the belief for a few hundred pages. What I found was the doctors in Gaza who stayed in the hospital until the hospital was bombed, the journalists who kept the camera pointed at what was happening until they were killed for it, the teachers who wrote the alphabet on broken whiteboards in the rubble of schools, all of them choosing differently, all of them exercising timshel in conditions designed to make the choice cost everything, and I thought about whether Steinbeck’s belief holds when the people choosing differently keep dying for it, whether thou mayest still means anything when the ones who choose it are the ones who end up in the mass graves the archive will eventually map.

This is what three years of watching a genocide does to a reading life. It does not make you stop reading. It makes you incapable of going anywhere in a book without bringing the whole thing with you. Every surveillance state is the one that follows Palestinians through their own land with cameras and checkpoints and biometric databases, every empire is the one that drew the borders that made my family’s return a crime, every villain who arrives with a civilizing mission is the one currently on television explaining why the bombing was regrettable but proportionate. I open a book to rest and find I am already in it, have been in it, that the story I was trying to leave is the one all the other stories were written about.

I know there are people who will read this and say the problem is my reading, that I am bringing too much to the text, that literature requires a certain openness and I have closed myself off. Maybe. But I think about the Palestinian grandmother with the key and I think she was not closed off, she was just someone to whom something had happened that made certain openings impossible, someone for whom the door of ordinary life had been shut from the outside, and the books she might have read would have found her anyway, the grief and the longing and the question of whether the world the stories described was the one she was actually living in or the one she was supposed to believe in. I think I am her grandchild in this, which is the inheritance she did not mean to leave me but left me anyway.

The world where the villains lose before all the innocents have died is the book I have not found yet. I keep reading. She is still waiting to go home. I am still counting. Palestine will be free.

Some Good Political Education Books:

(1) Voices of the Nakba

(2) Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

(3) Bad Law

(4) Prisoners of Geography

(5) The New Jim Crow

(6) Freedom is a Constant Struggle