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#10BeforeTheEnd - 3 Weeks In
I am 3 in, working slowly on Far From The Tree
Silly me I picked a lot of chunky books for this!
#10BeforeTheEnd - 3 Weeks In
I am 3 in, working slowly on Far From The Tree
Silly me I picked a lot of chunky books for this!
pickA once in a generation mind. Coates is always a pick. In this Coates strings together ideas from his travels - the slave trade out of Senegal, current day book banning in S. Carolina, Palestine occupation, and he some how threads them into a coherent telling on oppression
His cadence always blows me away, and how he can take subjects and make them not only lyrical but impactful.
Such important insights here. Should be required reading
It was late, my father was done work 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./1
I've explained, politely, to deeply well-meaning people that I don't have a problem shaking hands with women— maybe other Muslims do, I couldn't tell you; we don't all know each other.
I've sat through a wildly uncomfortable book interview once after I joked that I write all my novels in Arabic and then run them through Google Translate and the interviewer believed me.
I've smiled and nodded. I was nice about it.
Which is to say, I was a coward.
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. The truth and reconciliation committees are coming. The land acknowledgements are coming. The very sorry descendants are coming After all, grief in arrears is grief just the same./1
I know now there are people, some of them once very dear to me, whom I will never speak to again, so long as I can help it. It‘s the people who said nothing. The people who knew full well what was happening and said nothing because there was a personal risk of a chance of getting yelled at or, God forbid, a chance of professional ramifications. It‘s the people who dug deeply into the paramount importance of their own safety, their own convenience.
In the end, we will be asked to normalize not just unlimited extraction and unlimited suffering, but total absence: a hollow that will look an awful lot like the one we were asked to overlay onto the minimum wage workers and climate refugees and the victims of endless colonial wars, and yes, even those dead Palestinian children, who, had they been allowed to live, might have done something terrible. Just cease to believe these people were human.
Interviewing one of Uber‘s executives, who demonstrated the company‘s algorithms with the enthusiasm of a child at Christmas, I couldn‘t help but think that what this company really innovated was not some new solution to the travelling salesman problem, but the establishment of a new lower norm of employee treatment. Success, growth, and profit came from taking what at one time had been decent stable jobs and rebranding them as side hustles.
