Week 3
Monday, June 29th 2:00pm
Monday, June 29th 2:00pm
Now that we have read the first four chapters and discussed some of El Akkad's other works, as well as other books on Gaza and Palestine, what are your thoughts on the chapter titles and the short passages that appear at the beginning of each chapter? Does it affect your reading experience of each chapter? Do they merely introduce the chapters, or do they frame how you interpret the themes, emotions, and arguments of each chapter?
“...Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?”
“No.”
“Then where does the past exist, if at all?”
“In records. It is written down.”
“In records. And?”
“In the mind. In human memories.”
“In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?”
With all that’s happening all the time, it’s almost becoming cliche to draw a quote like the one above from 1984, however, the text remains uniquely prescient, and feels particularly relevant to El Akkad’s exploration of language’s capacity to enable oppression and genocide. Before we discuss this week’s chapters, can you think of any other instances where an authority has tried to, or is currently attempting to, reimagine something that is held in a collective memory? Or, more pressingly, something that is occurring right before us?
Chapter 3
El Akkad flashes back and reflects on experiences of being treated with suspicion at the Canada–U.S. border and how these moments changed his understanding of fairness. Although he believed that education, language, and cultural assimilation would protect him and his family from discrimination, he gradually realizes that identity can still determine how people are treated. El Akkad connects these personal experiences to larger US political systems, presenting to the readers that some people can challenge authority without consequences while others are constantly vulnerable to judgment and punishment. The chapter then shifts to the war in Gaza, where the he criticizes the ways violence against Palestinians is justified or normalized through political language and public discourse.
Chapter 4
El Akkad recounts his first time working as a journalist in a war zone, in Afghanistan in 2007. Using this as a jumping off point, he explores the ways in which language is used by oppressive forces to obfuscate or shift blame and guilt in the context of killing and imprisonment, and then moves into how these rhetorical moves have been and are being weaponized in Gaza in an attempt to make the victims of the genocide responsible for their own deaths, and to try shift historical narratives around Palestine on the whole.
Chapter 3
“In 2014, when an Israeli newspaper runs an opinion piece in which the writer describes Palestinian children as “the explosives of the future,” (page 54)
And then following the attacks, when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant says Israel is fighting “human animals,” (page 55)
“And yet there is a deranged honesty about the cult to which the likes of Pence—and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who signed her own message, “Finish them!,” (page 56)
In these quotes, Omar El Akkad draws attention to the language used to describe Palestinians. He suggests violence also depends on a particular vocabulary not only weapons. So, our questions are:
What emotions did these statements evoke while you were reading them? Did you feel anger, discomfort, fear, sadness, disbelief, or something else? Why do you think these particular words have such a strong emotional effect?
El Akkad calls them "vocabulary of violence" (55). Did you identify such a vocabulary in these quotations and other quotations while reading the chapter? What words or expressions stood out to you, and how do they shape the way certain groups are viewed?
Chapter 4
El Akkad highlights the distinction between victims of empire (those on the receiving end of its oppression) and victims of empire (those valued and protected by it) and the ways language is used against the former and in favour of the latter. Did this observation bring anything to mind? In what you had read previously about the genocide in Gaza, in Canada’s history, or anything else, have you noticed where language has been employed brazenly to benefit one party over another?
El Akkad bookends this chapter with the anecdote of Google Earth employees in Iqaluit learning that in the area some paths may exist and cease to exist with the changing seasons, something they seemingly had never had to account for prior in their work (pages 69 & 75). What do you think the significance is of this to the chapter and/or to the book? Why end the chapter going back to this?