Week 6
Monday, July 20th, 2pm
Monday, July 20th, 2pm
As we come to the end of the book, what ideas, moments, tensions, or questions have stayed with you the most? Is there anything you've found yourself returning to, reconsidering, or seeing differently over the course of our reading?
Chapter 9
In Chapter 9, El Akkad bookends his thoughts on leave-taking, in its many forms, with accounts of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in protest over the genocide in Gaza. Between, he considers the ways in which people turn away from atrocity and the forces that compel them to, from the US’s Ambassador to the UN vetoing a call for a ceasefire, to the ways institutions suppress protests and encampments, to the individual decisions we have to make every day. He writes to the value of both active resistance, protest and community work, and negative resistance, which he describes as “refusing to participate when the act of participation falls below one’s moral threshold” (166), and the inevitable hypocrisy that lies in doing both imperfectly within an imperfect system. Finally, he ruminates on the “numb, overriding grief that colors life” when one chooses not to turn away, as well as the people one may have take leave from in the process (178).
Chapter 10
Finally, in Chapter 10, El Akkad opens by recounting a health scare his daughter had, where she was in the hospital on oxygen, and how afraid it made him. He uses this account to acknowledge how difficult it can be to extend care beyond one’s own circle: “I don’t know how to make a person care someone other than their own. Some days I can’t even do it myself” (182). From there, El Akkad imagines the many ways, some good but many tragic, how the genocide will finally come to an end, while taking stock of the individuals that continue to inspire hope in a just outcome.
Chapter 9
On pages 160-1, El Akkad writes in reference to the university encampments supportive of Palestine, “what is happening is the opposite of an embrace. It’s a shoving aside of the present system that makes it more clear there is no future, no community, for this or any other generation to come. Only endless taking - and these young people must pay for it by forfeiting hope or possibility or clean air or a liveable planet, so be it. A system more petulant and intransigent than any protester who ever lived. A system that can only ever say: There is nothing better than this.“ From our collective experience in higher education systems, does this resonate with you, and the future?
El Akkad speaks about the idea of small acts of resistance, training that muscle, so that further, bigger acts of resistance can occur. There is potentially comfort or rage in that, does this align with how you view the acts of resistance, big and small we can all take?
Chapter 10
In the final chapter, the author speaks to how we might engage and reflect on what is currently happening in ways that still align with the systems that enabled it. As we close out this book, what do you see as the implications of this text for our work, learning, or collective action going forward?
The final paragraph of the book reads:
“It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we'll learn to lay tracks on air.”
Is this a fitting end to the book? What do you make of the final sentence?