One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

One night, I go to a party at the home of an old friend from Qatar who had been sent to Montreal by his father ostensibly to continue his education but instead has made quite a decent living for himself selling crack. One of the people there, aggressively enthusiastic in that way only certain men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two become when they first stumble onto the work of William Burroughs, says to me with complete conviction that Naked Lunch is the finest novel ever written, and that I know nothing of life until I read it. There’s a man in that book who’s being consumed by his own asshole, the young man says to me, very seriously, do you understand? Do you understand the meaning? I nod. The next morning, I go to the Concordia library. I remember a sense of fear, real fear, as I half-whisper the name of this book to the librarian at the desk. In another life I’d once smuggled a copy of Dennis Rodman’s biography—the one with a picture of his bare ass on the back cover—to Qatar from a summer trip in Florida. Back in the old country you got deported for reading the wrong thing, watching the wrong thing, thinking the wrong thing. Completely disinterested, the librarian points me in the direction of a row in the stacks. I pick the book off the shelves, whisk it home, read it in one sitting, don’t understand a word. It’s exhilarating. The overwhelming ordinariness of that day, and yet how it marked a small parcel of rootedness in those years when the West transfo...