Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

Abandoning the imposition of a calendar helped me understand that time isn’t real; it has no logic in the absence of hope or anticipation.

If you don’t learn a language early in life, its words will forever come out wrinkled and accented by another world, no matter how well you memorize or love the vocabulary, grammar, and cadences of a new language.

I look back now on so many moments in my life when I instinctively took responsibility for the actions and feelings of those around me.

Honor is an expendable luxury when you have no means or shelter in this fucking world.”

“We are not all blessed to receive a good education and inherit what it takes to live with some dignity. To exist on your own land, in the bosom of your family and your history. To know where you belong in the world and what you’re fighting for. To have some goddamn value.”

told it as I tell it now. As if it were someone else’s life, something distant from me. I didn’t feel the shame, pleasure, or trauma of it. I wasn’t holding back tears. There simply were none.

“Do you think it means anything that we both ended up imprisoned?” Um Buraq asks. “It means fate lacks imagination,” I say, but I sit with the question. “Or maybe it just proves the state will always find a way to imprison those who are truly free, who do not accept social, economic, or political chains.”

I liked breaking rules I had no say in making, at the same time that I hated how I did it.”

taught me many things, among which was how to live my truth even (and especially) when it was at odds with social conventions.