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.

Music is like spoken language, inextricable from its culture. 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.

We were a family with secrets, things that lurked in the corners of our lives, unseen, unspoken, but felt in the texture of arguments, the extra length of a pause, the focus of a stare.

I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth is never steady beneath our feet.

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.

We endure and wait, and cater to the whims of men, because sometimes our lives are at stake… until we get even.

He would kiss my feet, sobbing, and I would feel sympathy for him, which made me think I loved him too—that perhaps it was possible love could be nestled between revulsion and hatred.

therapist or clergy can substitute for the confidence of a whore, because whores have no voice in the world, no avenue to daylight, and that makes us the most reliable custodians of secrets and truth.

Perhaps predators in particular deserve pity, if only for the spiritual sewage of them.

When powerless, following world events only highlights your impotence.

me. I understood a new kind of joy that day. It was the sort of happiness that comes only when life takes everything and leaves you only the people who matter most.

Here is where we began. Where our songs were born, our ancestors buried. The adan sounded from unseen minarets. It floated through me, raised the hair on my arms, made me close my eyes and inhale the call to prayer.

Sheep, cows, fish, whales, goats—they’re nations unto themselves. They too deserve to be free.”

Their friendship revived and spread roots in the terrain of a grief particular to martyrdom, where the anguish of loss mixes with pride, resolve, the desire for vengeance, and camaraderie.

“What’s truly revolutionary in this world is to relinquish the belief that you have a right to an opinion about who another person chooses to fuck and why.

No one judged me more harshly than I judged myself.

world’s last remaining goddamn settler colonial project.”

I don’t want to bring a life into a world that will despise her existence,

This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere.

don’t see how else anyone can survive colonialism. Understanding our own condition, I think in saying ‘loved each other,’ Baldwin doesn’t just mean the living. To survive by loving each other means to love our ancestors too. To know their pain, struggles, and joys. It means to love our collective memory, who we are, where we come from,” he said, and after a silence for both of us to soak up that thought, he continued reading.

the struggle itself is not against them as a people, but against what infects them—the idea that they are a better form of human, that God prefers them, that they are inherently a superior race, and we are disposable.”

I have learned one can be surprised by the presence of humanity in many guises and languages, and in the most inhuman of places.