Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

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.

“Let them think they own the land. I know better. I know the land owns us, her native children.”

She was nearly blind and possessed the limitless generosity and kindness that often accompanies sightlessness, as if one’s love for the world increases as the ability to see it diminishes.

her embroidery was more special than any “desk job” could be; that she was an artist; that Western images of professional women don’t have to apply to us; that concepts of respectability and modernity are manufactured.

No one had ever kissed me with such love, and it occurred to me that happiness can reach such depths that it becomes something akin to grief.

“People don’t need to be told to dance. You just play music and their bodies know what to do. You can organize them all day to dance, but no one will move until you play the music. We just have to figure out what that music is that will compel individuals and small circles of people to act however they can all over the country, without trying to organize them in advance.”

chaos theory is an entire field of mathematics. It is not about disorder. In fact, chaos is not random. It forms predictable patterns,” said Bilal the Stoned Professor. “In what appears to be random, there are actually very complex but deterministic systems, with repeating patterns, constant feedback, and organization that is very sensitive to the starting conditions.”

“It’s important to understand that deterministic doesn’t mean that it’s predictable. And unpredictable doesn’t mean random. The weather is an example of chaos theory. The stock market. They are deterministic, they have repeating patterns and constant feedback, and they’re self-organizing. Unpredictable, but not random. A butterfly flapping its wings in Japan could initiate a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s part of chaos theory.”

“For the ones we love, nothing is ever trouble, and everything is never enough.”

But he’s not innocent either. Everyone’s hands are bloody and dirty in this place,”

Their deceit, once planted in the public imagination—like the epic fabrication of a Jewish nation returning to its homeland—had grown into a living, breathing narrative that shaped lives as if it were truth.

wanted to describe to him how the emotional intimacy growing between us was shattering my heart in the most life-affirming ways, but I didn’t have the right words, except to say that I loved him, which wasn’t nearly enough.

“Here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.”

if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.”

“I 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,”

You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

“Do you think Baldwin would say we should love Israelis?” “I don’t think that’s necessarily what Baldwin is saying. I think he just means that we should fortify ourselves with love when we approach them. It’s more about our own state of grace, of protecting our spirits from their denigration of us; about knowing that our struggle is rooted in morality, and that 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.”

Men in the Sun,

Silence here is not the absence of sound, but the presence of a dense, unshakable stillness. Like dark matter in space, silence here is a living force that slides into all corners and seams. I have come to depend on it.

and it feels good to know that my heart stirs.