Omar El Akkad: Kateshia Pendergrass

When Omar El Akkad tweeted in October 2023 about the horrors he saw unfolding in Gaza, he didn’t think his tweet would make much of an impact.

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this,” he posted. 

After he had completed the first draft of his third book, one of his editors suggested that the tweet would make a good title. 

“That’s how it came to be called what it’s called, but I think, for the rest of my life I’m going to be fighting this perception that I just took this tweet and expanded it into a book,” El Akkad tells Q&Q.  

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (McClelland & Stewart, Feb. 25) is not a tweet expanded into a book, but rather an honest examination of El Akkad’s relationship with the West. Born in Cairo, he grew up in Egypt and Qatar before his family moved to Montreal when he was a teenager. 

In his first book of nonfiction, following on his 2021 Giller Prize-winning sophomore novel What Strange Paradise, El Akkad interrogates the rights and freedoms of the West that led him to appreciate it as an adolescent but which he now sees as compromised by its official response to the ongoing conflict in Gaza. 

El Akkad spoke to Q&Q from his home in Oregon earlier this month. 

Since you left journalism, you’ve been a novelist. What led you to so urgently write this book of nonfiction?

I couldn’t really write about anything else. For the better part of a year, it was the only thing I was able to think about. I don’t know if the result is a good book or a bad book, but I do know that I was unable to focus on anything else. 

Writing has always been my avenue of first retreat and for nearly a decade, that has been, at least in terms of my published work, in the realm of fiction. But in this moment it seemed important not only to document something in real time, but to assess a change in my way of looking at the world that I suspect other people are going through, in one form or another. 

The thing that’s somewhat difficult about all of this is that I don’t know where I stand now; I only know that I’m taking leave of a certain way of being in the world that has been my central orientation for essentially all my life. There are things that I believed about this part of the world – about its institutions, about its load-bearing beams – that, at least to me, feel like they no longer hold.

You write about the ledgers you’ve been keeping – the one you call the ledger of atrocities in which you document the daily horrors in Gaza, and the other that you don’t actually name, but I thought of as a ledger of courage. Was it a conscious decision to keep these ledgers?

It emerged as a very pathetic way of trying to keep an accounting of something that I suspected then and still suspect now is going to be the subject of a great communal forgetting. It is a very weird thing to say about a book as obviously angry as this one, but I do think of it as being one of the most hopeful things I’ve ever written, because even as I’ve become incredibly cynical about institutions, I’ve seen so many examples of individual courage. I’ve seen kids risk their futures protesting on college campuses; I’ve seen people chain themselves to the gates of weapons manufacturers; I’ve seen people stand up and say something when it would be so much easier to just look away; and so I don’t know that it’s possible to only have one side of that equation even in a moment of horror as grotesque as this one. I am firmly of the opinion that most people are good, and that most people left to their own devices will stand up against industrial-scale slaughter, so the book ends up being an outcome of these two polar opposite ways of engaging with the moment. 

It’s interesting that you say this is the most hopeful thing you’ve ever written, because you spend a lot of time in the book pointing out the hypocrisy of Western governments and Western society more broadly. As you point out, many governments are cruel and indifferent, but it’s the “relentless parachuting of virtue” of the West (the celebrated speeches and regular statements about the importance of freedom and human rights) that is so shocking because it evaporates when the time comes for virtuous action. How optimistic are you that it is possible to move past that, to get to a place where values are actually values and not just props? 

One way or another, this society – like every society – will be forced to that place or else will destroy itself. 

This is a book in large part about the natural progression of two modes of being that are defined by a kind of insatiableness, which is to say capitalism and colonialism. Eventually you reach a place where you either address this and you find a way to create a more just ordering, or you watch the machine eat itself. It’s very difficult for me to talk about optimism in this moment where, for the last year and a half, I’ve watched tens of thousands of children get slaughtered. But I also know that we have no other way of living with each other that doesn’t end in total disaster, and so in a way, it’s not the most reassuring form of optimism, but I don’t know that I do reassurance very well, I guess.

In the book’s closing paragraphs, you make some cutting references to the future reconciliation committees and the land acknowledgements, the future “one day” of the title – the implication is clear that one day this will come, but do you think it will be too little too late?

On my bad days, I do. 

When I talk about that idea, I’m thinking about it in two ways. The first is just as another form of theft, which is to say that colonialism is not only the theft of land, and the theft of resources, and the theft of lives, it’s the theft of narrative. I can absolutely envision a future in which someone’s grief is taken and repurposed. 

But the other way I was thinking about it is how I think about the after-effects of colonialism in this part of the world, which involves watching the U.S. government, for example, issue a declaration of regret about the treatment of Indigenous people hundreds of years after the worst genocide in human history. That was the timeframe I was thinking about, which is incredibly cynical. But some people who have read the book have thought about [that timeframe] in terms of months. Obviously, I hope they’re correct, but it wasn’t what I was thinking when I considered the idea of the inevitability of regret and apology long after the act being apologized for is done. 

What do you want readers to take from this book, ideally?

I think it’s going to be the kind of book that some people react to very positively and some people extremely negatively, and I don’t think either reaction is invalid. 

You can’t write a book like this and expect everyone to love it or everyone to love you for writing it. My hope is that it provides a meeting ground, of sorts, for people who have felt over the last year-and-a-half like they’re going out of their minds as they have watched children be slaughtered by the tens of thousands, and have been told by their elected representatives and by the load-bearing beams of their society, that this is good and necessary and must continue. 

I have no idea if this book is worth a damn. I can tell you that it was my attempt to say not just that this is wrong, that this is patently evil, but that we are left with nothing of our own principles and our own conscience if we develop the capacity to look away from this. In that sense I think it’s in keeping with all the writing I’ve done in the last decade, which is that it’s oriented against the privilege of perpetual forgetting. Beyond that, I am certain that readers will have many different interpretations of what’s in this book, and certainly not all of them are going to be good.

Why do you expect some people to react extremely negatively to this?

[Kazuo] Ishiguro once said that all literature is just someone saying, “This is how it feels for me. Can you hear me? Does it also feel that way for you?” 

I think the answer to that final question, be it a yes or a no, in the case of this book is going to be very loud and very adamant. There is a narrative element that accompanies any atrocity that is incredibly powerful and compelling. To engage in a different kind of narrative will naturally cause very strong reactions. 

One of the things that I very much believed when, at a young age, I set this part of the world as my north star, is that this is what happens here. People write dangerous books or they make dangerous arguments or they engage in heated debates. In a way, the only thing more frightening than seeing this book cause heated reactions one way or another, is to see the thesis proved that there is, in fact, no debate here – that these things I told myself about this society don’t exist. I wouldn’t say I’m ready for it – I don’t think I’m ready for any part of this. But I don’t think there’s something irrational or unreasonable about having a strong reaction to such a book, for better or worse. 

This is a very personal book – you write about looking at atrocities in Gaza on your computer and then having to shut the laptop quickly when your child comes over to see you. Raising children is in some ways a fundamentally hopeful labour – do you have any hope for the future for your children?

I have no choice but to have hope. And I say that as somebody who over the years has written some incredibly depressing books and so has been asked about hope a lot, and has hardly ever provided a satisfactory answer. 

I’m one of those incredibly simple men who upon having children suddenly changed his entire view of the world and what’s important and what matters. I remember being a kid in school, listening to some grownup at an assembly talk to us about how their generation had screwed everything up but we were going to be the ones to fix it. And now I’m that idiot, who goes and talks to kids at schools, and tells them, “I’m so sorry about what a shitty job we did, but your generation will be the one to fix it.” 

I think if we’re going to mortgage our children’s future to the hilt, we are obligated to express not only hope that something better is on the way, but also to manifest that, to do the work. And here I’m not just talking about the horror of the last 15 months and putting a stop to that, I’m talking about all of the grand currents of colonialism and capitalism, the mess we’ve made of our planet. 

I would like to think of it as this voluntary thing that I’m doing, but in fact this is my obligation. So long as I can’t reasonably discount the possibility that my children’s generation is going to have it much, much worse than mine, then I have to work to do something about that, no matter how hopeless or dejected I might feel on any given day.

This interview has been edited and condensed.