A surly old man is speaking Hebrew on my laptop screen. He scowls. He says, “I have ordered a complete siege.” He gestures his resolve. He says, “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water,” counting on his fingers to emphasize each negation. He glares. He says, “We are dealing with human animals.”
It doesn’t hit me till later that what the man has ordered is a concentration camp, with air raids. To prepare for a ground invasion with mass graves. Video clips like postcards from hell confirm: He is getting what he asked for. Every day, survivors of the previous day’s bombing are bombed. Hospitals, universities, mosques, churches, UN facilities, schools where the wounded and starving shelter — anyplace where people can take refuge is bombed. Every day for two months, three hundred humans killed.
But in the story the West is telling, those deaths are not the point. Genocide, war crimes — not the point. The point is: the bad guys have attacked the good guys; it’s payback time. The surly old man is one of the good guys. This makes the dead babies in the clips the bad guys, right?
At eighteen, I leave Cairo to attend university in the North of England. It costs my parents an arm and a leg, but everyone agrees this is the best move I can make, academically. My secret plan is to transform my social life, and I think I will fit right in. I’ve read Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, and I think women will be crazy about me. I’ve read Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, and I think I’ll be talking Arab politics at the union bar. The closest I actually come to any acknowledgment of my identity is drunken students doing “Walk Like an Egyptian” dance moves while they point at me. It would be fine if I were popular, but there is hardly anyone to talk to. This is the best move I can make, but I’ve lost what social life I had, and I’m forced to give up on my secret plan.
I roam the grim, sprawling city. There are hardly any Arabs here. The Muslims are more fanatical than any I’ve met. When the locals jokingly tut-tut at me for not being observant, I have the sense they expect all Muslims to be. I smoke. Policemen stare at me. I’m never searched or arrested, but I’m occasionally “chatted to.” It makes me feel unclean. One time, I step into a noisy pub full of locals, and the moment I open the door, there is silence. I look up. Squat pint glasses in hand, everyone stares at me. I’m getting the education I hoped for, but I’m so alone and irrelevant that it’s like missing an arm and a leg.
The night my older Canadian roommates give me LSD, they don’t take any themselves. In the early hours, I’m walking to campus, tripping hard, when one of them falls in step with me. “It’s got to suck, coming from a dump like Egypt,” he says in a steady, almost sympathetic voice, knowing the defenseless state I’m in. “So it’s basically this prehistoric pigsty full of donkey fuckers, right? What’s the terrorist-to-beggar ratio again?”
Fifteen years later, when I start writing novels and they start being translated, I am forced to see how my identity bars me from the Western-mediated colloquy that is contemporary writing in the world at large, which I’ve aspired to joining. It was decided long before I was born. Contemporary Arabic writing might actually have made empire’s heirs more knowledgeable, more meaningfully virtuous, more global in an honest sense; it might have taken the edge off their hypocrisy or attenuated their narcissism — but no. Just like Arab Muslim lives, Arab Muslim writing is not worth the civilized world’s attention. By and large, it does not appear in the gatekeepers’ picture of a global canon, which, apart from the West, Eastern Europe, and Japan, only includes token representatives selected on the basis of their support for liberal democracy or their relevance to the news. To maintain my literary ambition, I’ve had to block out the fact that — even from a career standpoint — the powers that dominate my world want to kill me.
The Arab Spring arrives at around the same time as I start writing novels. It catches me at the height of my frustration with corruption and kleptocracy, and as I join in the protests, I’m convinced that the Obama administration is on my side. It’s the progressive face of what I take to be the best of all possible world orders, which has reigned unchallenged all through my adult life. I was thirteen when the Berlin Wall came down, and I’ve had twenty years to embrace capitalist realism. In other words: Liberal democracy is good; everything else is evil. Any objection to absolute American hegemony is evil. Any attempt to think past the racial hierarchies in place — evil. Socialism is evil. Pan-Arabism is evil. You’d think Islamism would be evil, but not when it’s “moderate” and Qatari-funded as it transpires. Not for the Democratic Party, which in the name of the ballot box supported not universal rights and rule of law but a one-time transfer of power to the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012.
Over a decade has passed, and while Gaza is razed to the ground, another social media video stops me in my tracks. In it, a gray-haired douchebag has stopped to address some specter off-screen in the middle of the street. “If we killed four thousand Palestinian children,” he says, “you know what? It wasn’t enough!” The only reason you worry about them, the gray-haired douchebag goes on to tell the specter, is because you’re a Hamas-supporting terrorist. Your prophet raped his own daughter, the gray-haired douchebag says. I can take you in — deport you — because you don’t belong here. But even if you manage to stay, he adds, I can get the Mukhabarat back in Egypt to take in your father and pull out his fingernails. And all that can be heard in response, barely audibly, is “Please go.” This is New York City. It turns out that the specter being spoken to is a random hot-dog vendor; the gray-haired douchebag, a former national security adviser — in the Obama administration.
Alone and irrelevant in the North of England: even as a Cairo-dwelling adult, how hard it’s been to own that suffering. All through my life, my culture has felt like a patina, the precious metal underneath it long gone. And it is my calling to forge a new, contemporary ore. I am aware it is colonialism that stunted and paralyzed us, but in the postcolonial world, I feel we can only revive in communion with the dominant civilization. Wherever I am, I live in a world wrought by the West. Life can’t be as meaningful if the West doesn’t give a shit about me.
The West doesn’t give a shit about me. I’ve known this since long before Gaza. Since Afghanistan, since Iraq, since Libya as much as Syria, Yemen as much as Sudan. Those rosy nightmares in which liberal democracy intervened to liberate Arabs from dictatorships, whether the regimes fell or not — parodies of revolution where Westerners got to pat themselves on the back while we savaged each other or died to feed their voyeurism. But I still can’t afford to let go of the thought that the West wishes me well. Even as a forty-year-old novelist, I never articulate my early letdown in words. But every time I apply for a visa, every time a Westerner stares or puckers up their ears at me, every time I stand in an office or circulate at an international event and am made to feel inferior because of where I come from — I can feel it in my body.
It made me physically unwell when, in a dreamlike Alpine town, a journalist asked me unironically whether Arab immigrants should be made to undergo an “assimilation program” before they are let into European society. To preempt religiously motivated violence, among other reasons, she said. But if what is happening in Palestine isn’t religiously motivated violence — that is what I now find myself thinking — what on earth do all those Europeans think it is?
I watch the German chancellor describe Israel as a democracy; I think of Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Syria, Yemen and Sudan. I tweet, “Fuck your democracy.” The next morning, I am shocked to see an expatriate Arab Spring activist call out my sinfulness. Because he still can’t forgive me for supporting the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood back in 2013, which he forgets that he did too. Everyone supported the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013, even if they incoherently reneged on their support a week later. He suggests that what Israel is doing in Gaza is somehow also my fault. He says that I’m attacking democracy because I like strongmen in military uniforms.
I watch while Obama’s former vice president declares the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood a scourge worthy of eradication; I remember how his predecessor once propped up that same political body. I think: A pretext for America to participate once again in both concentration-camp air raids and ground-invasion mass graves. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, Mark Fisher said. The end of the world has already been called forth in Gaza. You can see what it looks like online. And who is perpetrating it.
I don’t respond to my former comrade. He is slandering me. He is lying. He is just another asshole. But I note how precisely he has expressed the doctrine of capitalist realism without intending to. No matter what it does to us — Ayman al-Zawahiri pledging allegiance to the president of Egypt while people are dragged through the streets for being Shia or Christian and jihadi militias are armed and sent to discipline dissidents — liberal democracy cannot be wrong. If I renounce it, then I can only be a supporter of military dictators. Never mind that those enemies of freedom are themselves proxies of empire. Never mind that, even as we speak, empire is practicing every one of the crimes it decries in the countries it plundered and subjugated: murder, torture, graft, disinformation, unilateralism.
“I would not be a white American for all the tea in China, all the oil in Texas,” James Baldwin said in Paris six years before I was born. “I really wouldn’t like to have to live with all those lies. This is what is irreducible and awful. You, the English, you, the French, you, the West, you, the Christians — you can’t help but feel that there is something that you can do for me. That you can save me. And you don’t yet know that I have endured your salvation so long I cannot afford it anymore. Not another moment of your salvation. And that I can save you. I know something about you. You don’t know anything about me.”
With my hand in my sleeping eight-year-old’s hair, images of what the Israelis are doing to Gaza’s children course through my head. Breathe, I tell myself. Sort through what you’re feeling and breathe. Rage. Breath. Fear. Breath. Shame. Breath. Hatred. Breath. Hatred. Breath. Hatred. Breath. Breath. Breath.
Romanized without diacritics, the Arabic words for “witness” and “martyr” are identical. Shahid. In its original sense, the first translates to “one who knows,” the second to “one who knows the truth.” I suppose you only really know the truth when you die, but there are those who know more than they otherwise would because they saw it happen. That is the only thing that makes up for my current helplessness: I am the sẖāhid and, before the ascension of the sẖahīd, the one who watches. We are not numbers, the dead keep crying out on my timeline. While Israeli snipers bring down doctors and journalists for being the wrong religion and scions of your rules-based international order tie themselves up in knots over the psychological damage inflicted on supposedly secular minds from the use of words like martyr.
I need to explain to you the reason I identify with the Palestinians. It is not my religion, which I’ve only ever embraced with ambivalence. It is not my nationality, which continues to embarrass and subjugate me. It is not my ethnicity, which I don’t know or care to know with any precision. It is not my language, which has been, in political terms, more an instrument of repression than of liberation. It’s the fact that, no matter what they say or do in the world your civilization has wrought, Palestinians remain alone and irrelevant. Their existence has no density. So much so that, in many circles, the principal objection to what’s happening in Gaza is that it might “radicalize” a new generation of Palestinians and thus end up hurting Israelis or Westerners again. It’s as if they are wicked spirits that taunt you every time you look in the mirror — and, poor things, you just want to comb your hair in peace.
I have spent my life fighting for values attributed to your civilization, and I’ve tried to believe the stories you told me about why the world is what it is. I’ve questioned my idea of fairness, broadened my understanding of equality, recoiled from every last vestige of chauvinism in my own culture. I’ve become your model secularist, keener than anybody on world peace and universal rights. But I still don’t exist just for you to feel that you would balk at eliminating me. I would love to come out of the mirror and join in the life you command.
Meanwhile, I have no intention of disappearing. And no matter how far I go in your world, there will always be an irreducible and awful Gaza inside me.
