One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. I devoured it in two quick sittings, and by the end my heart was drumming ... Passionate, poetic and sickening. It is full of well-earned rage, frustration with those who need this morality to be spelled out. For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual, to have these ugly truths articulated. It stoked and tempered the fires of my own rage. It is an important book, a must-read.
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In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, his fiercely agonized new book about American and European responses to the devastation of Gaza, El Akkad is trying, in a very different way, to do the same thing — to force American readers to think of Palestinian victims not as 'them' but as 'us' ... Whatever one thinks of its arguments, the book has the desperate vitality of a writer trying to wrench from mere words some adequate answer to his own question: 'What is left to say but more dead, more dead?' It exists in the abyss between, on the one hand, the emotional overload of following daily live reportage of atrocities and, on the other, the future accounting that has not yet arrived ... His memories...are wonderfully evoked. They have the refined coolness of experience filtered through time and reflection. The book’s polemical side, forged in the raging heat of appalling violence, is, understandably, more disoriented ... At its best, it is a probe into the murky depths of a collective consciousness shaped by the need to evade the daily evidence of political and environmental catastrophe ... His book is a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people’s calamities.
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Questions burn and throb with a haunting clarity in El Akkad’s first work of nonfiction ... Muscular ... This book isn’t quite a memoir, though El Akkad does weave in the story of his family’s various migrations ... [An] excavation ... It may also stiffen the resolve of readers who come to it craving moral clarity.
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