Ep. 362 Colonialism Is Not an Abstraction with Omar El Akkad

Written By Megan Caballero

This week, we’re joined by author and journalist Omar El Akkad to discuss his new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which serves as a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. Omar shares how writing nonfiction compares to his novels, how he anticipates and thinks about potential criticism, and what it means to resist despair in the face of empire.

The Stacks Book Club pick for March is They Were Her Property by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. We will discuss the book on March 26th with Tembe Denton-Hurst returning as our guest.

 
 

Everything we talk about on today’s episode can be found below in the show notes and on Bookshop.org and Amazon.

To support The Stacks and find out more from this week’s sponsors, click here.

Connect with Omar: Instagram | Twitter
Connect with The Stacks: Instagram | Twitter | Shop | Patreon | Goodreads | Substack | Subscribe

To contribute to The Stacks, join The Stacks Pack, and get exclusive perks, check out our Patreon page. If you prefer to support the show with a one time contribution go to paypal.me/thestackspod.

The Stacks participates in affiliate programs. We receive a small commission when products are purchased through links on this website.

TRANSCRIPT
*Due to the nature of podcast advertising, these timestamps are not 100% accurate and will vary.

Omar El Akkad 0:00

There's this principle in architecture that I go back to quite often when I'm teaching creative writing classes. Whenever you design a structure of any kind, you should give some thought as to how that structure is going to look as ruins. And I think writers would do well to sort of think in similar terms. I was writing in part A Memoir, and I was writing in part, an assessment of the part of the world that I have sort of tethered myself to since I was about five years old, but I was also writing a real time account of a period of history that I think will be one of our most shameful I often go back to this thing that Isha Guru said, and when he accepted the Nobel in his speech, he said something like all literature is essentially someone saying, This is how it feels to me. Can you hear me? Does it also feel that way to you?

Traci Thomas 0:52

Welcome to the stacks, a podcast about books and the people who read them. I'm your host, Traci Thomas, and today I am beyond thrilled to welcome to the stacks. Omar el Akkad. Omar is an author and journalist whose work explores politics, identity and the consequences of war. His latest book, One Day everyone will have always been against. This is his non fiction debut. The book examines Omar's own conflicting relationship with Empire and the West. It explores how history is rewritten and the stories we choose to tell ourselves about who we wish to be in the world and what it means to live in a world that is deeply shaped by conflict. Don't forget our book club pick for March is they were her property, white women as slave owners in the American South, by Stephanie e Jones, Rogers, temby Denton, Hearst will be back on Wednesday, March 26 to discuss this book with me, so be sure to read along and tune in. Quick reminder, everything we talk about on each episode of the stacks can be found in the link in the show notes. If you love the stacks and you want inside access to it, there are two incredible ways to earn perks. Be part of an incredible community and help me make this show every single week. You can join the stacks pack by going to patreon.com/the stacks and get things like access to our Discord, participation in the mega challenge and bonus episodes. Or you can go to Traci Thomas dot sub stack.com to subscribe to my newsletter unstacked to get Yes, bonus episodes, but also hot takes on pop culture and a lot of writing about books. Either way, I'm so grateful for your support, and could not make the show without those two communities. Okay, now it's time for my conversation with Omar el Akkad.

All right, everybody. I'm I'm so thrilled today. I am joined today by Omar el Akkad, whose new book is called one day, everyone will have always been against this. I read this book, immediately reached out to his team and was like, it's got to happen, because this book is so good. It is the first 2025, book I have read. It's, we're in January, that I have loved this year. This is like my first true love of the year, and I'm so so thrilled to have you on the show. So welcome to the stacks.

Omar El Akkad 3:07

Omar, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here, and thank you for your generosity. I really appreciate it. This

Traci Thomas 3:12

book is such a spoon. We're going to talk all about it, but before we sort of dive into the details, we always start here in about 30 seconds or so. Can you just broadly tell people what the book is about.

Omar El Akkad 3:23

It is a continuation of my career of writing Stone Cold bummers, except this time, instead of fiction, it's non fiction. In early November of 2023 my editor was in town in Portland, where I live, and we were out for dinner, and I was talking about this idea, in light of the slaughter in Gaza, that I didn't know how to orient myself towards the west anymore. There's a reason I sound the way I do, and there's a reason if I called you up on the phone and said my name is John Smith, you'd probably believe me, it's because I've oriented myself towards the west, culturally, linguistically, in many other respects, for a very long time, and suddenly the things I thought I had oriented myself towards were seemed to be falling apart or seemed to have a hollowness about them. And I think my editor just got so sick of me rambling about this that a couple of days later, he called and said, You should cut this down on paper. And the result is this book,

Traci Thomas 4:21

okay, can you tell me more specifically what you mean by oriented yourself to the west, like, what are those things that you felt like you aligned yourself with or connected to or embodied that feel specifically like Western to you? Yeah,

Omar El Akkad 4:36

it's a really interesting question, because a lot of the book is struggling with exactly that question. So, I was born in Egypt. My parents are Egyptian. My family is Egyptian, dating back many, many generations. My dad had to get the hell out of Egypt when I was about five. And, you know, the political situation was bad, the economic situation was bad. And like a lot of people from that generation and subsequent. Generations. He found work in the Arabian Gulf, in the oil rich Gulf countries, specifically Qatar. Qatar is where I grew up. Most people can't point out Qatar on a map, but it's an incredibly wealthy place. They have one of the largest natural gas reserves in the world. 90% of the population of Qatar is from somewhere else, so something like English becomes the default language from a very early age. I was put in British schools and then American schools. And I think a part of the thinking is, this is the winner's language, this is the winner's culture. I mean, colonialism is not an abstraction. It's a very real thing that is overlaid onto onto a society. And as a result, you know, for many, many years, I was very proud of this, but I sound this way, that if you want to chat about the Wu Tang Clan or Arrested Development, or anything in between, I'm there. You know, I grew up absorbing as much as this as possible. And a big part of that, I think, had to do with not the West as any kind of active thing, but as a kind of negative space, whatever that whatever the hell that place is over there, it's not this. It's not a place where I can't talk about politics because the secret police might whisk you away. It's not a place where the laws only apply to these people, but not these people, it's not this, it's not that. And so over the course of my life, no matter how grotesque the wider political situation became, even during the post 911, years, there was always that underlying belief that, yes, but something is holding this up. Equal Justice, equal rights, for all this notion of a fundamental kind of load bearing beam morally or or societally. And I'm sure this changes for everybody, and everybody has their own sort of breaking points. But for me, Gaza was, was the point at which I could no longer believe that what you're left with in that situation, then is not it's a leaf taking but nothing is coming in to fill the place. So I don't, I don't feel like I belong to this thing that I've adhered myself to for decades, for most of my life, but I don't know what fills that vacuum. And so there's an immense amount of uncertainty in this book, precisely because of that reality. I'm leaving something behind that I've committed the entirety of my sort of moral, cultural, linguistic life to, and I don't know what to put in its place.

Traci Thomas 7:32

It's such an interesting question. I think we should say this because we're recording this episode on january 22 but people won't hear it until March. So the chance that a lot of things will change between what when we're talking and when the world hears this is high. I mean, it feels like every day we're living in a brand new world in a lot of ways, and a lot of the worst ways. But I do think this is something that many people are struggling with in different ways. I think, as you said, for you guys, it was sort of this like breaking point. And I think that's true for many of us, that this what's happening, this slaughter, this genocide, and especially for me as an American, like the American influence and money and backing of what's going on has felt extremely challenging to navigate. And like, you know, am I complicit in this because I, because I'm an American and because I say that I'm, you know, all of those questions. And so I guess my question for you is, when we don't know what fills the thing, how do we fill the thing? Like, how do we fill this void in our identity when we don't even know like? It feels like there's nowhere to go. I feel like, for me. Let me speak for myself, I feel like, for me, there's nowhere to go except for like, towards a despair. But I also know from history and from you know, my ancestors and from the literature that, like, that's not gonna work, right, like that's not sustainable. So where do you think we can or should go, or what should fill? What are you hoping can fill this for yourself?

Omar El Akkad 9:15

Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot, which makes the deeply unsatisfactory nature of the answer I'm about to give even more troubling. But I have been thinking about that because I think that there are so many days when I wake up fully dejected and fully feeling like all I want to do is just leave everything behind and disappear into the woods, which, in of itself, is a privilege right, that I could even consider that as a possibility, because a lot of people don't have that option, or anything remotely resembling that option. And one of the reasons it's been very, very difficult is that not only has my my fundamental orientation, been shaken, but also some of the things that I firmly still believe about my. Myself. So for example, I am a deeply committed pacifist. I firmly, firmly believe in non violence that has now collided against two things. The first is, what right I have to tell anyone how to resist their occupation, which is zero right I have no right. But the second is, but I can sit here and tell you how committed I am to non violence, but by virtue of the society I live in and where my tax dollars are going and what they're being spent on, I am one of the most violent human beings on earth, and so are the vast majority of people on this continent. And so you are left in this situation where you can't even say the thing that you believe about yourself because the reality of your life is contradicting it in real time, right? Having said all of that, I do think that while the last year and a half has completely shaken whatever faith I might have had left in so many of our institutional pillars, not just political, but educational, what the universities have been doing, cultural, what a lot of arts organizations have been doing, or more to the point not doing, despite how cynical I've become about so many of our institutional Load bearing beings, I have become the exact opposite about individuals and our about our capacity for individual solidarity. I did an event where I was interviewing ta nehisi Coates about his book a few months ago, and I was asking him about all of the flack he'd been getting, because obviously he'd been subjected to some really nasty stuff and some very, very racist stuff, like overtly racist stuff. And he was saying, yeah, that exists, but you should see the amount of love as well. And for a while, I had trouble coming to terms with that. But I think he's absolutely right. I mean, in the middle of a situation where virtually every mode of institutional power is telling you that it's actually a good and necessary thing that these kids be shredded limb from limb. You're watching individuals with the most to lose, and a lot of these are young kids with their futures ahead of them, protesting at their universities at the risk of losing their educational advantage, chaining themselves to the gates of weapons makers factories at the risk and very reality of getting arrested, showing so much more courage than I ever have in my life. That is a source of deep, deep inspiration for me. A long time ago, I was on this panel, a climate essay panel, and the last question on the panel was, where do you derive hope? And everybody answered with with the sort of answers you would expect, except the last guy. The last guy had just seen his house burned down in the wildfires in California, and he said, There is no hope. We've gone we've screwed things up too much. There is no hope, but we must behave as though there is. And I think about that a lot because that provides me no comfort, but it provides me a roadmap, and I'll take that over the other any day.

Traci Thomas 13:10

Yeah, you know, so interesting you're saying that about climate. I don't know if you're familiar with Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, but she's a climate writer and sort of activist personality, and in her book that came out last year, what if we get this right? She talks about hope and she talks about joy, and she sort of is like, hope is whatever fine, have it or don't She's like, but we still have to find the joy in the things in our lives. And I And to me, that feels very useful, because hope sort of feels like a little bit phony in the face of everything that we're seeing and living through. I mean, I'm in LA right now. We've just had horrible wildfires here that have decimated two huge neighborhoods. I know you're from Oregon, and you write about in the book the fires that were there. I mean, that's just, I mean, as we're talking there's a freeze in Houston and a freeze in Tennessee. I mean, it's just the climate change piece of it. I think between Gaza, between climate change, and sort of like the political moment in the United States, I think the idea of Hope does feel a little bit phony, like I'm just like, okay, glad you're hopeful, but I do, I do understand this, like we have to act like that. It is still possible like that. Hope can still still exist, even if we don't believe in it, we sort of have to trick ourselves, speaking of sort of like the future and the moment and all of this. I'm curious for you in this book about audience, because this book feels extremely of this moment. However, as I was reading it, I felt like it was a text that we can and should carry forward out of this moment in a lot of ways. A lot of the questions you were asking feel so much bigger than just 2024 or 2025 and so I'm wondering if you were thinking about what happens to this book in 2028 or 20. 2034, or 2055, or whatever that looks like how you were thinking about future audience, if at all.

Omar El Akkad 15:07

Yeah. Thank you very much for that. And thank you for the incredibly hopeful assumption that people will still be thinking about this book in any way, like a year from now, let alone decades.

Traci Thomas 15:16

Mark my words, okay, someone's gonna at least read this book next year, okay? And when they do, you owe me 100 bucks. Okay? Done,

Omar El Akkad 15:23

all of my royalties. All right, done, um, I there's this principle in architecture that I go back to quite often when I'm teaching creative writing classes. Is this principle that whenever you design a structure of any kind, you should give some thought as to how that structure is going to look as ruins. And I think writers would do well to sort of think in similar terms. You know, this, this book, it barges in through the door, pretending to be a series of arguments, or pretending to want to pick a fight. And I think I say at some point in the book, there's no arguments to be had. I'm not trying to argue with anyone. I was writing in part A Memoir, and I was writing in part an assessment of the part of the world that I have sort of tethered myself to since I was about five years old. But I was also writing a real time account of a period of history that I think will be one of our most shameful and I was rewriting this book up until the very end. I mean, we were recording the audiobook, and I was finding things that I was rewriting as we were recording the audiobook, which anyone in publishing will tell you, is a great way to infuriate everyone you work with. You know, for a variety of reasons, one of which is self interrogation. Do I actually believe this or not? The other is things that I had perceived as facts early on turning out to be complete lies and so on, so forth. But I often go back to this thing that Isha Guru said, and when he accepted the Nobel in his speech, he said something like, all literature is essentially someone saying, This is how it feels to me. Can you hear me? Does it also feel that way to you? And I think setting aside the quality of this book, and I honestly can't tell you if it's a good book or not, I'm too close to it. I will forever be too close to it. This is a book for which the answer to that final question, does it also feel that way to you? Is going to be deeply polarized. The yeses are going to be shouted out and the no's are going to be shouted out, and I've come to terms with that preemptively, but, you know, I don't think it will be remembered. But if it is, I think it's honestly going to be remembered as one of the tamer examples of this kind of book, in the sense that right now, we're in a position where there's immense personal risk to calling a thing what it is, yeah, that fades over time. You know, find me one human being who was on board with South African apartheid. Find me that person today. It's so easy in hindsight to say, oh, my god, that was awful. I would have always been against it. And I think that's the mode that this book, for better or worse. And I say this specifically with regards to its weaknesses. I think its weaknesses are going to move along this axis as well. Are very much influenced by trying to meet this moment as I would have met it if it was told to me as a piece of distant history, and wanting to believe things about myself and how I would stand in opposition to injustice, knowing full well that when push comes to shove, maybe, maybe none of that implied courage is there. Maybe the complete opposite is there. I have no idea how this book is going to be remembered if it is, but the moment I wrote it in demanded that, at the very least, I not lie to myself. And that's essentially one of the few things I can say about this book. Yeah.

Traci Thomas 18:46

Well, I'm curious about this idea of tameness, because, as you're saying, like, you know, who's the person who was on board with South African apartheid or whatever? Insert horrible thing here. I feel like it's so easy after the fact to be aggressively against things, and to be like, Never would I. How could anyone have let this happen? And the suggestion that sort of you were trying to meet this moment as a future self, like how you would respond to it, but also saying that you feel like this book is tame, I'm wondering kind of because those two things kind of feel in opposition, between like how we would approach something horrible in the future, and also, you know how you are approaching this I don't think this book is tame, but I'm just curious about you thinking this book is tame. I don't think this book is the wildest book that ever was written, but I certainly it's not tame. I don't think personally, which is, I think why I like it? Yeah,

Omar El Akkad 19:38

I mean, I was thinking a little bit about the obligations that you put on yourself when you decide not to look away. Because effectively, you know, I don't particularly believe in binaries, but if we were to impose one here and say that you are either opposed to an ongoing occupation and a genocide and this sort of. A complete dismantling of international law and norms and human rights when it's convenient, you're either opposed to this or you're on board with what's currently happening. If you are opposed, the obligations that are then imposed on you are relatively massive. You know, do something, say something. Make this worth upsetting people at a dinner conversation. Risk, your livelihood, risk, arrest, risk, blacklisting all of this with the chance that none of it will make a difference at all. If you are on the other side of that spectrum, all you are being asked to do is look away. You don't really have to even do the dirty work. You simply have to look away, right? And so it is disingenuous of me to pretend like the weight of those obligations isn't influencing the way I move through the world, let alone this book. Yeah, and one way or another, I'm going to find out the answers to these questions, because if I'm fortunate enough enough to live an average lifespan as it exists in this part of the world, I will spend decades seeing this book decay and weather and get washed over by time and seeing my own opinions change, and I will be able to gage what I said versus what I should have said, versus what I believe now. But that's sort of what happens when you write a book like this. Yeah, I have, I have to live with the consequences of it. And compared to the things I have been seeing on my screen for the last year and a half, that is such a minor, minor difficulty to face.

Traci Thomas 21:36

I want to talk you talk about this in the book, which I think is sort of in line with what you're talking about now, sort of like facing certain consequences for this work. And you talk about this, the pettiness of taking away jobs or taking away opportunities from writers who speak out, in this case, in support pro Palestinian sentiments. And sort of how the taking away of opportunity, the taking away of platform, is this petty action that these organizations, whether it's an arts organization, a government, a school, whatever it looks like. And I'm wondering, how do you think that that pettiness functions as like a large as a larger part of protecting empire, like why do you think that tool is is one and is so useful? Because it's something that I struggle with as a petty human. Like, I am petty. I love to be petty, but when I see it sort of portrayed on a larger scale, it feels so small from these institutions. So I'm wondering what why you think it is a tool that's being used against so many

Omar El Akkad 22:44

because I think that generally, people behave according to the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. And that's a very different thing depending on which part of the world you live in and which tax bracket you belong to, and so on and so forth. Right now, as we're doing this interview, I'm out in Banff, in Alberta, which is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I'm teaching a writing residency here, and I'm looking outside, and the mountains are gorgeous, and I have zero expectation that any of this is going to be bombed to rubble in the near future, or that if I go outside, I'm going to be hunted for sport, or that any of the thing that, if you are a Palestinian, not just living in Gaza but but living essentially in any part of the occupied territories you have to deal with on a daily basis. Could I imagine in some fictional universe these things happening to me? Sure, but it's not plausible. And I think for some people, the worst plausible thing that could happen to you is that maybe you get overlooked for a promotion because you're seen as troublesome, because you brought up this Palestine thing and made everybody uncomfortable. Or maybe the worst plausible thing is that there's an awkward silence at the next dinner party you go to because you brought up a strange piece of conversation than nobody expected. And so when the threat of the worst possible thing is not really on the table, then you you revert to the worst plausible thing. And so you get all of these petty pieces of punishment, like, Oh, you want it to be on that panel. We've cut you out of the panel, and it's enough, because it pushes somebody to the end of the spectrum, where they think, what am I doing here? You know, I got to take care I got to take care of myself here. And it works. It works. And it's so modular. I mean, right now, sure, it's Palestinians over the course of the Trump administration, beginning possibly by the time this podcast goes out into the world. The same narrative and the same petty punishments are going to immediately be applied to anybody who stands up for migrant rights. You're going to hear the same narrative. These are people are all savage. They're here to kill you. We have to protect ourselves. And there's going to be the same punishments. Oh, you're putting on a. Literary event in which you want to discuss migrant fiction, your sponsorship is getting pulled. The playbook is never constrained to a single case, because it works across the board, right?

Traci Thomas 25:12

You mentioned that you're teaching, and I'm curious for you as a teacher who is shaping young hearts and minds, young writers who hopefully will go out into the world and write, you know, great things. How has this shift for you, this turn away from this idea of Western greatness or whatever, however you've aligned yourself with westernness, with Empire. How has that shift for you changed how you're thinking and talking to your students.

Omar El Akkad 25:43

You know, not as much as I as I would have expected. Whenever I'm working with students, my central sort of approach is, how can I be of use to you? And most of the time I'm not. I'm not handing out sort of edicts or, you know, you need to do this, or you need to do that. I'm generally asking questions about the work. Where this has been more apparent, I think, is when there's functions, like when I'm reading, for example, you know, like over here, one of the things we do is we have student readings and we have faculty readings. And so during the faculty reading, I read from this book. There's been very few times where I've read from this book, but this was one of them, and it's impossible to do an apolitical reading of this book, you know, that's not, that's not a thing that's going to happen, you know. But mostly when I'm working with students, one of the things that I find is, you know, particularly on this topic, we like to think of the split between conservative and liberal, religious splits, that sort of thing. That's not the biggest split that I've seen. The biggest split on this issue has been generational. In the early days of creating this book, when I would tell elder members of my family or friends that I was writing it, the central response was, don't do that. Like don't do that. And when I talk to younger folks, high school students, and I'm not, you know, college students, I'm not trying to change their mind about anything. But when I mentioned that I'm working on this, the response is, okay, we get it. That's not there's so much braver than me, and there's so much further along the line of a commitment to justice and a commitment of standing up against wrongdoing that again, I go back to this notion of the long term tameness of this book, because I'm seeing what what newer generations are capable of, and what they're doing, and how much more courageous they are than me. And it's the only thing it is, is inspiring. That's what I've been getting from from this sort of teaching side life that I have. They don't need my opinions. They've cut their own, and they're incredibly strong ones, right? Okay, we're

Traci Thomas 27:53

gonna take a quick break and we will be right back. We're back, and I feel like I have to ask you about this, so you can tell me to fuck off. But what do you make of the ceasefire? What do you make of any of this? I mean, I read the book before the ceasefire announcement. So much of the book is talking about the violence in Gaza and what's going on and and, you know, just a few days after I finished, there's this news of potentially, this cease fire happening in a few days. You know, all of this stuff sort of trickling out, and I struggle to know what to make of it, but you're a smart person, and you've written about it, so I'm hoping that you can tell me what I should think.

Omar El Akkad 28:36

Yeah, I've been thinking about it a lot because it's one of those situations where you, I'm sorry. I say you. I mean me, obviously the royal you, where you realize the the extent to which being in the empire has affected the way you look at the world. And no matter how much I try to sort of rid myself of that, it's there, and it's incredibly sticky. And what I mean by that is over the last year and a half in particular, but but going back decades, going back the entirety of my life, when something very grotesque is happening to a people who are considered unworthy, there's a particular sort of mainstream liberal knee jerk reaction to say this is bad, because one day it might be done to people who matter. And so you see this a lot of like, oh, the drones are sniping Palestinian kids now, but that might not always be the case. The surveillance that happens to Palestinians all of the time is being imported. The weapons used in the war on terror are now coming back to police departments all over major cities in the US, and that is all undoubtedly true, but the underlying implication is, yes, now it's happening to people we consider sub human, but you better worry, because it might happen to people we consider human soon, and that's a really ugly. Impulse, no matter how well meaning. And the reason I bring this up is because, with something like the ceasefire, there is always a tendency to think of it as part of a great chess game. You know, how does this affect the prospects of Hamas? And will this do that? And will, you know, and that's all well and good, but to me, anything that even provides the possibility that these human beings are not going to be murdered wholesale, even for a brief moment, is worth celebrating. This is similar to how I felt when the Syrian regime fell. I mean, the Assad regime was one of the ugliest and cruelest regimes on Earth, and when it fell yes, there's always the tendency to think in these pragmatic, great gain kind of modes of who fills the vacuum, and how does this affect the power balance in Iran and this there are people coming out of torture dungeons for the first time in 30 years. If that isn't worth celebrating, then we have lost something of our humanity. So that's sort of how I think about this. Do I believe that the ceasefire is going to hold already it's not holding, and already, a lot of the brutality that was inflicted on Gaza is being inflicted in different modes, on Jenin and on parts of the West Bank. And no, I don't really think that the same entity that's been murdering people for a year and a half is suddenly going to adhere fully to a ceasefire, but anything that brings even a pause to the killing has to be worth celebrating on some level. So that's my very sort of unsatisfactory way of thinking about this. And this is a difficult thing to think

Traci Thomas 31:39

about. No, I mean, I actually really appreciate that, because I feel like, you know, where we started this conversation, and sort of this, like cynicism that that you feel like you've kind of uncovered in sort of the lies and myths and things that have been chipped away for you. I, for me, when I think about the ceasefire, some of that becomes so present. Of like, this feels like good news, but I can we trust it? Like, can we trust these people? And so I think my, my skepticism around the ceasefire has nothing to do with, like, what does this mean for X, Y and Z and more of like, What the fuck are they up to? Like, they've, like, have two five year old twins. And like, when it gets quiet, I'm sort of like, I know something bad's happening, even though I've been asking you to shut the fuck up for the last two hours, right? It's like that feeling for me of like, I know this is a good thing, but also, can I trust it? Does it hold? And I guess maybe it's okay to feel both of those things at once and not try to be like, this is a great thing, or this is the worst thing ever, like that. It can be both a good thing for people who who need a fucking break, and also it can be something to keep our eyes on, because something might be afoot. You talk about a smirk in this book, as I'm smirking to you. This is my favorite little bit in the book I just I loved it. You're talking about people in these political moments who align themselves with the Empire, whether it is the civil rights movement when they're sticking the dogs on the black civil rights activists, and you cut to the you cut to the picture, and you see the faces of the people in the crowds, and they have this little smirk on their face, and the four more years chanters who drown out pro Palestinian protesters at Joe Biden's rallies. And can you just talk a little bit about the smirk this part of the book gave me tingles because, yes, that fucking smirk, yeah.

Omar El Akkad 33:45

I mean, I've seen it in so many, so many different modes. Obviously, the one that that was most prevalent over over the last year and a half were these State Department or White House spokespeople who, you know, the way this works is that you're given your talking points, and then you go out to the podium and you repeat the talking points. That is your usefulness to the machine. That is what you do. And I think one of the things that stuck with me is, you know, you're watching someone with this smirk on their face as they say something they know fully to be untrue. They know at their core, and maybe they've been in politics long enough that they've smothered this to the point where they won't even think of it in these terms. But you know, to hear someone from the Biden administration talk about how this administration has done more for Palestinians than any other, you have to have turned off a certain part of yourself to be able to do that kind of work. Something has shut down a soul, a conscience, I don't know. But on top of that, I think there is the very comforting notion of. Of knowing deep down that the horrible thing is being done on your behalf, that you personally are not getting your hands dirty. You wear the nice suit and you go to the nice restaurants and you socialize with the nice people. And in fact, if somebody were to go to your restaurant and interrupt your meal and show you a picture of a child who'd just been torn limb from limb, that would be so uncivilized and so crass and how dare you. And I think all of that works its way into this very sly look of just knowing fully that the system serves you, and once you're in that place, what's better, what in the world is better than having the most powerful empire in human history serve you? There are many things I feel about that particular smirk, as I have seen it throughout history as an and as I have seen it over the last year and a half. But I think the one commonality dating back to those pictures of those folks outside the school that was being desegregated for the first time at the protests, where the protesters were being attacked and mauled by dogs all the way up to the present day. Is this sense of something like comfort. The Empire serves me, and this is proof that's worth smiling about, I suppose, if that other part of you is completely shut down, yeah,

Traci Thomas 36:27

you know who I'm just thinking of, who has the smirk? Is Kyle Rittenhouse, yeah, yes. Like smirk, smart. God, so I I'm sure you know this somewhere in yourself, but I don't You seem like a humble person who won't say it, so I'm gonna just say it for you. The title of this book is so fucking fantastic. It's actually just like, uncomfortable to know that someone really just like, wrote that. And I know this was a tweet that you or write a tweet. It was a tweet that you put out, and I'm wondering, when you put the tweet out, did you did you like, tweet it and then be like, Wow, that's the greatest tweet that's ever tweeted. Or were you like, Oh, I'm just gonna get this tweet up. Like, because it's such a every time I talk about this book or like, mention it, someone is like, Wow, what a great title. And it is. It's such a great title. So I'm wondering, like, when you actually wrote this as a tweet, what you were feeling and thinking, and then also, when you decide, when did you decide that it would actually be the title of the book?

Omar El Akkad 37:31

Yeah, thank you for that. That's, that's very generous. I so this was in mid October, I think was when I, when I posted that tweet. And effectively, it was, there was a picture of of what Gaza looked like then, which is so alarming to think about now, because, you know, obviously there's been a year and a half of devastation. That makes that initial photo actually look tame by comparison. But it's, it wasn't tame. It was, it was grotesque the amount of destruction. And all I said, was something to the extent of, you know, one day when there's no downside to speaking out, and when nobody's left to hold accountable, everyone will have always been against this. Because, again, it's sort of, I think one of, one of the things I try to get at is, is something I've discovered about myself over the years, which is, I have no teams. I'm not on anybody's team. Half this book, not half, but a significant amount, anyway, is very much criticism of of the Arab regimes I grew up under and and I don't I'm not one, one of these folks who takes a side and then no matter what grotesque thing that side does I have to defend them at all costs? I'm not that guy. When I see echoes in history of something, it's not particularly difficult for me to point those out in terms of the response to it. I mean, I fucking hate Twitter. I tweet, like, back then even I was tweeting like, once a month or something, I've now essentially left it all together and all other social media, I don't do that. There are other people who are very, very good at it and more power to them, but I'm not that guy. I don't like it, and my dream in life is to just be able to shut all of that stuff down and never deal with it again. So I certainly wasn't expecting, you know, 10 million views, or whatever the numbers are. And in fact, the original title of the book had nothing to do with the tweet. I had finished the book, and then I was at the Penguin Random House building in New York, meeting with some of the editors. And one of the editors, Gabrielle, said, you know, that tweet would make for a really good title. And immediately everyone in the room was like, oh shit, you're absolutely right. And so that was the title. The original working title was something like a glass coffin. I was thinking about the idea of, when you're in this kind of situation, how the worst thing you can do is show the body and show what has happened to people who have the privilege of looking away from the body and how that has existed. I. Throughout history, Emmett Till and the Open Coffee, you know the idea of, yeah, how someone could be so, so offended by being shown the reality of the thing that serves them. And so that was the original working title. Is still the folder on my computer is still called the glass coffin. But once that title was suggested, it made perfect sense for the nature of the book. And I'm never going to be able to convince people that I didn't just take a tweet and expand it into book form, but I promise you, that's not how it played out.

Traci Thomas 40:33

That's funny. So you also have written novels famously, and you're a journalist as well. How did this compare for you writing this essay collection? Did you find that long form fiction, short form journalism, or these essays, book, book length essays were more fueling to you, more enjoyable, more difficult, sort of. How did it compare for you as a writer? It was a really

Omar El Akkad 40:59

interesting experience, and it was somewhat akin to throwing a car from reverse into Drive. When I think of fiction, I often call fiction my first avenue of retreat, when I retreat away from the world into the invented world of the novel or the short story or whatever it is I'm working on. And so there's something deeply comforting about creating a made up world and then swirling away in it for years at a time. And this was the opposite. I had to walk into the world as it exists, and so it was an entirely different set of muscles that were quite exhausted by the end of this process. One of the other interesting things about it is that, you know, I subscribe to this thing that Jorge Luis Borges once said about all literature being tricks. And no matter how clever your tricks are, they eventually get discovered. My tricks are not particularly clever. One of my central tricks is inversion. I take something that was happening this way and I make it go that way and see what happens. And so I often say that I did write a book about Israel and Palestine. It was called American war. It was my debut novel, and it came out in 2017 nobody has ever read American war that way. It's read as an American book, because it's set in an alternate United States and so on so forth. And sometimes I would say, Well, you know, the entire middle of that book is based on what happened in Sabra and Shati, a Palestinian refugee camp where a massacre took place. And SABR is, is the Arabic word for patience. And in the book, the refugee camp is called Camp patients and so on so forth. And nobody buys any of that. It's not read that way at all. And now I find myself with with sort of the opposite problem, in the sense that, of course, this new book is about Israel and Palestine. Of course it is. It would not have been written were it not for what happened over the last year and a half. But I think it is overwhelmingly a book about the West. Yeah, it's overwhelmingly about this part of the world and how I feel about it. But it's not going to be read that way. I don't think,

Traci Thomas 42:58

I think it will. I That's how I read it. I do have to say, like, when I read the book, I thought, Oh, this is such an interesting way. Like, like, he's using Israel and Palestine as an entry point to talk about these other places, sort of like a four leaf clover, where it's like, you kind of go back to that middle, the middle of the thing, or flower. The middle of the thing is ISRAEL PALESTINE, but the petals are all different, like, you're pointing to different. I mean, that's how I read it, that's how it because I feel like

Omar El Akkad 43:25

that's, that's deeply reassuring to me. I was, yeah, I mean, that's sort of the intent.

Traci Thomas 43:31

I think it also, it's so dependent on the audience, something like this. Like you said, you know, how do you feel this way, too? And the yeses and the NOS will fight or whatever. But I think a lot of I mean, who knows people are so some people are really stupid and up to so I don't, I can't say what people will think. I can only say what I thought. And I feel like that's why I liked the book. I felt like you did such a good job of connecting dots for me and helping me to see out and in, like, around what's going on? No, I appreciate

Omar El Akkad 44:04

it. Thank you. And I think there's a lot of bad faith readings that are coming. I know that, yeah, but there's also a lot of valid criticism that's going to come for this book. And I think that's a good thing, right? I'm not you know the stuff about, oh, you're a terrorism supporter, you deny Israel's right to exist, or whatever the sort of stuff that's you can sort of expect that doesn't bother me that much. I don't. I don't. It doesn't matter to me. It's obviously from a place of bad faith. But there's also going to be a lot of legitimate criticism of this book, because, for better or worse, it's, it's one of the earlier entries about what has happened. There's more coming. I'm sure there's better coming, but just sort of walking out that early into that space, you can't believe that you're going to do it properly off the bat, but I felt the need to say I felt that staying quiet right now would not allow me to live with myself. Yeah, and so, yeah, I think all of it's coming, and some of it might arrive between when we tape this now and when it airs so who knows, who knows

Traci Thomas 45:07

when you Okay? Obviously, you're thinking about that a little bit. As you said. You were working on this book up until the very last minute. So I'm wondering, like, when you're thinking about criticism that's coming, are you, are you using that to write? Are you thinking, Okay, someone could say this. Let me respond to that, like, how are you sort of crafting your arguments, or knowing when your arguments are like, thorough enough that you feel comfortable publishing them, whether or not people have criticism, but that you feel like, confident enough to put it out into the world on a piece of paper?

Omar El Akkad 45:38

Yeah, that is really fascinating question. And the short answer is, No, I wasn't thinking in terms of a chess game. You know, someone's going to say this, therefore I must counter in this way, or, you know, something like that, because that's endless, like there is no end point if you're thinking along those terms. And I think the book just gets worse as a result, the central question that I had in my head was, do you feel this like Is this how you actually feel? And so the things that were changing were things that I felt based on a set of facts that then turned out to not be facts at all, or situations where I made the mistake of believing in interpretation, and then it proved to be completely, completely fabricated and in bad faith, things like that. But the defining sort of orientation throughout the process was, do you actually feel this way? Are you saying it because you think it'll be easier to put it in these terms, or you think you'll get less criticism this way, or you'll make this person happy. There's no way a book like this makes everyone happy. That's impossible. And so you just keep asking yourself, do you actually feel this way? And if the answer is yes, you put it down on paper and you live with the consequences. And that's why I say there's going to be a lot of legitimate criticism of this book, because you because just because I feel some way doesn't make it correct. If that was the case, I would never learn another thing in my life, right? So, so, you know, there is a part of me that's quite looking forward to how people interpret this book. I'm certainly going to learn something from it.

Traci Thomas 47:20

Is there any legitimate criticism that you, like, foresee already, that you're like, I know this is coming.

Omar El Akkad 47:30

I mean, I would imagine a lot of it would have to do with, okay, you claim to be this non violent person, and you, you know, non violence at all costs, and so on and so forth. How do you suggest the occupied resist their occupation? Certainly in the case of Palestinians, you know, if you if you engage in boycotts, you're engaging in economic terrorism. If you march peacefully, you're shot and maimed and killed. If you try to cut ties with institutions, you're accused of being illiberal. If you resist in any kind of physical way, you're a terrorist. What the hell is left? And so again, I'm sitting here on my high horse talking about non violence at all costs. What fucking right do I have to do that? You know, the argument that I make for non violence in in the book is in large part predicated on what things like James Baldwin on, things that people like James Baldwin have said. You know, James Baldwin once gave the speech, and when she talks about the idea of non violence, and he says they have bigger guns, and a lot of what I talk about in this book is this idea of the the powerful desire to move onto the field of physical violence, because that is where it maintains all advantages, not just in terms of weaponry, and not just in terms of fire, you know, firepower and the ability to cause massive destruction, but also preemptive absolution, in the sense that anything you do is by definition a reaction, you know, the barbarians at the gate do, and then the civilized on the other side of the gate respond. So you have narrative protection as well. And for all of those reasons, purely pragmatic ones, in addition to moral ones, is where my opposition to violence sits. But those are all legitimate criticisms, like, what? What the hell do you expect these people to do? You sit there in the heart of the empire, protected by its machinery of war, and you claim to be non violent. You're not non violent. So I suspect that's coming. Yeah. Also, I'm sure there's lots of things that I haven't thought about that are coming, and we'll see them all soon enough. Yeah.

Traci Thomas 49:39

Okay, this is such a shift. But I ask every author who comes on here, how do you write, how many hours a day, how often music or no snacks and beverages, rituals, anything about your process?

Omar El Akkad 49:53

Yeah, I can tell you, this is a prepare for a really disjointed answer. Great, in part because I. Now have two young kids, so So writing is like, whenever the hell I have time, yeah, you know, that sort of thing. But left to my own devices, the most important part of my writing practice is wasting a good chunk of the day doing nothing for like, you know, until noon or something, sleeping in something like that. I find allows me to move into that mode easier. I will write early afternoon through to the evening. Sometimes it's 1000s of words, sometimes it's very few words, sometimes it's a negative word count. I end up just the leading garbage that I wrote the day before that now appears as garbage. And then I'll edit sort of after midnight. That that's in a perfect world. The kind of music I listen to is almost exclusively either shoegaze or Miles Davis. I will listen very, very different modes of music, but I find that I need something beautiful, but I need something where I either can't make out the words or there are no words, because I find that messes with me a little bit. And then I led I read it the next day, and then I let it go for a while, and I come back to it a little while later with a different brain that is all in an ideal world. The reality is now I will hand write some notes on a post it note between like feeding my kids and stuff and just to get something down on paper. But, um, but the writing practice used to be a lot more disciplined than it than it currently is. What

Traci Thomas 51:33

about snacks and beverages?

Omar El Akkad 51:35

Um, oh, God, if anything is within reaching distance, it is going to be consumed whether I'm hungry or not. It's like, you know, when you go to the doctor and they tap your knee and it kind of reflects on it's very much a reflex reaction if there's something to consume nearby. And so I've gotten to points where, like, I need to make sure that that the fast food from yesterday is not within reaching distance, because I'll just like crusty fries from like, two days. Yeah, I'm not proud of any of this. If there's something consumable, I have to reach for it, so I try to sort of preempt that by having either something healthy or nothing at all.

Traci Thomas 52:13

Okay? And then what's a word that you can never spell correctly on the first try?

Omar El Akkad 52:18

I have gotten to a place where I had to go to Google and type in what was clearly not entrepreneur but, but, like the Microsoft Word was, was just like, I don't know. I'm not sure. I don't even know what you're trying to go. I know the bureaucracy has a bunch of vowels, has maybe all of them in there somewhere, but the order messes me up. But entrepreneur is one that no matter like I've used business person, I have changed the argument that I'm trying to make like I'm gone out, so I don't have to use it. I love it. Okay?

Traci Thomas 52:54

This is, this is an Ontario Canada thing, because I know that you spent time there and I listened to your audiobook. And has anyone else told you that you and Malcolm Gladwell have very similar voices? Not

Omar El Akkad 53:09

a single human being has ever compared me to Malcolm Gladwell along any lines. Wait, this is, this is like our audiobook. Voices are the same? Yes.

Traci Thomas 53:18

So I listened to his latest book, which I didn't like at all, maybe, like a week before I listened to your book, and I put your book on, and I was like, Gosh, he sounds like someone I know. Who does he saw? And eventually I was like, Oh, my God, it's Malcolm Gladwell. And then I looked it up, because you talk about being in Canada, and I looked it up, and you're both from Ontario, Canada, or you both spent time there. You're both actually not from there. You're both from other places, and spent your early childhood and other places, but both lived there for like, your mid, mid childhood, teen, whatever time. And so I'm convinced that there's something about having been elsewhere and coming to Ontario which has made you to have similar speaking voices.

Omar El Akkad 53:58

Oh, my God, I have to go download a Malcolm Gladwell audiobook. Now, I mean, I went into a studio with having my only experience, I did this podcast and and the whole pod, the whole run of the podcast, was the producers being like, Could you put a little bit more like, like, Could, could you sound more awake and more into this, right? And I'm like, Well, I have bad news for you. This is it? No, this is my voice. It worked a lot better for the book, given the Book subject matter. But one of the things I didn't realize is, is how much I half ass the things that the tasks of my daily life, like, you know, I'll go to the gym. My arms get tired. The reps start looking like garbage because I'm cheating my way through them. You cannot do that in a situation where two professional sound engineers are listening to every word that comes out of your mouth and saying, Nope, nope. You breathed right through those letters. Go back. Do it again. Do it again. So it was one of the few tasks in my life where, like you had to, you had to get it right, and if you didn't, you go back again. You. Do it. And in that way, it sort of resembled, resembled writing. But it was, it was difficult. It was a difficult thing to do, and they were very patient with me. Anyway. The key takeaway here is for fans of Malcolm Gladwell, this is exactly the next book you want to pick up. It's right, right up that alley.

Traci Thomas 55:20

The content slightly different, but the voice, the voice is similar. Okay, I just have two more questions for you, for people who read and love one day, everyone will have always been against this. What are some other books you might recommend that are in conversation with your book? I

Omar El Akkad 55:34

don't know if they're in conversation with but I can tell you that they're far better and and get to places that I that I tried to get to and couldn't, both in fiction and non fiction. In terms of fiction, one of the best novels I've read in the last decade is minor detail by a Daniel Shibley, very short book written in two parts, one about a historical atrocity that is based on a real historical atrocity, and one present day about a person trying to figure out what happened back then, short, sharp, with a stunning ending, that book is the first piece of fiction that comes to mind Isabella Hamad recognizing the stranger, which is based on a lecture she gave. Is so clear eyed and so in control when it quite easily couldn't have been like could have been the exact, yes, it's, it's the kind of writing that I aspire to, but absolutely cannot reach. And it's, it's, it's just a beautiful piece of writing.

Traci Thomas 56:37

I hope that she writes a whole book from there I could do. I mean, I loved that. And I was like, Can you, can you do more? This is so fantastic, yeah,

Omar El Akkad 56:48

and I should say that I'm sort of highlighting the non fiction, because obviously it's the most recent, most recent one. But her fiction is brilliant, absolutely, absolutely brilliant. So, so the entirety of her work, I think, is quite spectacular. Those are the first two that come

Traci Thomas 57:06

to mind. Okay? And then my final question for you is, if you could have anyone Dead or Alive read this book? Who would you want it to be?

Omar El Akkad 57:14

It's not the most interesting answer in the world. I don't think, because you don't get to decide

Traci Thomas 57:19

if it's interesting. Yeah, right.

Omar El Akkad 57:23

My father died a few years before I started writing American war, my first novel. He never saw this side of my life. He was never there for that, and so obviously, that's my go to answer for all my work, but especially something like this, he lived with, with a closeness to these issues that is very different from the closeness I have. And so even if it wasn't a sense of, you know, I want my father to see what I have done, I think he would have been such a spectacular editor of this book and critic of this book in terms of what he saw firsthand on every side of this, you know, the question of Israel and Palestine, but also the question of this mixed belonging, and what do you do when you have this uncertain ground underneath your feet? So, you know, I could try to come up with with a perfect answer, more interesting answer, but that is by far the one at the top of the list. No, that's

Traci Thomas 58:20

a perfect answer. Very interesting, very interesting. Approved, everybody. This has been a conversation with Omar Al Codd, and you can find his book one day. Everyone will have always been against this. Wherever your books are sold, as I've mentioned, fans of Malcolm Gladwell, get the audio book. No, it's great. I mean, it's great on the page. It's great on audio. Omar, thank you so much for being here. This was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it, and everyone else. We will see you in the stacks.

All right, y'all that does it for us today. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you again to Omar El Akkad for joining the show. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to Jordan Rodman and Sarah new for helping to make this conversation possible. Remember, our book club pick this month is they were her property by Stephanie e Jones Rogers, which we will discuss on Wednesday, March 26 with pembie Denton. Hearst, if you love the show and you want inside access to it, you've got to head to patreon.com/the stacks andjoin the stacks pack and check out my substack at tracithomas.substack.com. Make sure you're subscribed to the stacks wherever you listen to your podcasts, and if you're listening through Apple podcasts or Spotify, please, please, please leave us a rating and a review for more from the stacks. Follow us on social media @thestackspod on Instagram, threads and Tiktok, and @thestackspod_ on Twitter, and you can check out our website at thestackspodcast.com. This episode of the stacks was edited by Christian Dueñas, with production assistance from Megan Caballero. Our graphic designer is Robin McCreight, and our theme music is from Tagirijus. The Stacks is created and produced by me, Traci Thomas.

Megan Caballero
Previous

Ep. 363 Gender and Genre Are the Same Word with Torrey Peters
Next

Ep. 361 Reading Black Writers Gave Me Heritage with Tembe Denton-Hurst