On Feb. 27, Elliott Bay Book Company and the Seattle Public Library Foundation hosted Egyptian Canadian writer Omar El Akkad in conversation with treasured Seattle author and speaker Ijeoma Oluo at the Central Library. They discussed El Akkad's new release, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The slim nonfiction volume confronts how the American empire acts in defiance to its purported values and promises of freedom in the midst of the ongoing war on terror, police brutality against Black people, and ironclad investment in Israel's decades-long genocide against Palestinians, with a focus on the intensified Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip after Hamas' Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a reckoning for its author and its readers. It pulls no punches, offers no answers, but asks, "Who are you in relation to [the Western] empire?" The small but eviscerating book takes its title from a social media post El Akkad wrote in October 2023 regarding the Israeli genocide of Palestinians: "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."
El Akkad, with his nervous, self-deprecating humor, admitted he is most comfortable speaking in anecdotes; it is how he began his event and how he answered nearly all of Oluo's questions. He read aloud the book's prologue, a story he said took two months to write and differs greatly from the rest of the book. It's an arresting account of a Palestinian child being rescued from the ruins of a building that has been bombed by Israel. The once-buried girl is not sure whether or not she is still alive. Her conversation in Arabic with a paramedic reflects the importance of language and its power to both obscure and inspire truth.
El Akkad described his process of drafting the book as "addressing my own cowardice as a Westerner." As an Egyptian Arab who grew up in Qatar, emigrated to Canada in his teens, and now lives in the Pacific Northwest, El Akkad used his book as an unlearning process, an interrogation of his belief in the "American dream." He and Oluo discussed the opaqueness of the American empire — which usually takes the form of "benevolent" military intervention in the "global south," the world's least industrialized or developed countries, to extract natural resources and labor — compared to the British empire, which explicitly aims to "civilize" the "savage," El Akkad said.
El Akkad traced his first experience of the American empire growing up in Qatar, where he went to an international school close to an American military base where many people he knew worked, and extended the connection to Lebanon, where the U.S. is now constructing one of its largest military bases. He begged the audience to question American expansion.
El Akkad and Oluo's conversation was infused with plenty of critical intellectual and political considerations for this moment, namely how a colonial empire creates what El Akkad calls "an asymmetry of obligation" when it comes to standing against injustice. Resistance requires any number of risky acts and their consequences, from losing your job and being maligned by your community to being permanently silenced by assassination, whereas participation in an empire requires only that we look away from what the government does in our name. Usually, we will still be granted the basic comfort of acceptance and all the things we "work for." He notes pacifist language as a response to state-sponsored violence and erasure: "It doesn't mean much when you're on the launching side of the missile."
The author argued that One Day's intention is less an indictment of the West and more an attempt to incite uncertainty and discomfort in its readers; feelings that are necessary to arrive at a radicalized future because white supremacy depends on a collective, complicit terror of the unknown structures we will be able to create in the wake of imperialism's destruction.
Answering a question from the audience, El Akkad and Oluo spoke on what they see as the critical role of writers and journalists, and how Western media contributes to our current age of misinformation. He asserted that the current model of journalism assumes everyone is operating in good faith and that public opinion should meet somewhere between two extremes. Because that isn't the case, "the journalist has to be allowed to say to the person they're interviewing, 'Hey, that's bullshit'" when they know what the person says is wrong.
Oluo recalled a recent experience at the Jaipur Literature Festival, where, while on a panel of writers, she was confronted by what she calls a "cherished ignorance" in America that is enabled by news media. An audience member had asked, "What are Americans doing?" in response to the Trump–Vance administration's intensifying oligarchy. Oluo considered the average American's lack of political engagement with what the federal government does on their behalf, quoting a statistic that says half of U.S. adults get their news from social media, and further, that most American news sources are owned by just a couple of big corporations that cater to certain demographics. She compared these statistics to the 80-some percent of Indians who, Oluo said, reportedly get their news from over 100 different sources.
The discussion ended with a searing message from El Akkad: "The writer's job is to say something about what it means to be human. Don't quote [James] Baldwin at me when you keep your head down until it's time to write that beautiful story. If you wait until you won't be hated for [writing about] it, you aren't doing the real work of writing."
El Akkad seems to believe his book will be a mere drop in the grander ocean of literature about the lack of meaningful intervention into the U.S.'s destruction in the Middle East, but what if his textual reckoning leads someone to lend their voice to the chorus against injustice? Every drop of water counts in a drought.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is available to purchase from Elliott Bay Book Company.
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