"This morning I saw two videos, he said. One was of an ICE agent. The woman was on the asphalt, zip-tied. He came over and zapped her, and then carried her like garbage and threw her in the back of the SUV. The second video, he continued, showed a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon that was bombed and 12 people died. And I kept thinking: they make a desolation and call it a ceasefire. Sometimes, as writers, we have to say: enough."
"It's very difficult to think in celebratory terms about a book that was written in response to a genocide, said Omar El Akkad, who won the nonfiction prize for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The Egyptian-Canadian author's book is a treatise on the western response to Israel's war on Gaza. It's difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child's body, he said. When I know my tax money is doing this, and that many of my elected representatives happily support it."
Rabih Alameddine won the National Book Award for Fiction for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), a darkly comic saga spanning six decades of a Lebanese family. The novel follows a gay 63-year-old philosophy teacher confronting his past, his mother and his homeland amid Lebanon’s civil war and economic collapse. Alameddine thanked his psychiatrist, gastrointestinal doctors and drug dealers, and recounted two videos: an ICE agent zip-tying and zapping a woman; and a bombed Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon where 12 people died. Other winners used remarks to foreground literature’s role amid global tragedies, and Omar El Akkad won the nonfiction prize for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, described as a treatise on western responses to Israel’s war on Gaza.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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