“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.”
El Akkad was one of three winners recognized by the first time by the National book award.
El Akkad’s most compelling argument takes aim at “a fiction of moral convenience”, as he calls it: “While the terrible thing is happening – while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed – any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilisation.” Later the children of the aggressors, with all that stolen wealth and privilege firmly in their hands, hungry now for cultural capital, can celebrate the old resistance and claim outrage and solidarity in hindsight. At the time they say: “Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned … screaming from under the rubble … is barbarism.”
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction.
