Quirky Tense Employed to Tell a Heartrending Story
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Egyptian Canadian journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad, was selected for discussion in the Ink Book Club earlier this summer.
A title that begins like a story (One Day…) contains a promise about the narrative to come. The comma, with its implied pause, suggests that this will be a complex book and I ought to pick it up and expect to spend some time trying to come to terms with it. And how could I not find irresistible the use of the future perfect tense, “will have been…?”
Right when I should have been immersing myself in this memoir, my little grandchildren came to visit. With an almost-4-year-old and a 2-year-old in my orbit, I couldn’t find time to read anything beyond board books and picture books. In truth, I couldn’t find time to think a plausible thought to completion. I also missed the book club discussion. So I’m using this post to unpack my thoughts about Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
The first few pages made me feel as if I were on a path from far to near, not yet in the “One Day.” An epigraph from Wislawa Szymborska’s “Vietnam” is followed by an anecdote of a girl of nine or ten being whisked away on a stretcher. Soon we’re privy to a soldier speaking of what happens when a bomb goes off, then it’s back to the girl on the stretcher, and then a reflection on Arabic phrases that sound like poetry even while defying translation. All of this in italics, the font made to lean forward, showing me many linked pathways, terribly inextricable from one another.
The first chapter, titled “Departure,” lands me in many possible One Days. The author’s daughter “turns seven soon, a hundred in dragon years. She is made of dreaming.” The titular One Day could possibly be the day, timestamped “Portland: 2024,” when she builds a city in the hallway of their home. It’s an intimate, loving scene. Making the writer vulnerable, it invites the reader in.
El Akkad’s immigrant journey left me reflecting on my own—on the changes in technology when I left India in the late 70s, and had to shout over an operator-assisted call if I wanted to talk to my parents. I wasn’t forced out of my country, but I can still feel the complicated relationship he writes about, of the Western world to immigrants and in particular Black and brown ones:
In the hierarchy of migration, “expat” is largely reserved for white Westerners who leave their homes for another country, usually because the money’s better there. When other people do this, they might be deemed “aliens” or “illegals” or at best “economic migrants.”
The “One Day” could also, of course, be the day that Omar’s father was accosted by soldiers in their native Egypt, who tore his papers, threw them on the floor and then said, ”Your papers.” He writes:
It has been…the memory that anchors my overarching view of political malice; an ephemeral relationship with both law and principle. Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.
Or it could be the day in Doha the winter young Omar turns sixteen, driving around with a friend who has recently obtained his driver’s license. They witness an accident. A South Asian man rams a local’s car and the local man, driving a Mercedes, takes off his sandal and beats the offender on the spot:
I return to the memory of that moment often, the way we watched and laughed, didn’t think for a second to stop, to interfere, as the man in the Mercedes assaulted someone whose existence he had been so rudely forced to acknowledge. It’s come to shape the way I think about every country, every community: Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?
The writer’s willingness to hold a mirror up to his own life and actions makes of these many “One Days” a mirror held up to the reader. The prose is beautiful and sharp. A summary of the violent Hamas attack on Israelis on October 7, 2023 and the brutal Israeli response to them, raises the matter of starting points in history for such sequences of killing:
When next this happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child), this same framing can always be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.
El Akkad comes to the West as a young immigrant believing in a promise of freedom and justice for all. But a career of reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and the violence in Gaza leads him to question that promise altogether. His disillusionment with the West includes a disenchantment with his own profession. He experiences the ordinary indignities of life as a member of a visible ethnic minority group. He encounters the fascinating insulting directive, Go back to where you came from, uttered without irony by people whose forebears might well have arrived on this continent with no papers.
After 9/11 he sees the impermissible become permissible:
When those dying are deemed human enough to warrant discussion, discussion must be had. When they’re deemed nonhuman, discussion becomes offensive, an affront to civility.
This book is the story of a painful personal evolution, as much as it is a call to liberal America to pay attention. Whenever something unjust or illiberal happens in the United States, or with its assent, or at its behest, the outrage is often framed in a particular way—this behavior was horrible but it was un-American. This isn’t us, people say.
But what if that is simply untrue? Under the previous administration, America gave Israel carte blanche to punish a whole people for a crime that was surely not committed by all the inhabitants of Gaza. Under the current administration, America is openly and flagrantly narrowing the window of who should be considered American, and discarding even the pretence of freedom and justice for all. That makes this breakup letter with the West, painful as it is, even more necessary reading.
And what of the other countries in the Middle East? Here too, the context is power:
For the gaggle of authoritarians who run most of the Arab world, there is nothing to be gained from meaningfully assisting a population so well versed in resisting oppression, lest that capacity for resistance prove contagious.
And yet, for all the worldweariness of this narrative, the arresting tense of the title reaches into the text in an oddly hopeful gesture:
When the past is past, the dead will be found to not have partaken in their own killing….The babies will not have chosen starvation.
I will remember this book for its choices of words and idioms to serve the story, the careful rhyming of themes and ideas, and yes, for that long shadow cast by using future perfect tense in the title. Here is a writer tending to his story with care, with all the fierceness of a gardener in a drought-stricken landscape, refusing to stop, even when he doubts the capacity of the seeds he’s sowing. I will remember it as well for the question he asks writers:
What is this work we do? What are we good for?
He makes us question what it is we want. When you ask a hungry child what she wants, he says, the answer is unhesitating: Bread. If you write for children, no matter where you stand on this particular topic of Palestine and Israel and the long timeline of failures to achieve peace or justice or whatever you choose to call it, you surely know this to be true:
…it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children.
