In literal translation, the word means: What God wills. A closer approximation of meaning— of one meaning— is something like: What has happened is what God willed. But English, tasked with a word like this, turns stiff and monophonic, and Mashallah is orchestral.
[She is fog-colored…]
In literal translation, the word means: What God wills. A closer approximation of meaning— of one meaning— is something like: What has happened is what God willed. But English, tasked with a word like this, turns stiff and monophonic, and Mashallah is orchestral.
Chapter One: Departure
To be outside at night required a formal reason, or else one risked harassment by the soldiers who seemed to make a military checkpoint out of every intersection. It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.
My father pulled out his paperwork. Without reading it, the soldier tore it in half and threw it on the floor.我父亲掏出证件。士兵看都不看，撕成两半，扔在地上。 Your papers, he repeated.
looked to the French and the British and thought: This is what winners look like. These are the languages they speak and these are the customs they practice and if our own children are to have any chance at all they must become fluent in these things because anything less than fluency is a sentence to a life of something lesser. It is this impulse, to give your child a fighting chance at privilege by immersing them in the myriad languages of the privileged world, that makes me who I am, that lands me in the American International School at age eight, writing thank- you letters to American soldiers.
It came to me, a long time later, that the Southeast Asian man had done something worse than dent a fancy car’s bumper. He had violated the bounds of his assumed nonexistence. In this place, at this time, people who looked like him were to be invisible. They could perform labor and be paid wages, but as vessels of agency beyond the most necessary transactions, they quite simply did not exist. They were not subhuman, they were nonhuman, non- anything.
(I learned later that the chief government censor during those years was the mother of one of my closest friends— just the sweetest woman.)
Chapter Two: Witness
You go to the movies and Titanic isn’t ninety minutes long and seemingly edited by a prudish maniac.
Finally, we were brought back and taught the undeniable lesson of the exercise: left to their own devices, most human beings are useless at estimating time, distance, or space.
But this story, of beheaded babies, will in the early days of the genocide come to define an essential unburdening. Almost a quarter century earlier, reports of phantom uranium helped garner support for a war that killed upward of a million people. Now, once more, an essential truth of calamity journalism is made clear: In the earliest days, in the chaos that precedes systemic annihilation, it is not what the party deemed most malicious has actually done that matters, but rather what it is believed capable of doing.
So instead, the company approaches a newspaper and pays for a special supplement on the SUV revolution: articles that read like traditional news stories, but would not exist had the advertiser not paid for them. Can management force reporters to take on such assignments, treat them no different than real news? The two sides of the bargaining table had very different opinions on the matter.
At the time, the reporters were livid. Today, after countless rounds of layoffs and the prospect of AI- generated noise coming to replace human- written stories of any kind, it almost seems quaint.
They say what you’re supposed to do, in this line of work, is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I heard that saying a lot, as a young journalist. Believed in it, too. It’s a quote originally from a piece of fiction, spoken by a character who can’t stand the press.
There’s a model of self- perception among some journalists that views the world as a playing field and the reporter as some combination of referee, scorekeeper, and play- by- play announcer. It’s a model that seeks to assign agency while maintaining the veneer of both neutrality and objectivity. If there’s a foul, the referee will call it, regardless of which team is responsible. The announcer will tell you what happened. The scorekeeper will tell you the results. No favor, no bias. One can see the consequences of this kind of model most frequently in political coverage, where the chief concern of so many stories is not the substance of the policy proposal but the way it moves the polls. It’s a bizarre, destructive form of pragmatism— the jettisoning of moral faculties in favor of a near- Machiavellian view of the world.
A deranged Republican talking point presented with at best mild rebuke because there are only two major political parties in America and one of them just happens to be populated with the sort of people who muse about whether wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers.
Chapter Three: Values
Don’t let the Biden administration’s endorsement of mass murder distract from the reality that a Trump administration would be so much worse.
It is not quite accurate to say the Republican Party is more destructive on virtually every domestic and foreign policy issue, because such a statement would imply that the party has any interest in policy as it exists in normal, civil society.
It can’t be both rhetorical urgency and policymaking impotence.
(It’s a fascinating directive, Go back to where you came from. One can’t help but wonder how changed the world would be had the ancestors of the same people who use that phrase now heeded the same advice then. Overwhelmingly, it’s employed against anyone who tries to make use of the freedoms on which the West so prides itself: the freedom to speak and to criticize, to hold power accountable. In this way, it shares a deep bond with the approach to free expression that can be found in most dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, the places so many immigrants fled: You are free to say so long as what you say is acceptable. Whenever I am told to go back to where I came from, I can’t help but think: Why don’t you go where I came from? You’d love it there.)
Chapter Four: Language
In the fall of 2007, at the age of twenty- five, after pestering the foreign editor for months, I’m put on the Afghanistan rotation, my first assignment covering war. It’s a temporary thing, filling in for our regular correspondent. These are the middle days of the NATO invasion, and many Western media outlets still feel the need to have at least a semipermanent presence in the country. I’m ecstatic. It’s impossible to do the work of journalism, or at least serious journalism, and not be forced to make some kind of peace with the reality that you will be, many times over, a tourist in someone else’s misery. You will drop into the lives of people suffering the worst things human beings can do to one another. And no matter how empathetic or sincere or even apologetic for your privilege you may be, when you are done you will exercise the privilege of leaving. Some reporters learn to make peace with it, justify it (How else will the public know what’s happening here? How else will change come about?). My first time out, I ignore it entirely. I’m young: this will be an adventure, a grand adventure.
Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power— the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away. Years ago, when I wrote a novel called American War, I found that one of the most popular uses of that phrase was as a Vietnamese moniker for what in the United States is called the Vietnam War. And what in the United States is now called the Civil War once had dozens and dozens of euphemistic names (of which one of the more memorable is the Late Unpleasantness).
The Bush- and Obama- era practice of labeling just about any man killed by the U.S. military as a terrorist until proven otherwise is one of the most pernicious policies to come of the post- 9/ 11 years, and for good reason. It doubly defiles the dead, first killing then imposing upon them a designation they are no longer around to refute.
Chapter Five: Resistance
To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.
Whatever crimes they may have once been accused of, their mistreatment becomes, eventually, its own kind of self- perpetuating indictment. If they didn’t hate the West before decades of their lives were taken from them, mustn’t they hate it now? What is the statute of limitations on resentment, on rage, on revenge?
It’s the person who in self- image professes to be a rule- breaker, untamable, wild— and in the next breath sides unquestioningly with every facet of state power. I’ve seen the Punisher decal on the bumper, the stylized American flag denoting the thin blue line: I’m an outlaw; also, anyone who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed.
Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them. The man in the action movie looks one way, the man the cops just shot in a traffic stop another.
Chapter Six: Craft
I had heard the same sentiment before, from many members of my family— Egypt’s precarious upper middle class, for whom democracy was a nice abstraction, but the janitor’s son getting all worked up and forgetting his place was very, very real. With a strong, decisive man at the helm, you have stability, I was told time and again— not this chaos where all norms and values go out the window, and who knows what your kids end up thinking or saying or doing. Years later, I’d hear all this again on a different assignment, interviewing Trump voters.
The president delivers a speech venerating the two nations’ shared desire for basic democratic rights. Years later, after I sold the manuscript, one of my editors returned the section to me and suggested it would hit harder if the speech itself were not so transparently insincere, if it seemed the head of this empire had at least some belief in the platitudes he was espousing. I had copied the text, almost word for word, from Barack Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, the one titled “A New Beginning.”
Writing is a precarious profession. We are broke, for the most part. We work jobs we often don’t enjoy to keep the lights on: Faulkner at the post office, Vonnegut and his disastrous car dealership, every writer you know and their faculty gig. The average author doesn’t make enough from their royalties to clear the poverty line. Most books don’t even make back their advance, meaning they earn no royalties for the author at all. When Anna Burns won the Booker Prize, she thanked her food bank. Our work is stolen to train the software of multibillion- dollar artificial intelligence companies run by people who believe art is a problem to be solved.
Chapter Seven: Lesser Evils
It is to say, to the centrist who simply cannot understand why a good upstanding student at Columbia would risk their job prospects to protest some distant unpleasantness: These people making trouble are not like you. If they get their way, things will change and it will not be to your benefit.
It’s an odd thing to watch a variant of this argument take root in the West. There’s immense persuasive power to the notion that the only alternative to mainstream Democratic politics is fascistic Republicanism. Who are Muslim Americans going to turn to? The Arab authoritarians from whom so many of them escaped? China, where Muslims are regularly thrown into concentration camps? Russia, where political opponents are assassinated as a matter of course?
Chapter Eight: Fear
I start to keep a list of frequently asked questions at these events. The year before my novel was published, in an attempt to make friends in Portland, I’d signed up for a stand- up comedy class. Among the instructor’s most practical pieces of advice was to always have a solid five in your back pocket— a well- tested five- minute set of jokes you can always fall back on in a pinch. I begin creating my own solid five— answers to the questions I get most often. You can’t make up a different origin story every time you’re asked to explain why you started writing the novel, so best to polish the real one into something remotely interesting.
Immigrants are supposed to be grateful. The narrative arc of immigration, in which one flees their own failing society to come to a better place, a country that was under no obligation to accept them but did, demands perpetual gratitude. And it exists, this gratitude, but the narrative makes no room for the many shapes it comes in, its many less straightforward forms. I harbor no ill will toward the immigrant who waves the miniature flag on the sides of the Independence Day parade, who says honestly and plainly: I love this country. But nor do I judge the immigrant who is as emotionless and pragmatic about the nation- state as the people who run that nation- state are so regularly emotionless and pragmatic about immigrants, who says honestly and plainly: I don’t love this country, don’t love any country, patriotism being the property of an entirely different kind of life than luck has given me; I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.
I watch discussions on social media in which someone asks: What radicalized you? In response, others will point to various moments of mass violence at the hands of the state, blatant cases of injustice, moments such as this one where it becomes clear there exists a massive gap between the empty statements of the powerful in support of justice and the application of actual justice. But the word “radicalize” feels wrong, seems to imply an element of extremism, as though rage at this kind of blatant hypocrisy is the abnormal thing, when what is plainly abnormal is to accept it.
How does one finish the sentence: “It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…”
Chapter Nine: Leavetaking
and the inconvenient occupied whose land and water might hold resources we implicitly know but cannot explicitly say would be so much better used in service of the civilized world might be human, and if even the natural world and its inhabitants deserve the rights of humans— well, what’s left to feed the machine? What’s left to manufacture convenience?
But it’s one thing to contend with this sort of thing in the abstract, another to sit opposite the cofounder of what was one of the biggest technology companies on the planet and hear him tell you, with a conviction I have never once mustered for any issue or argument, that this new tablet is going to be an absolute sensation because, you see, it has a very slightly raised rubber edge that makes it possible to place it on the table upside down without damaging the screen. I came to see how cults take shape.
I recall the same sensation the day a business magazine I used to freelance for named its CEO of the year: an airline executive whose hallmark achievement was figuring out a way to offload his workers’ pension and health benefits, thereby doing something truly spectacular to the company’s financial fortunes.
Whatever late capitalism is, it seems to be careening into this embrace of growth by negation. Through that prism, it’s hard not to see the advances in something like artificial intelligence less driven by technological breakthroughs as by a society that has, over years, over decades, become normalized to a greater and greater magnitude of both loneliness and theft, such that a sputtering algorithm badly trained on the stolen work of real human beings might be celebrated with a straight face as something approximating humanness. Under this ordering, it is not some corporation’s increasing capacity for better that drives the extractive world, but everyone else’s increasing tolerance for worse.
I know now there are people, some of them once very dear to me, to whom I will never speak again so long as I can help it. It’s the people who said nothing, who knew full well what was happening and said nothing because there was a personal risk to it, a chance of getting yelled at or, God forbid, a chance of professional ramifications. It’s the people who dug deeply into the paramount importance of their own safety, their own convenience. I feel no anger toward these people, not even frustration or disappointment, simply a kind of psychological leavetaking, an unspoken goodbye.
Chapter Ten: Arrival
When the time comes to assign blame, most of those to blame will be long gone. There will always be feigned shock at how bad things really were, how we couldn’t have possibly known. There will be those who say it was all the work of a few bad actors, people who misled the rest of us well- meaning folks. Anything to avoid contending with the possibility that all this killing wasn’t the result of a system abused, but a system functioning exactly as intended.