Louis Yako > Quotes

“Oh, my friends, the first wish I have for the new year is to change the worn-out greeting: 'happy new year'. There is no happiness, only fleeting moments of joy. There is nothing new under the sun, only new ways of looking at the same eternal challenges and unresolved questions. There is no point in wishing for a perfect health in a profoundly sick world – the view is much clearer and more interesting when living on the edge. And so, I wish you all endurance as we go through another difficult year. I wish you courage to snatch a few more days (or moments) of joy as another year slips through the fingers of Time. I wish you much strength to maintain your equilibrium as we face new earthquakes of uncertainty in the coming year. Most of all, I wish we never give up on the possibility of doing things otherwise. And, of course, I wish you much love.”
― Louis Yako

“It is complicated,’ they say. I am so sick of this response. Many people use it repeatedly to escape depth and confronting reality. They use it to take solace in the fact that they don’t know (or don’t wish to know) the ugly truth of what is happening right in front of their eyes. They reduce crimes, injustice, war, pain, hunger, rape, and everything that must be unpacked, dissected, and confronted to this: ‘It is complicated.’ They say this about COVID-19, too. Oh, how I have grown to hate this response. Every time I hear this statement from someone, it sounds like ‘I am a loser’ to my ears. ‘It is complicated’ is the favorite response of lazy brains that refuse to think and do. Oh, my friends, I insist it is not complicated. If you really want to know, it is not so complicated. However, if you are really looking for reasons and excuses to justify your silence, complicity, and to protect your self-interest, then you are absolutely right – it is complicated!”
― Louis Yako

“This is precisely why the mainstream media’s language has failed us, it has not been telling us what we really need to know, because their language marches in step with that of the bankers, warmongers, oppressors, and executioners. We need a new language of radical love not radical hate.”
― Louis Yako

“The AIDS pandemic forced humans to cover their genitals with condoms. The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing them to put on masks. It is as if many people weren’t already going through life putting on a million masks and changing them based on convenience and self-interest. It is as if countless humans on this planet weren’t already forced to keep their mouths shut and endure the misfortunes imposed on them by the ‘fortunate’ few. I wonder which body part we will be forced to cover next. I wonder if, in the first place, all of this is happening because our eyes were covered all along. Are we heading to a time when staying safe becomes akin to a death sentence with stay of execution?”
― Louis Yako

“Although many of us are struggling against the same oppressive powers worldwide, we are all made to think of each other as enemies rather than allies in this global struggle. We have been separated from each other by the most misleading notion that some of us are citizens of the “First World”, while others are sub-humans from the “Third World”. I dreamed of a time when we all realize that we live in one world not three worlds as politicians and warmongers want us to believe.”
― Louis Yako

“The story always starts in the same way when people ask me the simple, yet most difficult question to answer: “where are you from?” I often wonder why of all questions people start with this one that has become the hardest for me and countless other exiled people to answer. The question is especially hard when asked in crowded and fast-paced places, or during quick encounters which make a short answer inadequate and a long one potentially uncalled for…I thought to myself: why is it that the first thing people want to know about me is where I am from? If they only knew where I am from, they would perhaps know that where I am from—Iraq—happens to also be the deepest wound on the geography of my body and soul, and so they would tread gently on my wound by not asking that question in the first place. Is there something in my eyes, something written on my forehead, something in my looks, or some marks inscribed on my other body parts that immediately tell people that I am from a place that lost itself and lost me to exile on a cold, dark, and sad winter night? Why don’t these strangers just start with the more common and safer usual remarks about the weather being nice, dreadful, or whatever? Of all questions, “where are you from,” is the most delicate and complicated for people who have lost their home and all the things they loved.”
― Louis Yako

“Given the current pace of its corporatization, academia may well become the worst institution for indoctrinating and subjugating many brilliant minds that may otherwise have great potential for dissidence and creating a new worldview, which is much needed amid the global turmoil we are experiencing internationally.”
― Louis Yako

“Yet, if we insist on dividing the world into multiple worlds, and if we consider all the wars, crimes, plundering, and exploitation the so-called ‘first world’ has committed against the worlds ranked lower, then does that really make it ‘first’ in anything? Is a world that commits all these atrocities worthy of being called ‘first’? If we, for the sake of argument, assume that the ‘first’ world is called so because it is more technologically and scientifically advanced, then we must raise another critical question, should humans be measured by their advances in technology, nuclear power, and other destructive weapons, or should they be measured by their level of humanity, mercy, and kindness?”
― Louis Yako

“They say the world will end soon.
They say that the nuclear weapons made,
Due to fearing 'the other',
Has become a curse, a plague, a scourge
On those who made them
Even more than those they were made to scare...
And I wonder:
Will the nuclear weapons be the cause of world’s end?
Or will world’s end be caused by humanity’s fear, complicity, and submission?

And if what they say is true,
Before the world ends and before I die,
I wish to drink one last cup of cardamom-flavored tea
Taste one last fig, peach, or apricot,
Smell a quince,
Dip one last piece of bread
In Palestinian thyme and olive oil…

Before the world ends,
I wish to smell a few pine needles,
To breathe the smell of the first rain shower
After a long, hot, and dry summer…

Before the world ends and before I die,
I wish to read one more book
Out of the thousands of books that I still want to read…

Before the world ends and before I die,
I ask for one more spring
To smell bunches of Iraqi narcissus flowers.
I want to live one more autumn,
To enjoy the magical colors
Of the dying leaves on the trees
As they challenge death with beauty
Right before falling on the grounds of indifference…

But my biggest wish before I die is
For my death not to be the end of the world…

[Original poem published in Arabic on October 13 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“[W]e are the ones to blame for enabling and even nourishing the toxic workplaces. In continuing to cooperate with a profoundly unhealthy and exploitative employment system, we become at once the dagger and the wound. Wounds never heal so long as they continue to cooperate with daggers. In a sense, the cure is in the disease itself. Our silence is the disease. Our serious commitment for change and for exposing power abuses and bullies is the cure.”
― Louis Yako

“Beware of Strangers
As children, they teach us
To beware of strangers,
To refrain from approaching them.

As we grow older we learn
That no one is stranger than those
We thought we’d known all our lives.

As we grow older we learn
That a stranger may carry more empathy,
And may understand us more deeply.
Even feelings of affection from a stranger
May be more sincere.

And so I ask:
can humanity and the strangeness be synonymous?
Could we say:
I am a stranger; therefore I am?

Can we truly feel alive
Without strange things
Strange encounters
without strangers
reminding us that our hearts and minds are still beating?

They teach us to avoid strangers,
And life teaches us
that human awareness can only be borne out
Of the dagger of strangeness…
That life is tasteless
When we don’t mix it with strangers…
That familiarity is opposed to life!
And thus, I loudly declare:
A stranger I was born. A stranger I wish to remain!
And I ask that you issue my death certificate
The day I become familiar.

[Original poem published in Arabic on October 29 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Yet, we must remember that even White privilege is not distributed evenly among Whites. Many White people never get a piece of the pie. This fact, sadly, instead of making them unite with other marginalized and oppressed American employees, it makes them unload their rage and disappointment on the already suffering low-income, refugee, or poor ethnicities, accusing them of ‘stealing our jobs’, or ‘destroying our country and values’. In doing so, they miss the chance of working together with a significant number of allies for real change. Furthermore, they vote for and side with their oppressors thinking that voting for racist and supremacist candidates will change this ugly reality. What they fail to realize is that politics is literally a nasty business that is fed by the masses’ hatred and, once in power, that business never thrives by changing the way the business is done. If all these supposed problems are solved, where will future politicians get their fodder to feed hatred to masses who will bring them to power?”
― Louis Yako

“If it is true that education is the main foundation of any society, it follows that the state of race in today’s America mirrors its education system. Therefore, America’s education needs serious examination and even remaking. It is a system that uses Blacks (and other marginalized people) as mere tokens. You see a meager quota of Black people (as employees or students) here and there to give the false impression of equity.”
― Louis Yako

“Happy New Year? Oh, dear friends, this statement is like a dagger that gets pushed one inch deeper into my chest each time I hear it…Oh, my friends, let’s not celebrate the traditional holidays that no longer mean anything to many of us. Let’s find a new celebration day to celebrate every human life. Let’s do away with all celebrations imposed on us by the oppressive political and religious establishments around the world. Let’s stop killing each other. Let’s stop waging wars against each other. Let’s stop imposing economic sanctions on each other. Let’s stop closing borders in the face of each other. Let’s do away with all the fake, expensive, shiny, and nicely wrapped gifts of indifference. Let’s work a bit harder on the most precious human gift possible—the gift of listening carefully to each other.”
― Louis Yako

“Many treat friendships and other human connections as if they are things they can store in a closet where they can come back one day and find them unaltered. Alas, human connections do not survive with this mentality.”
― Louis Yako

“Our understanding of what is really 'newsworthy' is a misunderstanding.”
― Louis Yako

“We must rethink and change the worn out concept of the “job market” under capitalism, which is designed to dispose of people in a second if deemed unprofitable to the system.”
― Louis Yako

“Here we must ask a critical question: what does it mean when American media outlets deliberately censor and silence anything related to Palestine, the voices of war atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria, while at the same time glorifying the Ukraine war or presumably covering Black Lives Matter or police brutality against black people? Can we believe that such media has good intentions? Can we believe that they really care about Black people, or are they more interested in deepening the divide in the society? I personally find this suspicious and ill intentioned. I believe the purpose here is not to support any Black causes or push for meaningful changes, but rather, exploiting the already existing and strong structural racism and white supremacy weaved into the fabric of the entire society to make people even more alienated from each other. Mistaken are those who think that “divide and conquer” is only practiced in remote places and in so-called “third world” countries. There are many ways to divide and conquer, but we need to have the right critical tools to detect and fight against them, as is the case here.

[From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“With all this hoarding, alarm, deceit, lack of information, plethora of disinformation, ambiguity, and confusion, I wonder whether it is time for us to start drafting a post-coronavirus manifesto? Perhaps it should contain all the things we don’t want the world to become after this pandemic is over. There are many alienating powers out there that thrived on keeping us quarantined, at distance, and distrustful of each other way before COVID-19. There are systems that thrive on our loneliness and fear. There are institutions dedicated to make sure that we don’t help each other so that we turn to them for help… Let’s not allow them to get their way once this pandemic is over! Let’s make sure that we create a world in which such blood suckers are not needed in the first place. Oh, my friends, let’s beware of the ways disaster capitalism is using the pandemic for its benefit.”
― Louis Yako

“It still shocks me to see countless academics who consider themselves intelligent, deep, or critical who constantly post and share articles from places like NYTimes, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and other such sources that, at the surface, appear to be intelligent, objective, and critical even of the power under which they operate (the Western elites), but if you dig deeper, you will discover that they are, one way or another, in perfect harmony with the imperial and colonial agenda of the West against the rest.”
― Louis Yako

“Christmas and New Year should not be a temporary dose of heroine to sedate people and have them consume more goods, go on vacations, or sit with family and friends at the dinner tables of triviality to boast presumed ‘achievements’ or share pathetic stories about ‘changing the world’.”
― Louis Yako

“I propose that we change its abbreviation from ISIL or ISIS into a new name that contains the initial letters of each country or lobby that contributed to its existence.”
― Louis Yako

“After a long journey with wars, moving, and exile, life has grounded me like coffee beans. My mother used to say that 'coffee beans have less value as whole beans.' They must be painfully grounded to become this delicious, stimulating, and awakening drink called 'coffee'.”
― Louis Yako

“Don’t let the politicians bought and sold in the political markets, the chosen “analysts”, the assigned “experts”, the co-opted writers on the Empire’s payroll tell you what is newsworthy. Don’t listen to all those who are more interested in fame, in standing on the podiums of arrogance and sitting to dine at the tables of triviality tell you what is newsworthy.”
― Louis Yako

“This is exactly what it means to be caught in the colonial matrix of power. It is to be constantly suffering from lack of options, and constantly finding oneself in such a position that all the choices available have already been chosen for you. As a result, you are constantly trapped and unable to think or do otherwise. You are consistently deprived of the possibility of working with other possibilities.”
― Louis Yako

“When the mainstream media and the ruling class decide to pick on a critical issue, it is usually for two reasons: first, the issue is serious enough and is affecting their interests, and therefore the narrative must be controlled to ensure that the results are in their favor. Second, in doing the former, the ruling class gets to strictly filter and manage the narrative on what needs to be said about any given topic; which ‘experts’ are given the stage to speak; and whose voices are excluded from debates, or even defamed and slandered, if necessary.”
― Louis Yako

“We both found much more truth in poems than in the rhetoric of those who write to flirt with the power of their time, or those who only speak the 'truth' once the word 'former' becomes attached to their job titles. We both believed that powerful writing is a combination of madness and reason, observation and courage.”
― Louis Yako

“Reem’s life was one of a lost past, a present she rejected, and a future that is up in the air, like a plane traveling between continents.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“Traveling is not only the art of getting lost, but true travelers, in a sense, never return home. If they do return, they never see home the same way they did before leaving. They begin to see the foreignness of home after experiencing being at home in other foreign lands.
Traveling, I have learned, is not all about the touristy and the beautiful places as we see them in tourist guides. Traveling can be frightening in many ways, most important of which is the realization of how much sadness, pain, impoverishment, and despair exist next to, behind, under, over, and above the mountains, the blue lakes, the pristine beaches, the highly rated hotels and restaurants, the well-designed museums and historic and cultural sites, the fancy shops that, in many places, most locals can neither access nor afford. There are places so sad that the fanciest building one can see there is the airport! There are other places where the airports are run down and depressing, but once you step out of the airport, you discover that such places are full of life, meaning, and physical and spiritual nourishment. There are countries, namely the developed countries, where everything looks shiny and perfect, yet as soon as you enter, you encounter so much loneliness, depression, hate, racism, and lifelessness. Things are never as they appear at first glance. Traveling leaves us with more questions than answers – it is so bittersweet."

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“Why are we so afraid of confronting ourselves? Why do we always use the loud noises of the outside world to mute what our inner voice is trying to tell us?”
― Louis Yako