Horizon

“Israel’s bombing of Gaza altered the clock. As if time had been wounded, it now moved in a crawl, its daily passage impeded by the rubble that carpeted the terrain, its presence so thick that Hajje Nazmiyeh felt the sun dragging along the heavy weight of each hour. So much needed to be done, yet there was nothing to do. People gathered with nothing to say. Even when they spoke, their words were coated in a silence that stared into a chasm as they picked out and buried their dead. Even rage and calls for revenge seemed perfunctory. Tears made for a sort of refuge. A place to go to feel something in a wreckage that demanded numbness. For many, it was simply a waiting to die. Hope seemed vulgar in this hour, and the idea of death was so comforting and alluring that no one spoke, lest words do away with the seduction of a quiet ending.”
― Susan Abulhawa, The Blue Between Sky and Water

“If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands—not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views—the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the oppressed themselves.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message