Jessica

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Jessica.

https://www.goodreads.com/jessicabyrne

The Israeli-Pales...
Rate this book
Clear rating

progress: 
 
  (36%)
Nov 17, 2024 11:09AM

 
Blindness
Jessica is currently reading
bookshelves: currently-reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

progress: 
 
  (38%)
Nov 17, 2024 11:05AM

 
Men Without Women
Jessica is currently reading
bookshelves: currently-reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

progress: 
 
  (25%)
Nov 17, 2024 11:04AM

 
See all 7 books that Jessica is reading…
Loading...
Omar El Akkad
“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?”
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Omar El Akkad
“It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people: they became balls of pale white light. What mattered was, it wasn’t us.”
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Omar El Akkad
“Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate. Any population on whom this asymmetry is imposed will always be the instigators, the cause of what is and, simultaneously, the justification for what will be. The savage outside does, the civilized center must respond. How does one finish the sentence: 'It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but …'
Ignore for a moment that the number is an approximation. Ignore the many more children mutilated, orphaned, left to scream under the rubble. Ignore the construction of the sentence itself, its dark similarities to the language of every abuser—You made me do this. Ignore all of this and think about how you would finish this sentence that has now been uttered in one “tence that has now been uttered in one form or another by so many otherwise deeply empathetic Western liberals. How to finish it and still be able to sleep at night.
Surely, many people have, and their answers might relate to terrorists or revenge or an all-encompassing right to self-defense. But trimmed to its most basic language, every proposed conclusion to that sentence is some variant of the same basic thesis: They would have killed more of ours.
What does unlimited fear cost? What will sate it?”
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Omar El Akkad
“Anyone who has dragged a relative out from under the wreckage of a bombed building, who has held a friend bleeding to death in the street while the officer who pulled the trigger looks on, who has watched their water poisoned, their land burned, their communities starved, is intimately well versed in love. But in the eyes of the empire such a thing can never be called love, because the directive was never in the first place, Love, but rather, Love me. In spite of it all, love me.”
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Omar El Akkad
“In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire. A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously.”
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

year in books
Ellie S...
126 books | 46 friends

Molly P...
120 books | 54 friends

Nicollette
168 books | 218 friends

Pauline...
1,842 books | 49 friends

Promila
351 books | 44 friends

Laura D...
419 books | 54 friends

Kira Ma...
411 books | 42 friends

Hina Chiu
22 books | 22 friends

More friends…



Polls voted on by Jessica

Lists liked by Jessica