Razan > Recent Status Updates

“Though the poet might say: If I’d been another
I would become only me again”

“He said: you’re a prisoner, prisoner of yourself and to nostalgia!”

“there is something of life in death”

“I found my presence filling in absence
and whenever I searched for myself I found others
and whenever I searched for them I found only myself the stranger
Am I a crowd of one?”

“Writing was the way Proust painted.”

“The colonialist bourgeoisie is helped in its work of calming down the natives…”

“The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native's mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought. Now the native who has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for freedom will discover the falseness of this theory.”

“All those white men, fingering their guns, can't be wrong. I am guilty. I don't know what of, but I know I'm a wretch.” nod to The Wretched of the Earth

“But when you take it into your head to express existence, you will very likely encounter nothing but the nonexistent.”

“‘When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention; he is talking about you.’ And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and soul for the fate reserved for my brother.”

“I wanted quite simply to be a man among men.”

“Is there in fact any difference between one racism and another? Don't we encounter the same downfall, the same failure of man?”

“Yes, European civilization and its agents of the highest caliber are responsible for colonial racism."

“When another desperately tries to prove to me that the black man is as intelligent as any white man, my response is that neither did intelligence save anybody, for if equality among men is proclaimed in the name of intelligence and philosophy, it is also true that these concepts have been used to justily the extermination of man.“

“I never could have explained to you my awareness that I was born to witness the extinction of my people.”

“I wondered if the Islam that foreigners practiced could be kinder than ours. Because of their more liberated mentality…”

“I know from experience that I have to wear neutral tones and downplay my femininity if I want to be taken seriously. If I show up wearing lipstick and a pretty dress, how could I possibly claim to be a penniless refugee fleeing certain death?”

“I know from experience that I have to wear neutral tones and downplay my femininity if 1 want to be taken seriously. If 1 show up wearing lipstick and a pretty dress, how could I possibly claim to be a penniless refugee fleeing certain death?”

On refugees: “We are different races and different colors but have all come here for the same reason. We all have the same basic desire. To stay alive.”

“Ghassan Kanafani paid great attention to the great Revolution of 1936-1939… because he recognized that it was the defeat of that revolution that paved the way for the occurrence of the Palestinian Nakba in 1948.”

“the trinity of enemies - Zionist colonization, the British Mandate, and Arab reactionary forces locally [feudal landowners] and regionally [Arab regimes]“

“a colonizer who cannot accept the humanity of the colonized, because, like the clarity of a polished mirror, it forces him to confront his own inhumanity.” - foreword

“[the 1967 war] also created a new mechanism for imperialist invasion and aggression in the region, marking the first time a United Nations (UN) member state would justify initiating military conflict using the threat of anticipated attack; a tactic indispensable to the imperialist playbook in the region still today.”

“The woman who takes her place in the world without permission is a dangerous thing.”

“Who spectacled us? Why did we watch?”

“But who will hold you in the middle of a civil war? Nobody told you the cost of entering was losing your way back.”

“she always says that we should stop holding our breath for justice | she says enjoy the little justices instead”

“What is the narrative if not the blood it carries? What are you if not the trauma you inherit?”

“Bourgeois Democracy is not enough, but it is very much better than Fascism, and to work against it is to saw off the branch you are sitting on.”

“The Palestinian question has intentionally been robbed of origins, of roots, rendering us unable to make sense of history.”

“My whole life has been strange, and a strange life can only end strangely.”