Rida J > Recent Status Updates

I love James Baldwin and I hate it's becoming 'cliche' to love him and for everyone's favorite novel to be Giovanni's Room (guilty as charged). Don't care! I love him, the way he encapsulates cities and the location the novel is set in. A New York that is the people's, not one fed to the entire world. A New York that is home, a New York of struggle. That's my review so far.

Sobbing on the tube as I finish this. “I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you. He would be somewhere else entirely. He would be different with women, his aspirations for love would be different. And Marianne herself, she would be another person completely. Would she ever have been happy? All these years they’ve been like two plants sharing the same soil growing around one another.”

So easy to read and very relatable. Flows beautifully. Connell and Marianne have reunited after their breakup, the description of being in love, of being reunited with your soulmate, of familiarity with another human being that you allow yourself to be completely vulnerable with, that you have expressed the greatest of intimacy with. Especially heart wrenching in this moment in my life. I miss those moments.

So ready to read and very relatable. Flows beautifully. Connell and Marianne have reunited after their breakup, the description of being in love, of being reunited with your soulmate, of familiarity with another human being that you allow yourself to be completely vulnerable with, that you have expressed the greatest of intimacy with. Especially heart wrenching in this moment in my life. I miss those moments.

Page 11: “Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it. She had that feeling often, but it wasn’t accompanied by any specific images of what the real life might look or feel like. All she knew was that when it started, she wouldn’t need to imagine it anymore.”

Soha writes about her relationship with another detainee at Khiam, Kifah. Soha writes that a large majority of the prisoners were pressured into becoming collaborators, but Kifah was her most beloved and trusted comrade. Kifah was Palestinian from Shatila, who joined the resistance young and bought to Khiam at 18. Soha a communist, Kifah a devout Muslim; united by deep commitment to resistance and love of homeland.

This is as a great autobiography should be; easy to read and delicate with words. Reading through her commitment to resistance and to fight for a new world induces so many emotions of hope and revolutionary optimism. It makes one think of all the power an individual has to change the course of history, and to take it now, to go out and move in rage. It makes me think of all the unwritten-about revolutionaries.

Introduction into the ICP’s internal structure, it’s organizing and mobilization techniques; interesting to note these mobilization tactics were so effective and popular they would soon be adopted by the Free Officers Movement who overthrew the monarchy in 1958, and the anti-communist Ba’ath Party in the 1960s. Unfortunately, not much background on ICP’s founder and most influential leader, Fahad, so far.