Doreen > Recent Status Updates

Excruciating but well-written and researched account of the troubles during its height of violence in the 70s and its aftermath based on one family’s suffering.

I have a story to tell about the genocide: how it destroyed all the worlds we knew inside the Gaza Strip; how by managing our lives we built temporary lives while the genocide continued; and how we will always choose life and hope for the end of the war and the return of life. ——Mahmoud Alshaer

Scarily on point.

I get the accolades for this book.

Suitable October read.

Even his mother’s “just a couple of days” and “we will be back” reminded him of his ancestors’ dreams that never came true. —Haida al-Ghazali

In Gaza, we adore going for walks….I sing with the breeze in the street, as my hair flutters….The war defies me and paralyses me. All the streets have been razed, all the places have been swallowed by the earth….

Endless murmurs and thoughts circled in my head about dying faces in living bodies that moved amid shattered scenes of devastation. These are the faces of Gaza. —Mohammad Al-Zaqzooq

To think of eating became a crime, a transgression for which children, women, and even the defeated elderly paid the toll.

In the daytime we run after a whole set of problems that begin with water and end with a piece of bread dipped in exhaustion. —Doha Kahlout

And so at the beginning I learnt this: the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything.

A lot of weaving of memory, biography, rich description and history. Feel a bit lost but in a good way.

Read it and weep for the people of Palestine. The novel’s brevity doesn’t belie the depth of despair, the horror or the foreboding details that builds to a bleak but not all together unpredictable ending given the bloodlust that pervades a hyper nationalist occupying force hellbent on destroying any visible remnant of the culture or people that preceded it.

Everything read so far covering decades of exclusion, massacres, landgrabs, and Israel and the US setting all the terms of any negotiations with little input from Palestinians has led to this genocidal moment the world is now witnessing. Again it is Israel calling the shots, now under the ruse of But Hamas!!! rhetoric. I will continue to be disgusted and enraged by US support of the menace state called Israel.

The second declaration of war covers the nakba and the consolidation of Israel as a nation-state mainly through its support by the US and the Soviet Union and its settler-colonizing tactics of ethnic cleansing still used today. Khalidi shows in great detail how Palestinian leadership and the Arab world were totally unprepared for Zionism as such a formidable colonizing power even after decades of British rule.

Already Khalidi has shown how Palestinians—despite all attempts by Zionists and British rule to not recognize them as a people intimately tied to what is now Israel— led to a nascent national identity and a fight for self-determination. (this latter point about there not being a Palestine and thus no Palestinians living in what would become by fiat Israel is a frequent hasbara talking point.)

The language of pain allows those who suffer, those who acknowledge their suffering and share it with others, to articulate an inexpressible experience as an inherent criticism against the sources that made it possible in the first place.

A product of the inequalities and hierarchies of an economic system based on dispossession and extraction, the narco has strategically and successfully worked for decades to validate itself as an essential entity in our everyday lives.

“It’s only now that I’ve lived a lot, listened a lot, experienced a lot and witnessed a lot—esp in my relationships and interactions with Black women—that this book became achievable.”

First essay ended with two of the best sentences I’ve ever read that ended an essay. Essay two a series of vignettes related to his home county, Wexford, his family, especially his mother’s autodidacticism, houses he remembers and his own memories growing up ended with a stunning homage to the Irish Sea and its chimerical light.

The Americans showed up at the wadi and it’s all going to go to shit.

The Americans showed up to the wadi and things are going to go to shit.

Crows carry a lot of representational, mythical, and allegorical baggage, good and bad, over the ages and across the globe.

RIP Stephen Cohen. Everything he's written in this book has come to pass and couldn't be more relevant to the current Russian/UKR crisis. Excellent background to the conflict and the US role in pursuing its own agenda.

Nearly done. Hard to read as the layers of corporate greed and local government acquiescence are deep and disturbing. The poor are fucked and the developers endlessly excavate and re-envision urban space as neat and tidy and so very residential. There’s no end in sight! Even Queens gets fucked…