Hoda’s Reviews > Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal > Status Update

I hang from the morning’s gallows
and my forehead is lowered by death
because alive, I did not lower it.

- Amal Dunqul

“It is for good reason that we shed our skin to assimilate into the world that invisibilizes us: after acquiring respectability and protection, we will finally wear our real faces…we quickly learn that the inside is already rotten, we too run the risk of decay...we look deep in our closets for the skin we once wore, we find it shrivelled and discolored, foreign to us as we are foreign to it.”

Poetry.

“The israeli president sat in front of a menorah when he showed the BBC "something exclusive" his infantry had found "in a children's living room" in northern Gaza: a copy of Mein Kampf. And in Arabic, no less. It was proof of "the real war" Isaac Herzog and his colonymen are waging, a war not against children but against their reprehensible taste in literature.” Had to stop myself from laughing OUT LOUD 🤣

Love how he calls out using “human” as an adjective & how it’s used to describe superhuman features. Do we all go around forgiving killers? rapists? oppressors? This is why I love Buffalo Hunter Hunter bc it explores the HUMAN emotion of anger in indigenous communities. It does not shy away from being vengeful & brutal bc victims don’t have to be defenceless peaceful lil princesses to maintain victimhood.

Man oh man. I don’t even know why I feel like the ideas in this book are so new & profound to me when it feels so fucking obvious. That’s how deep the propaganda goes that my instinct is to argue that the child with the mein kampf doesn’t hate jews when it’s like since when did we use that as a justification for killing a fucking CHILD?? The standard is so not human.

Damn this guy’s way of writing is so good. I never thought about how humanization has a certain restrictive criteria. Humanization although sounds important only is given to the perfect victims. People can no longer be people, be flawed & be cruel. Their death is justified when a crime is committed, regardless whether death fits the crime.

The writing is already super poetic and I’m not even done the first chapter. I love the human perspective, rather than what we overwhelmingly see, the law & human rights argument—which isn’t & very much shouldn’t be our only measurement of morality.