My year in books — 23 degrees
I don’t read books the same year they come out. Well, sometimes you just can’t afford books when you can’t find them online, let’s be honest. This year, I bought a lot of books (that I haven’t read yet!) and I also tried to read some books I already had on my bookshelf, which I must have bought some years before. Sometimes, you get a book, but only to realise that you are either not ready for it yet or vice versa. You meet the book at a time when you need a pause, but you want it near you, so you get it. However, you put it aside so that it keeps you company while you gather yourself to make sense of it before you open it. These are the books that I enjoyed thinking with during these past months (in no specific order!) with some of my favourite quotes from each!
To each book its season!
I would also like to mention that I find it very hard to read a hundred or so book a year. I’ve been recently inclined to read what I like, and finding a hundred book that I enjoy has become a challenge. This is to say that I picked up a handful, but finished a few, and contrary to before, I no longer regret it! By opening my mind and heart to the stories in each one of these books, I have found things I didn’t know I was looking for, and I am grateful.
Joan Didion — The Year of Magical Thinking
I think someone had mentioned that I reminded them of Joan, I couldn’t understand why. The book brought me closer to her! It is an extremely raw account of Joan’s experience of loss. She traces her grief, recalls the chaos and silence in which death came dressed in, how mourning enveloped the fabrics of her daily life after the death of her husband John and the illness of her daughter Quintana.
“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”
“I used to tell John my dreams not to understand them but to get rid of them, clear my mind for a day”
Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke
I spent my summer under the sun dreaming with Rilke! Two friends mentioned it to me one day apart. It must have been a sign! Rilke extends his wisdom to a young poet who writes him every now and then.
“Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowledge. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; what is bad is that most people misuse this learning and squander it and apply it as a stimulant on the tired places of their lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering themselves for their highest moments.”
“Don’t think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you much pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.”
A Dying Colonialism — Frantz Fanon
There is a lot to be said. I’ll be brief. On Algerian resistance. Kin ties, the doing and undoing of culture. of A must read!
“There is not occupation of territory on the one hand and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.”
Americanah — Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie
Yes, yes finally! I bought the book from the bookstore in the picture above back in 2017, and I just couldn’t get hold of what it was saying saying because I was suffering from a cognitive deficit (which shows up every now and then, it sucks). This summer I glanced at it, and picked it up again. It’s roughly 600 pages, very fluid once you start it. It is about Ifemelu and Obinze. Between Lagos, Princeton and London. In the search for the nuances of being, cultural relativism, and about the irony of time, ticking clocks, and unmarked gazes. Chimamanda is good. She is great. She is brilliant at articulating what many have us haven’t been able to voice, the trapped intuitive self that oscillates between half semi colons and full stops.
“How was it possible to miss something you no longer wanted?”
“There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing.”
Chewing Gum — Mansour Bushnaf
I guess I was attracted to this book by the mere fact that it was written by a Libyan author, Mansour Bushnaf — who happened to be incarcerated for ten years for his political activism under Gaddafi’s regime. Before that I had never been exposed to Libyan prose per se.
I was able to rediscover Tripoli, and sense how life unfolded itself for the main characters: Mukhtar, Fatma, Rahma, and Omar. Written in a refreshing style, the book is heavily metaphorical, flow-y and reflects the writing style of a play wright. Each chapter provides an extensive description on each of the characters. The chapter containing the plot (i.e.what actually happens) is made of a half a page, ending with “This is the story, everything else is peripheral.” By accentuating on what is peripheral to a love story that did not turn out well, Mansour squeezed in stories of the interplay of time, sites of remembrance, archeological artefacts and symbols. It is his account on the making of a post-modern society, chewed daily on Libyan streets.
“Time is the enemy of one’s first love. The war between time and love erupted at creation and seems likely to continue until the end. Love tries to stop the flow of time while the flood of time seeks to break down the fragile dams of love, held up, above all, by art.”
On Identity — Amine Maalouf
Amine Maalouf is one of my favorite writers. On Identity is non-fiction and looks at the multiple dimensions of identities, in which Maalouf argues strongly for the urgency not to consider identity as a singular variable. He questions violence, and what pushes individuals to commit violence in the name of identity, why is belonging so important? How can we rethink the ways in which we conceptualise identities? In brief, identities can not be compartmentalised. Identities do not have defined boundaries and cannot be split into pieces. Identities are made of several elements in constant negotiation within one’s mind and with the external world, and never apart.
“Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbours them with difficult choices”.
“No doubt I speak like a migrant and a member of a minority. But I think what I say reflects the sensibility that is more and more widely shared by out contemporaries. Isn’t a characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant a member of a minority? We all have to live in a universe bearing little resemblance to the place where we were born: we must learn other languages, other modes of speech, other codes; and we all have the feeling that our own identity, as we have conceived it since we were children is threatened”
“You could read a dozen large tomes on the history of Islam from its very beginnings and you still wouldn’t understand what is going on in Algeria. But read 30 pages on colonialism and decolonisation and then you’ll understand quite a lot.”
*The original French title of this book is “Les identités meurtrières.”
Our Women on the Ground: Arab Women reporting from the Arab World — Edited by Zahra Hankir
** This book was published this year, and it is the only exception to the rule I mentioned above.
My passion for autobiographies found in this book a remarquable and honest realm occupied by talented storytellers, who speak my native tongue, Arabic, with whom I can relate.
This collection of essays written by Arab women reporters reflects an abundance of courage. Because it does take an incredible amount of courage to leave the comfort of telling the stories of others to tell one’s stories of migritude, exile, remembrances, resilience, grief, language, transitions, countless challenges and complex adversities, the untold fabrics of the everyday. Finding this book felt like stumbling upon a new territory of belonging, and creating invisible yet symbolic kinship ties with each of the narrators.
Every sentence in this book is worth being quoted. And I happen not to have a specific “preferred” quote.
Natives : Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire — Akala
Akala tells the silenced history of the British empire through a retrospective gaze that examines his childhood and early teenage years growing up in Camden, in North West London. Having had the chance to hear him speak both live and on youtube (really, check him out if you haven’t already!), Akala has a straightforward way of saying things, and so does his writing. It’s brutally honest, full of imageries. He breaks down theories and undoes the complex language of political theory to bring it closer to the people to whom it matters. He unveils the dresses which imperialism wore/wears, and how it repeatedly fabricates repressive and oppressive performances of what is deemed “political”. Give it a go!
“Out there in the colonies, whiteness implies aristocracy, whiteness is aspirational, and as the only white people my grandparents knew of in Jamaica were the ruling class, this association was entirely rational. My uncle could not contain his shock when “me come a English and cyan believe say white man sweep the street”; the illusion was ruined the moment his four year self foot off the boat in the 1950s and saw poor white people.”
“The boundaries were ‘race’ ends and class, geopolitics or ethnic, national and regional conflicts begin are of course blurred. There are literally billions of people alive today who’ve had far more extreme experiences of poverty, brutal law enforcement and exploitation than I have simply because of of where they were born. So while I critique imperialism, I also acknowledge the contradiction of my own ‘Western’ privileges, brought about in part — ironically- by my proximity to whiteness.”
