Summary
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.

Review
A book filled with unapologetic candor and wit that makes you come to terms with your own mentality and beliefs in regards to Palestine. This is a must read.


What I learned

• El-Kurd argues that repeated exposure to images of Palestinian suffering has normalized atrocities that would once have shocked the world. I've learned more about this mentality when I read "Regarding the Pain of Others" by Susan Sontag. I have a lot of thoughts on this subject.

  
  "Are we too aquainted with the horrific? What was once horrifying, what was once a harbinger of doom, now blends into the terrain of boring scarecrow."
  
  

• Something that's discussed in this book as well as a few others on this topic ("One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This"), is the violence of language during this genocide. The headlines we see lack agency. People "die," buildings "collapse," or civilians are "caught in crossfire"instead of explicitly identifying who carried out the violence.
  

• The thesis of this book is incredibly powerful as it argues that Palestinians have to prove their humanity rather than be perceived as humans. They're held to an impossible standard (by design) to be expected to be patient, peaceful, articulate, and morally flawless in the face of genocide. Any perceived imperfection is used to undermine sympathy for their humanity.

"On the contrary, our death is sustenance for the world we live in, necessary to maintain things as they are. Our blood is the price of our colonizers sense of 'security'."

"You need to be polite in your suffering, should you be granted the right to a roof over your head. Crass statements are corrosive to your plight, even when such statements are about those who first steal your home and then loot your tent. The violence inflicted upon our lands and our bodies, we are told, is secondary to the blemishes tarnishing our image, the blemishes that stand between us and justice, it seems. The smears we live to scrub clean."

• Golda Meir is often displayed as a hero or peacemaker. In fact, a library is named after her at my hometown's university. However, her reality was violent and she blamed Palestinains for forcing her to kill their children:

"When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to fogive them for having forced us to kill their sons...This was Golda Meir's vile catchphrase, and it has reverberated ever since. But Golda Meir could have spared our children. No one forced her. She chose to kill our children."

• The Palestinian Authority (which were founded as part of the Oslo Accords in the 90's) functions in collaboration with Israeli counterparts. One example is in the killing of Nizar Banat, a dissident political leader. Protests broke out and the PA beat up and used tear gas on the protestors.

Non-fiction

• "A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay candidly appraises the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up, and makes palpable the impact of European colonization and tourism.

• "My Favorite Plant" edited by Jamaica Kincaid

Kincaid gathers a sparkling selection of new and beloved poetry and prose about each author’s favorite flora.

Short stories

• "Ladies of the Night" by Althea Prince

With women's loves and lives as their focus, the stories contain dramatic twists and some humorous, others shocking and disturbing, all leaving a haunting melody behind.

Fiction

• "My Stories Have No Endings" by Gayle Gonsalves

Kai is a spiritual child who dips her ears into the wind where she hears the voices that tell stories from the forgotten past. Though she grows up in poverty in the Caribbean, her quick mind wins her a scholarship to the island's most prestigious all-girls' school where she's catapulted into a very different world

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Content warning: This post includes information and testimonies about torture, war crimes, and murder.

Summary
Author Hal Gold draws upon a wealth of sources to construct a portrait of the Imperial Japanese Army's most notorious medical unit, giving an overview of its history and detailing its most shocking activities. The book presents the words of former unit members themselves, taken from remarks they made at a traveling Unit 731 exhibition held in Japan in 1994-95. They recount vivid first-hand memories of what it was like to take part in horrific experiments on men, women and children, their motivations and reasons why they chose to speak about their actions all these years later.

Review
It doesn’t feel fair to give this book a rating, but wow. I had no idea about this horrifying piece of history before I read this book. The eyewitness and perpetrator accounts given in this book were some of the most disgusting stories I’ve read from human history (so I wouldn’t recommend this book lightly). However, I do think it’s so imperative that more people learn about the war crimes committed for the sake of “science”.

What I learned
Unit 731 was a secret research facility run by Japan in Manchukuo (now part of China). In this facility, they ran biochemical weapon research by experimenting on humans. It's hard to say the exact human cost due to destruction of evidence, but it's estimated that 200,000-300,000 people were murdered as a part of this program.

• Manchukuo was a puppet state of Japan in China that existed during WWII from 1932-1945. The land was occupied by Japan during its invasion of Manchuria.
  

• Victims were primarily Chinese, but there were also Russian and Korean victims as well. These victims were often civilians and included women and children (even children born within the unit as a result of rape). There were no survivors.

  “The Chinese had a saying about us, that Japan had a ‘three-way complete policy: burned completely, killed completely, and pillaged completely.’ Yet, when we were doing those things, we had no sense of guilt or of doing anything wrong. It was for the emperor-for the country!”
  

• The human experiments conducted on these victims was vast and included infecting prisoners with diseases, live vivisection (invasive surgeries that involved the removing of organs that often didn't invovle anesthesia), amputation, forced frostbite, forced STD infection, and more.

  “Some of the experiments had nothing to do with advancing the capability of germ warfare, or of medicine. There is such a thing as professional curiosity… What medical purpose would be served by performing and studying beheadings? None at all. That was just playing around. Professional people, too, like to play.
  

• As part of the experimentation of biochemical weapons, the unit also conducted experiments on civilians outside the unit by contaminating water supplies, food, and land. This contamination included releasing plague-invested fleas that they harvested and raised, anthrax, and typhoid.
  

• Most individuals invovled in these war crimes were never tried or punished (only 12 were) and it wasn't until 2002 that Japan acknowledged its role in them. This lack of punishment was largely due to the fact that the U.S. found the learnings from the experiments to be valuable, which ultimately led to the immunity for the perpetrators.
  
  
  

Non-fiction

• "Mountains of Fire: The Menace, Meaning, and Magic of Volcanoes" by Clive Oppenheimer

Meeting with volcanoes around the world, a volcanologist interprets their messages for humankind.

• "The White Darkness" by David Grann

In 2008, Worsley set out across Antarctica with two other descendants of Shackleton's crew, battling the freezing, desolate landscape, life-threatening physical exhaustion, and hidden crevasses. Yet when he returned home he felt compelled to go back. On November 13, 2015, at age 55, Worsley bid farewell to his family and embarked on his most perilous quest: to walk across Antarctica alone.

• "Madhouse at the End of the Earth" by Julian Scanton

Drawing on the diaries and journals of the Belgica’s crew and with exclusive access to the ship’s logbook, Sancton brings novelistic flair to a story of human extremes, one so remarkable that even today NASA studies it for research on isolation for future missions to Mars.

Memoir

• "The Last Cold Place: A Field Season Studying Penguins in Antarctica" by Naira de Garcia

Lab Girl meets Why Fish Don’t Exist in this “compelling blend of memoir, environmental writing, and scientific exploration” ( Kirkus Reviews ) from a young scientist studying penguins in Antarctica—a firsthand account of the beauty and brutality of this remote climate, the direct effects of climate change on animals, and the challenges of fieldwork.

• "South" by Ernest Shackleton

The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-1917.

• "Antarctica" by Gabrielle Walker

Drawing on her broad travels across the continent, Walker weaves all the significant threads of life on the vast ice sheet into a multifaceted narrative, illuminating what it really feels like to be there and why it draws so many different kinds of people.

Fiction

• "Chasing the Light" by Jesse Blackadder

A fictional recounting of the little-known true story of the first woman to ever set foot on Antarctica, and her extraordinary fight to get there.

• "The Dark" by Emma Haughton

A&E doctor Kate North has been knocked out of her orbit by a personal tragedy. So when she's offered the opportunity to be an emergency replacement at the UN research station in Antarctica, she jumps at the chance. The previous doctor, Jean-Luc, died in a tragic accident while out on the ice. The move seems an ideal solution for Kate: no one knows about her past; no one is checking up on her. But as total darkness descends for the winter, she begins to suspect that Jean-Luc's death wasn't accidental at all.

• "My Last Continent" by Midge Raymond

Each year, Deb and Keller play tour guide to the passengers on the small expedition ship that ferries them to their research station. But this year, when Keller fails to appear on board, Deb begins to reconsider their complicated past and the uncertainty of any future they might share.

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I have been meaning to read "Orientalism" by Edward W. Said for years now and I finally picked it up a few months ago. Yes, it took me a few months to get through. This book is a dense piece of academia, but it's so foundational when understanding the narratives that the western world abscribes to the east.

Summary

In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.

What I learned

• "What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understnding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that 'we' might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow."
  
  History, culture, and collective memory cannot be discarded just because they are inconvenient to colonialism and its leaders. This is still especialy relevant today as leaders continue to frame domination as a "fight for democracy" or a "new start" while ignoring the people whose histories and identities are already deeply rooted in the place that they want to occupy.
  

• "It does not occur to Balfour, however, to let the Egyptian speak for himself, since presumably any Egyptian who would speak out is more likely to be 'the agitator [who] wishes to raise difficulties' than the good native who overlooks the 'difficulties' of foreign domination."
  
  The former prime minister of Britian and one of the figures behind the Balfour Declaration which supported a "national home for Jewish people" in Palestine in 1917 assumes authority to define Egypt and Egyptians without ever considering their own perspectives. Unsurising that Balfour did the same to Palestinians.
  

• "Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very relity they appear to describe."
  
  Descriptions of other cultures are never neutral. In fact when they're repeated enough, they shape how people see the world and how institutions behave. The "Orient" was not simply discovered through Western writing, it was constructed by it.
  

• "According to Israeli law only a Jew has full civic rights and unqualified immigration privileges; even thought hey are the land's inhabitants, Arabs are given less, more simple rights: they cannot immigrate, and if they seem not to have the same rights, it is because they are 'less developed'. Orientalism governs Israeli policy towards the Arabs throughout, as the recently published Koenig Report amply proves. There are good Arabs (the ones who do as they are told) and bad Arabs (who do not, and are therefore terrorists). Most of all there are those Arabs, who once defeated, and be expected to sit obediently behind an infallibly fortified line, manned by the smallest possible number of men, on the theory that Arabs have had to accept the myth of Israeli superiority and will never dare attack."

  Orientalism isn't just a thing of the past, but still shapes our world today, most notably in Palestine. This is a key example where entire populations can be divided into categories of "good" and "bad" based on their willingness to accept existing power structures.

  

Non-fiction

• "Before We Were Trans" by Kit Heyam

A portion of this book focuses on Angola. Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories.

Fiction

• "A General Theory of Oblivion" by Jose Eduardo Angualusa

On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years.

• "That Hair" by Djaimilia Pereira De Almeida

That Hair is a family album of sorts that touches upon the universal subjects of racism, feminism, colonialism, immigration, identity and memory.

Poetry

• "Broken Halves of a Milky Sun" by Aaiún Nin

A powerful poetry debut exploring the effects of racism, war and colonialism, queer love and desire.

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Non-fiction

• "Algeria is Beautiful Like America" by Olivia Burton

A memoir, graphic novel that explores the rich heritage and tumultuous modern history of Algeria and its connections to Europe and colonialism.

• "The Wretched of the Earth" by Frantz Fanon

A dense, but foundational text that I think everyone should read. It's an eternal touchstone for civil rights, anti-colonialism, psychiatric studies, and Black consciousness movements around the world.

• "Inside the Battle of Algiers" by Zoha Drif

This gripping insider's account chronicles how and why a young woman in 1950s Algiers joined the armed wing of Algeria's national liberation movement to combat her country's French occupiers.

Fiction

• "A Man with No Title" by Xavier Le Clerc

Mohand-Said Ait-Taleb is an enigma. Living in France but ravaged by memories of the war in Algeria, he has withdrawn into his own world, away from his wife and children. When his son Xavier discovers articles by Albert Camus describing the appalling conditions his father grew up in, he starts to piece together the story of his life.

• "This Strange Eventful History" by Claire Messud

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story.

Other

• "The Disappearance of Mr. Nobody" by Ahmed Taibaoui

A man disappears without trace and the detective in search of him finds more than he expected.

• "2084 : The End of the World" by Boualem Sansal

Tells the story of a near future in which religious extremists have established an oppressive caliphate where autonomous thought is forbidden.

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