nowhere left to go

If anything positive can be said to have come out of the horror of the last couple of years, it’s that the West’s inability to reconcile its liberal fantasies about itself with the exigencies of maintaining a settler-colonial empire has been laid bare with shocking clarity and detail, and it’s led a great many people to shed the last of their faith in the whole busted structure. Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is probably the most eloquent expression I’ve yet seen of this impulse. It’s a fluid assemblage of visceral memoir, media and discourse critique, and reflections on a decade of reporting on issues related to race and terrorism for the Globe and Mail, and it chronicles his disenchantment with the empty promises of Western democracy and pained sense of betrayal at perhaps having once tried to believe in them.

So much mainstream writing about Palestine ties itself in knots restating the most elementary arguments, endlessly debating fundamental points of fact and human decency with fictitious devil’s advocates, and what’s refreshing about this book is that it has enough respect for the reader to assume that they’ve also been watching the news in possession of both brain and conscience. It doesn’t waste any time arguing about whether or not it’s a genocide, whether or not Israel is an apartheid state, whether or not the entire Euro-American political class is complicit. He gets right to indicting Western power’s “ephemeral relationship with both law and principle” as a fundamental rot, in which both putatively liberal and conservative politics are wholly invested: “In times like these, one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.” Overall he makes a compelling argument for individual and collective integrity in the face of the overwhelmingly hypocritical inhumanity that governs the current global order, urging us to look these facts in the face and give name to what we already knew was the truth about what we’re witnessing, about how this world is built.

It’s a powerful and beautiful read, though I should say I still found myself mildly frustrated insofar as these arguments appear novel at all at this point in history. The jacket copy describes it as a “heartsick breakup letter with the West,” which Phillip Dwight Morgan playfully referenced at the launch event I attended in Toronto a few weeks ago. “When did you know?” he asked, to which El Akkad responded by evoking Hemingway’s “gradually, then suddenly” adage. That’s fair enough to the extent that it’s a personal narrative – and really, I have a lot of respect for the extent to which he implicates himself as an active participant in the systems he’s railing against – but for all of the book’s righteous and elegantly expressed rage, it feels like its astute observations are a little at odds with the urgency of its conclusions. That is, it’s a little difficult to accept the notion that it took this long to come to these realizations about the West and its supposed fundamental values.

Still, it’s far from the naivety of what Isabella Hammad critiques as “epiphany narratives” in her excellent Recognizing the Stranger: Palestine and Narrative, adapted from her Columbia University Edward Said Memorial Lecture delivered September 28, 2023 (!!) in which she brilliantly analyzes the way literary conventions affect how we construct “the narrative shape” of Palestine. So often, the narrative structure of the turning point, the sudden coming to consciousness, becomes the mode through which accounts of the occupation and of Palestinian life as such are conveyed – effectively erasing the prior and extant voices of Palestinians themselves and the ongoing experience of violent dispossession that is the condition of being a Palestinian human being. In a great review for Vulture, Andrea Long Chu points to one manifestation of this in the context of the genocide as “a tendency to view the ‘plight’ of the Palestinians as a humanitarian morality play rather than as a concrete political situation,” cautioning against the way this kind of reading allows the observer to retreat into metaphor, into a contemplative mode that excuses them engaging in meaningful action.  

Indeed, “What are the pretences that absolve us from participating in history?” asks Mohammed El-Kurd in an essay published about a year ago by Mondoweiss. The piece, “Are we all indeed Palestinians?” felt like a firecracker, with its fierce insistence that genuine solidarity must go beyond the liberal politics of metaphorical identification and orient itself towards material action. His stunning new book, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, includes that essay, along with his explosive and challenging – and not unproblematic – missive on responding to accusations of antisemitism from a year prior, and a pile of new writing ruminating on what it means to claim agency as a Palestinian in 2025. El-Kurd is a ferocious critic of the West’s discursive construction of the Palestinian struggle and its effacement of Palestinian humanity, who shot to prominence in recent years amid the movement to prevent the Israel annexation of parts of the Sheik Jarrah neighbourhood in Jerusalem, where he grew up. He’s also a poet – his first collection, Rifqa, was published by Haymarket in 2021 – and with a poet’s sensibility he does some truly masterful work with words throughout this volume, both distilling and expanding on what they can mean and do.

The primary target here is the colonial bias of Western discourse in its constitution of the Palestinian as an always-already compromised subject, and modes of liberal advocacy that, even if “well-meaning,” compromise with and enable such rhetorical violence. He adroitly dissects the paternalistic rhetoric of “humanization,” which he describes as, among other things, “a colonial divide-and-conquer strategy doing the exact opposite of what it purports to do” because in practice it requires “the ceaseless infantilization of the dehumanized subject.” He returns repeatedly to the fact that, if we’re going to endeavour to believe in anything like the universality of basic human dignity, we must “look Palestinians in the eye” and refuse framings of their eligibility for rights as contingent on preconditions – most obviously the now-classic demand that they condemn Hamas before we’ll affirm their right not to be summarily destroyed. 

Lest this be mistaken for a purely discursive intervention, though, he repeatedly emphasizes the stakes of these questions in the material register. The rhetoric of “humanization,” he writes, “is not merely our psychic response to colonial dehumanization – it exposes the absence of material analysis in our societies. As a project, it is largely the mandate of a specific class.” He asks: “What promises to save you from dehumanization? Sophisticated degrees. The money in your bank account. The willingness to forgive. An unassuming gaze and unthreatening demeanour. Connections to the magazine editor who slanders your neighbours.” He insists that “we must be loyal to Palestinian street,” demanding “a commitment to a material analysis of the Palestinian question, a learned understanding that is informed by the very streets where the breaking news takes place, by the very people whose slain bodies feature prominently in our documentaries and news reports, but whose experience and expertise are sidelined to make room for Western sources.”

These three books are all must-reads, and taken together they constitute a powerful and searching interrogation of the connection between public discourses, popular comprehension, and the violent realities of dropping bombs, and indeed the extent to which the "question of Palestine" is the key to much broader analyses of the geopolitics of late empire writ large.

The mix this time is sort of a two-parter, in that there’s a pretty clear division between an A side that's mostly drums and guitars and a B side that's mostly beats and electronics. I think there’s enough of a consistent ambience to bridge the aesthetic gap, but I’ll let you all judge for yourselves.

It starts with Portland's avant-rock collagist collective Grails with "Silver Bells," the first single from their forthcoming Miracle Music LP (out in May on the mighty Temporary Residence), which fittingly sounds as though its wall of Blade Runner synth is echoing out of some sort of shadowy temple. Then it's an excerpt from Prayer in Dub, the latest from Body Metta, a sort of post-rock supergroup from NYC. "Etel" is both trance-like and unsettling, drummer Greg Fox's taut snare rolls throwing off the clock as jazzy guitar chords channel old midwestern emo. Next is "Flesh and Electronics," from northern California trio Vulture Feather. The band boasts former members of mid-90s emocore heroes Don Martin Three – initially what caught my attention – though the songs on It Will Be Like Now more immediately draw to mind the minimalism and idiosyncratic spirituality of Lungfish: vital, committed, innervated with aliveness and hard-won joy.

Next it's the latest from eminent noise wrangler and GROWING alum Kevin Doria's HUMMING AMPS project, here augmenting his signature wall of drone with a lo-fi kosmische beat and soaring guitar squall half-submerged in the mix. I've only included about five of the 26 minutes that comprise "MAXIMUM NOTHING," and though it's a thrilling passage I highly recommend taking the plunge to let the full picture come into focus. Then it's "Company," something of an oldie from now-defunct Baltimore alt-pop outfit Lower Dens, off of their incredible Escape From Evil LP, which came out 10 years ago almost to the day. Upon its release Sasha Geffen described the record as "a vivid world of queer retrofuturism," and it's been a dear friend and something of a lodestar for me over the past decade, a reminder that dread need not negate rapture, and that the embrace of pleasure need not mean descent into nihilism. Closing out the front end is Beirut's Postcards with the stunning "Dust Bunnies," the show-stealing lead single from their Ripe LP, just released by Ruptured. The album is a live wire, leaning in to a ferocious and gritty post-punk sound and roiling with anger, though never succumbing to resignation or despair. It's quite the opposite, in fact: to rage against the ugliness of something can also be a declaration of love, a commitment to its concurrent beauty, and you don't sound this vital without something to fight for.

Kicking off the back half is "Ghorzetein," the closer to Nadah El Shazly's forthcoming second full-length, Laini Tani: chronicle of a twice-broken heart, a thrilling polyrhythmic stomp bursting out from a dark passage of haunting atmospherics. Its abrupt end launches us right into "Sea," a swampy and ferocious blast of bass from Nairobi-based producer Slikback's latest EP, Data (released in January). Then it's "Mangrove," a collaborative effort from Deena Abdelwahed, Nick Léon, and Julmud, featured on Chromesthesia: The Colour of Sound. The experimental compilation project is a heady affair: the release page hosts some brilliant writing from British-Egyptian historian and project founder Hannah Elsisi, who sketches a portrait of "the global rhythms of our time," which "archive over a millennium of African and afro-descendant musicking on the move." For its part, "Mangrove" morphs from stuttering electro-dabke towards downcast and dub-inflected dancehall beats, throwing out glimpses of deep grooves in turn before snatching them away again.

Next it's Dutch producer Windu with "Lhusima," a highlight from his recently-released debut LP Juxtapose. I haven't been able to find out much about the guy thus far, but the claustrophobic urgency of the track, which sounds a bit like a snake charmer lost in a fun-house mirror maze, more than makes up for the shortfall in information. After that it's NYC duo Baalti, who make tactile and pounding bass rave ups inspired by sound system battles from their native West Bengal. As Resident Advisor puts it, Baalit aims to "bring India's rural raves to international dance floors, mixing dek bass and traditional Indian percussion (like dhol tasha from the state of Maharashtra) with classic UK club fare," and "Loose Leaf," from their new EP Mela, certainly delivers. Finally, it's a clip from Masking, an EP from London junglist Joe Baker's Forest Drive West project just released by the Munich's always excellent Ilian Tape; you can almost feel floorboards heaving along to the fever dream of bouncy kicks and murky bass that is "Ziggurat."

• Mixcloud: nowhere left to go (apr 2025)

• MP3s: 25/04 - nowhere left to go

NB: The zip file linked above contains the individual MP3s as well as a single 50-minute track of the whole mix.

Okay that's it! Thanks everyone for reading, and particularly to Don for editorial support.

xo, graham