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Quote by Rawi Hage

“All those who leave immigrate to better lives, but I wanted to better my death. Maybe it is the ending that matter, not the life, I thought. Maybe we, like elephants, walk towards our chosen burials.”

Quote by Rawi Hage

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Author

Rawi Hage
Rawi Hage

Rawi Hage is a Lebanese-Canadian writer born in Beirut in 1964. His works often focus on the social and cultural conflicts between Lebanon and Canada, as well as the exploration of individual identity. Hage's writing is praised for its profound social insight and literary skills. more

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“The only true solutions to complex systemic problems are piecemeal, multi-pronged answers, and they will vary wildly from forest to desert, from city to city, and even between neighborhoods within a single city. Life is messy and civilization even messier. If your answer is ever any less messy, you’re fooling yourself.”

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“Imagine two incidents of theft. In the first case, a bandit takes something valuable from someone else. Deprived of this important source of wealth, the victim and his family live a life of relative destitution, even as the thief and his family flourish, with nary a thought about the crime that served as the basis of their wealth, nor the fate of those they stole from. Eventually the perpetrator and his family forget about the theft altogether and come to view their wealth as legitimate. In the second case, a bandit also takes something precious from someone else, likewise leaving the victim and his family in a state of relative destitution, even as the robber and his family prosper. But in the second case, the bandit constantly acknowledges that his own prosperity was achieved at the victim’s expense. He explicitly and repeatedly recognizes the state of privation that the victim and his family live in as a result of the crime. He publicly praises the victim at every turn. Yet he nonetheless declines to return the stolen resources. Instead, he continues to actively leverage the seized assets in order to build his own wealth, but incessantly laments the poor state of the victim and his family, and the horror of the crime that was done to them, and insists that someone really ought to do something to help “those people” out. The second scenario describes the practice of land acknowledgments, which have grown increasingly popular in symbolic capitalist spaces in recent years (while the first scenario depicts how the people who do make land acknowledgments describe those who don’t; I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which is worse). One stated purpose of land acknowledgments is to show respect to those who have been dispossessed. But of course, precisely as a function of that very dispossession, there are almost never people from the affected tribes “in the room” to receive these acknowledgments—particularly in symbolic capitalist spaces (where this practice is most pronounced). Instead, these acknowledgments typically consist of non-Indigenous people virtue signaling exclusively to other non-Indigenous people, who nod along approvingly, leading all in attendance to feel good about how enlightened they are … and then everyone gets on with business as usual.”

WokenessNative American HistoryLand Acknowledgement
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“Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but it neither invents them nor originates their themes. These were prepared for them by fifty years of imperialism and disintegration of the nation-state, when the mob entered the scene of European politics. Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.”

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