By Yahia Lababidi
Yahia Lababidi is an Arab American writer and poet of Palestinian descent. He is the author of more than a dozen books of essays, poetry, and prose. His latest book is If You Cannot Say Genocide: Essays on Conscience and Witness. His writing has appeared in The New Statesman, Liberties, World Literature Today, Salmagundi, and The Threepenny Review, among other publications.
Stepping out of my building, a neighbor stopped me to say he was sorry for the Islamophobia he felt circulating lately in Trump’s America. He extolled the virtues of Canada as a model of how we should be.
At the post office, the man behind the counter asked if I could write “Happy Holidays” in Arabic for a sign he wanted to hang. I wrote it carefully, conscious of my uneven hand. He thanked me and taped it up. I hope the small sign does its modest work, easing someone without drawing notice, doing what such gestures often do best when they pass without notice.
At the bus station, a large man asked to borrow my phone. When he handed it back, he asked where I was from. I said Egypt. He laughed, swore affectionately, and spoke with me for a few minutes about the world, about worry, about what people owe one another. Before boarding, he offered a blessing.
These moments remind me how relatively easy my own passage as an immigrant has been. I have not encountered violence directly. What I have met, mostly, is ignorance, and even that only recently. I have rarely felt compelled to take it personally. I tend to think that most people would not speak as they do if their lives had widened just enough to complicate what they take for granted, if familiarity had been allowed to interrogate fear.
That belief comes from observation over decades and across cultures. People are rarely changed by reason alone. They are altered by proximity, by repeated exposure to what does not confirm the story they have been told about others or about themselves. Knowledge and kindness work slowly. They loosen bias and false certainty by degrees.
I have seen how easily whole communities are reduced to headlines, how faiths are flattened into caricature, how violence becomes explanatory shorthand.
I carry sorrow for the violent pain and murderous ignorance that continue to surface where I come from and far beyond it, and the knowledge, held alongside that sorrow, that we are capable of living far better than we do. After the recent mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, where fifteen people were killed, a Muslim man, Ahmed al-Ahmed, intervened by tackling and disarming one of the attackers. He was shot multiple times in the process and is credited with saving lives. Past narrow religious allegiances, this was a human refusal to stand aside. That matters because it interrupts the story we are encouraged to believe about what people inevitably are.
Living in the United States for over two decades, I am well aware that this country has inflicted violence far from its shores for generations, often while renaming it, often while insisting on its necessity. Any serious accounting asks more of us than explanations shaped for the news cycle. It asks for patience and the willingness to trace continuities rather than isolate events. It asks us to notice how harm travels, how language assists it, and how forgetting is organized and rewarded.
Memory is still alive, and it asks for responsibility. Distance has a way of laundering conscience. The longer we wait, the easier it becomes to confuse explanation with absolution. We need historians willing to write while the record is still unsettled, while consequences are still unfolding, guided by moral orientation.
Goodness is practiced—less dramatic than resolution, more demanding than loyalty. It appears in ordinary exchanges. In the traditions that have shaped my thinking, love is not postponed to a future settling of accounts. Mercy is learned here, among people who misunderstand one another, who arrive carrying inherited fear, who fail and try again. The love we hold back, in turn, holds us back, narrowing the range of what we are able to see or become. When we make others suffer, we do not escape the damage. We carry it, often without knowing how it has narrowed us.
I have seen how easily whole communities are reduced to headlines, how faiths are flattened into caricature, how violence becomes explanatory shorthand. None of this survives sustained attention. What survives are the small acts that refuse the terms we are handed, gestures that loosen suspicion without pretending to solve anything.
What heartens me is simpler: Decency persists. I meet it on the street, in ordinary people who speak plainly and want no part in the ugliness of the headlines.
The effort to see the divine in everyone is its own discipline of perception. Much depends on that effort, repeated daily, without witnesses.
Excerpted from If You Cannot Say Genocide: Essays on Conscience and Witness by Yahia Lababidi, published by New Village Press.