I did you an injustice, and even if it was only in my thoughts, and we neither know each other or are likely to meet, I owe you an apology for it.
A few years ago, after I read your book, Between the World and Me, I looked for your other writings and came across your piece on Kanye West. Your book I had loved, but that essay was exquisite. In particular, your description of how your “small literary fame” warped so much around you clarified to me certain ways that we were having to live in a world suffused with social media, because that is what a lot of social media offers – the chance at being famous, recognised, becoming a minor or even micro-celebrity.
That essay helped me make an argument on how to approach social media at an angle, not just for myself, but for others who I saw as comrades in a struggle for human dignity. Like any tool, it had flaws, but the most corrosive – I felt – was that in creating a culture of minor icons, it inspired not just competition among those at the receiving end of power’s brutalities, but a scramble to expose the clay feet of such idols.
We know, of course, that no human is perfect, and that one of the tools of power has always been to point at small imperfections in its critics to ignore the force of criticism itself. The story of the denial of rights has always been sung along with the chorus of dehumanisation. It is merely human to draw horns on the heads of our victims to justify acting as demons ourselves.
Knowledge, though, is for spaces of self-reflection, and the rapid-fire world of social media pushes us towards emotions instead, creating a frenzied atmosphere of accusation, guilt, and public condemnation. That is why, when a friend asked if I knew you were considered anti-Palestinian, I was immediately on-guard, unwilling to hear it. Then they sent me a link to your essay on reparations, in which write about what has been done to the African-American community, what it is owed, and how Germany’s reparations to Israel might serve as an example for the way forward.
I read the essay only then, although it was the essay that had earned you the greatest accolades. I did not know this at the time. The essay was a finely done thing, unwinding many of the arguments made against reparations, but I also thought it was shallow in parts, particularly on European anti-Semitism and the fact that European Jews had commented early on that sending Jews to Mandatory Palestine created both an image of double loyalty and would work to rid Europe of Jews. Both these things were, and remain, mainstays of that old European disease. But I did not think the essay was anti-Palestinian, rather that it largely ignored the Palestinians, and I said so to my friend.
That is not the whole of the thing, because I also lowered you in my estimation as a commentator on issues beyond the United States. This was not the injustice, the injustice was that when I disagreed with something you had written, I allowed myself to lower my estimation of you without giving you my reasons, or giving you a chance to respond. I judged you without allowing you a say.
Of course, had I written then, it is unlikely that you would have encountered my words. And what would I have written? The suggestion that you read more from Palestinians was obvious, but maybe I could have pointed you also to Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million, on how the Israeli state treated the survivors of the Holocaust, or writing even about the Jews of Arab origin and their treatment, which might have allowed you to deepen or change some of your thinking, to recognise that this as was a project speaking to colonial powers that helped them displace their guilt, not face it, and ignored the colonised completely. I told myself that such a response would have been an empty gesture, worse, I would be undermining a writer I admired – and by so doing, trumpet my greater knowledge on a subject – simply to act holier-than-thou. So, I did not write, or even speak of that essay publicly.
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The reasons I gave to myself for my silence may even have been true, but there is another truth, another reason that I did not respond in public to your essay, and that is because you are an African-American writer who has done great things. Having lived in the US, having worked with NGOs that focussed on racialised issues, I have some minor understanding of how difficult this is, how rare you are, how strewn with obstacles the course is for anybody even trying to be an honest writer on the subjects you wrote on. So, I gave you a pass.
In this, I did you wrong, because when we shield somebody from scrutiny all we really do is suggest that they are incapable of withstanding that scrutiny. This is not comradeship, rather it is condescension.
The fact that you are bigger man than I gave you credit for is in your latest book, The Message; the proof that you were willing to not only take criticism in good faith, but do the hard work of learning to do better, and producing not just an apology, but a counter to your previous blindness to a people. I read it with pleasure – if one can use that word about a book that is as much about pain as it is about hope – but also with guilt.
I should have written then. I did not. Time has given me an opportunity to apologise for thinking less of you. Whether it ever reaches you or not, I would like to say I am sorry, and to write out the reasons why.
Omair Ahmad is an author and journalist.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
