On an early morning flight in 2024, I started reading Against the Loveless World—the first book I bought this year, right after our first fight of the year. Sunlight spilled through the plane’s window and gently lit up the pages of Susan Abulhawa’s story. It felt like the light knew exactly where to land. It led me into a narrative that held the same tangled ache I’d been carrying—for Gaza, for womanhood, for resilience.
The book opens with a line that lingers like dust:
"In Gaza, everything was colorless. Everything was gray."
It wasn’t just a metaphor. It was a mirror. That grayness isn’t poetic; it’s literal—the debris of bombed buildings, the air thick with loss. That gray still hangs heavy in 2024, as Israel continues to devastate Gaza. This book isn’t a fictional escape. It’s a confrontation. A necessary one.
Then came Nahr.
Nahr is fire and silence, pain and power. Her resilience became my travel companion. At one point, she says,
"In the darkest times, hope is something you give yourself."
That line hit bone. Hope isn’t something handed to you. It’s a choice. A fight. A quiet rebellion. And in that way, Against the Loveless World reminded me so much of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Both books speak of suffering. Both say: find meaning, or be devoured.
Nahr begins her story in an Israeli prison—a claustrophobic world that mirrors the wider incarceration of Palestine itself. Abulhawa doesn’t soften the blow. She writes with the precision of someone who refuses to let you look away. The story becomes a kind of emotional cartography, forcing me to travel places headlines never do. It demands attention—not just to the politics, but to the pain beneath them.
But love—love still insists on being part of the story.
Nahr’s family, her messy romances, her defiant tenderness—they all remind us that love doesn’t just survive through chaos, it shapes itself around it. One line especially stuck:
"In the chaos of life, love was the only thing that held its shape."
I laughed. Then I teared up. Because of course. Of course it is.
In war, in waiting rooms, in prayers half-whispered in the dark—love holds.
Even when everything else breaks.
Abulhawa weaves humor into the heaviness. It doesn’t dull the pain; it makes it human. Love in this novel isn’t decorative. It’s survival. It’s truth. And through it, I was reminded: we all want to be held—especially when the world is burning.
Her writing? Clean. Sharp. Deep. You don’t read it; you feel it.
"The air was heavy with the scent of oranges and the dust of ruined homes."
That line didn’t just paint a scene. It carried me there. I wasn’t a reader anymore. I was a witness.
I finished the book a few days later. And I couldn’t walk away unchanged.
There was a sense of responsibility pressing on my chest. Not performative guilt. Not saviorism. Just a deep, grounded knowing that this story mattered. And because it mattered, I had to carry it forward. Not to explain Gaza. But to remind myself not to look away. To let literature be more than personal—it has to be political, too.
Since October 7th, Gaza has suffered more than 30,000 deaths—half of them women and children. I’m still trying to hold that number. To feel its weight. The horror of men stripped and executed. The silence of world leaders, the unbothered stance of power in the face of mass death. It’s not just heartbreaking. It’s enraging. And it demands that we don’t detach.
In this context, Abulhawa’s story isn’t just timely—it’s sacred.
Against the Loveless World doesn’t offer solutions. But it does something harder: it keeps your heart open when it would be easier to shut down. It gives dignity to grief. It makes space for hope—not the fluffy kind, but the kind you plant in the rubble and protect with your whole self.
So here I am, still carrying Nahr.
Still learning how to stay soft while the world burns.
Still believing that books like this don’t just teach us—they rewire us.
And maybe that’s the point.
To feel more.
To know better.
To hold stories, not just in our minds—but in our hearts, our politics, and our prayers.
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