Name: Cities of salt
ISBN: 039475526X

ʻAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf

Cities of salt

this book is so incredibly written and it's made me cry over and over but it's also made me cackle and this is the cackle source. 

aisha

After two Americans came to visit him, with Naim to translate for them, he made an important decision: to leave and never come back. 

"We used to have one problem," he told some of the men from Harran. "Now there's no problem we don't have." He turned to Maimoun and laughed. "Have you actually seen them? Have you seen their faces? They look like kangaroo rats, or like bread dough. They're speckled and have beady eyes. They might make it through the winter, but I doubt they'll be able to take the summer.

He was silent for a minute amid the quiet and confusion, then said to himself,  but wanting the others to hear, "Tomorrow they'll be out of here.They'll be farting from fear!"

what a perfect prelude to my diving into the wretched freeport-published Grasberg book 

The sun is above and the scorpions below.

fills you with such dread and grief. Munif’s position, as a once-career man in the oil industry, injects this book with such clarity about the sheer evil in extractive industries. there is no home, no town, built on the premise of extraction that isn’t all-consuming and all-destroying. death will always follow. 

read after Nixon’s <i>Slow Violence</i>, which features a chapter just dissecting this book and it’s portrayal of ‘slow violence.’

fills you with such dread and grief. Munif’s position, as a once-career man in the oil industry, injects this book with such clarity about the sheer evil in extractive industries. there is no home, no town, built on the premise of extraction that isn’t all-consuming and all-destroying. death will always follow. 

read after Nixon’s <i>Slow Violence</i>, which features a chapter just dissecting this book and it’s portrayal of ‘slow violence.’

Cities of salt

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