Why I Withdrew My Book From the Gillers

Books, Not Bombs

When I first became aware that authors were pulling their books from consideration for the Giller this year—in protest of the principal sponsor Scotiabank and their holdings in Elbit Sytems, an Israeli weapons company—I knew immediately I would remove my latest book, Rubble Children, from consideration as well. Having witnessed the genocide unfold for months, having attended protests and meetings and actions, having joined Jews Say No To Genocide, donated money, raised money, tweeted and posted, held my daughter, yelled and cried and shook, donated more money, here finally was something concrete I could do: put my book on the line. Gum up the machinery of imperialism and war with one of the things I hold most sacred: fiction.

Which doesn’t mean I didn’t doubt myself. (Doubt being one of my main preoccupations.) Aaron, what are you thinking? Aaron, won’t this harm your book, that you worked on for years, that faced constant rejection, that everyone at University of Alberta Press worked so hard and lovingly on, that—you hope—speaks to this moment in moving and surprising ways? Aaron, what if this was your year to win, and you just royally fucked up?

What if, indeed. In more quiet times, worries like this would have the chance of consuming me. Drowning me. But these aren’t quiet times (we might never know quiet times again). I can easily silence the doubts and the worries with a bigger, and more important, what if: what if pulling your book, along with the dozens and dozens of others, the two judges that stepped down, applies enough pressure to spook the board of the Giller to reconsider, to step out of themselves for a moment, to realize that they also don’t want their illustrious award to be connected in any financial or material away to the ways and means of unholy destruction? What if pulling your book could slow the gears of war, even a tiny bit, force Canada to uphold international law, save a single Palestinian life? These are the what-ifs that make it crystal clear that the Giller would not have the privilege of reading my work this year.

An added irony: Rubble Children is about Israel/Palestine, is about settler colonialism, is about the fractures in the Canadian Jewish community, chasming wider every day the majority holds on tighter and tighter to their ethnic nationalist project and the minority yells as loudly as possible, not in our name. In the short stories that make up the collection, there’s antizionist Jews lamenting the moral deprivation of their friends and families. There’s Palestinian intellectuals. There’s Zionist fanatics, red in the face from yelling their hatred to a shockingly receptive audience. There’s horrible crimes; there’s visions of a decolonized Palestine. There’s an editor at a national magazine telling a prospective author to remove all mentions of Palestine from their piece (too on the nose? Apparently not.) There’s even, surprisingly, hope. (There’s also lots of weed smoking, unrequited love, diasporic joy, and probably a bit too much teenage angst.) Wouldn’t it have been better, then, the voice of doubt asks slyly, trying a different tact, to have left open the possibility of winning the Giller, of getting more eyeballs on your work? You could have donated the 100,000 to Gazan children! You could have loudly proclaimed “free Palestine” as you accepted the award! It would be the same thrill of defiance you felt when you used to order antizionist books from Indigo.

Maybe.

But this isn’t about changing minds or perspectives. This is about ending the gyre of mechanized death. This is about refusing to be part of the culture-washing of banks that uphold the violent status-quo with their invisible billions, of institutions and corporations that hide their violent ideologies behind their philanthropy.

Since all of this started with the Gillers—the arrest of the protestors at last year’s gala, the leaked knowledge that winners were being prohibited from speaking about Gaza, the bare fact of being sponsored by a bank that owns half of an Israeli weapons company whose weapons were being used to murder an entire people, eradicate libraries and schools and hospitals—what I can’t stop thinking about is what it must be like for Palestinian authors in Canada right now, especially early career Palestinian authors. To be told, again and again, that the major institutions of Canadian literary and prize culture consider Palestine off limits. To know that your story, your perspective, your very presence is unwanted in the gala halls.

I pull my book, I write this piece, for that Palestinian writer.

I don’t want to have anything to do with the creation, manufacture, or deployment of weapons, of bombs, of technologies that dehumanize, that surveil, that kill and maim. That destroy. In fact, I, perhaps naively, want my books, my fiction and my poetry, to do the polar opposite of these weapons. I want them to open people, to imagine better worlds, to say: this can end. This can be stopped. We can be better than this.

That is why I have pulled my book from contention for the Giller. A battle is waging behind the scenes of all of Canada’s cultural and literary behemoths. But we have power in numbers. The more of us that refuse, the sooner a better, more ethical cultural landscape can be built. We make these literary institutions. And we can unmake them, as well.

Further reading:

Can Lit Responds

Open Letter From Past Giller Award Winners

Writers Against the War on Gaza

Indigo Kills Kids Campaign

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (please donate if you’re able!)