Panopticon

Silence as an Occidentalist tool
"“In a way it is about privacy. When you come from a place where the walls have ears and you spend your life hiding and fabricating, trying to learn the rules to games you have no hope of ever winning and searching for cracks from which to scurry out, your instinct is to hold certain matters close to the chest.”p18

"“It’s not so difficult to know what people want. At the root of it we all want the same things: freedom, happiness, safety. I want to write what I want to write without the fear of a knock at the door and an interrogation room. I want to love who I want to love without the fear of death or corrective rape. I want to wear what I want to wear without the worry that men will see my skirt or the buttons on my shirt as an invitation. That’s it. The freedom to live how we want to live.”p28

“In that other place, my other life, there were limits everywhere. One wrong word could land someone in jail, though more often than not they were just gone. Walking down the road, you were a target. Going to the shop was an ordeal, full of logistics and mathematics, and the strong possibility that you might not return." p31

"« “It will come here “It’s only a matter of time.” “Yes, yes,” Amer concurred with a little shake of his shoulders, like a dancer warming up for a show. “The doctor is next(Al Assad)” Khalid looked up from the book he held, dark eyes flitting around the room as though we weren't alone. He was always watching doors, anticipating knocks and shouts and the men who take you away. There are eyes everywhere. All the time. When he'd bought a laptop for school, the first thing he did was tape over the camera. We laughed and called him paranoid, but he just put another layer on…“He’s too strong.” “Nothing will come of it,” Khalid agreed, » "p60

“ All those conspiracy theories about how Big Brother is watching and screening and listening in on our phone calls and monitoring us through our laptop cameras, fucking find where my call is coming from and send the police.” p85

"« In the center of one wall ( Amer’s place in Aleppo) hung a large portrait of the president, his icy eyes boring into the room. The first time we came over, Ossama nearly jumped out of his skin when he glimpsed it over his shoulder, sending me into a fit of giggles. Khalid scowled and raised his eyebrows at Amer, who shrugged and said, Just in case. And every time we were in the flat, Khalid would glance uneasily at the portrait, as though anticipating red dots of surveillance to appear in its corners or for the eyes to track him around the room.” p100

"he was always the first to volunteer to take the posters and banners out, to affix them to walls and stick them to windows in the dead of night, when, maybe, no one would see. They see everything. » p101

"“High in the corner of the ceiling, where the light cannot reach, is an eyeball. Large and white with red veins, and a bright iris with a fully dilated pupil, it moves with us. Scanning back and forth, back and forth, from one wall to the other, from window to door, it misses nothing… It sees Ossama and Amer laboring over their length of fabric, huddled over it so the Eye can’t see what they're drawing. » p105

"Pulling back into the room we turn, as one, to the Eye.” p107

« malak almawt cackling as he lifted more and more of us away. His eyes are numberless; there’s no escaping them.”p133

“popping eyeballs with fiery veins peering into houses and hearts and minds.(Ossama’s sketch)”136

“I go outside, to sit in public where, if my lungs or heart or something decides to stop, passers-by might be there to call for help.”p144

"What of surveillance apparatuses and institutionalized oppression and indefinite states of emergency? Could she trace the form identity took in such cases?”p170

« We were puppets, moving back and forth across this cell like what we did mattered. »p174

« High in the corner of the ceiling, where the lid of the box seals us in, is an eyeball. A golf ball or ping-pong ball perhaps. Large and white with red veins and a bright iris inked into it. Scanning back and forth, back and forth, from one wall to the other, from window to door, it misses nothing. »p175

"The cell( referring to her room in Syria) is limned in red. No matter how hard I scrub, the windowpane will not let in anything but red red rays.”p237

“room, house, prison, country, all of them cells. All these places where you are watched and heard and monitored. The only safe space is the one between your ears or in the grave.”p238

“High in the corner, the Eye watches us. Like every other time and in every other place, it watches us. The veins are more prominent today, bulging red veins that beat to a soundless rhythm. Back and forth, back and forth, no brain behind to interpret what it sees. »p238

“I turn to ask Khalid to join us, . but he’s under the Eye now, inspecting it, reaching up with hesitant hands to poke at it, as though it might bite, and my breath catches in my lungs…”p238

“Behind us there is a crash. Khalid is attacking the Eye with his helmet. My heart stops as he hammers at it. Furious. Desperate. It drowns out any and all other sounds. Bashing and bashing, he lets out short grunts and yips and what sound like whimpers, until the Eye cracks and splinters and is ripped from the ceiling to lie in a broken heap at his feet. He’s sweaty, jaw locked in a grimace, panting, like a feral animal, like the wolf they've turned him into. Is this victory? Or just another kind of death? »p240

“she passes it like she thinks the government might be spying on them through the screen. »p264