Kaveh Akbar at the TIME100 Next Gala [VERTICAL]

Watch Kaveh Akbar at the TIME100 Next Gala [VERTICAL] - TIME on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00Congratulations on being a finalist for the National Book Award. I heard that you

00:03found out at the dog park. What does that recognition mean to you?

00:07I go to the dog park every day. My dog was totally unimpressed. I was trying to

00:12leverage it as best as I could to try to make him think that I was cool. He truly

00:17didn't care. Galilee is his name. Shout out Galilee. Yeah, I mean that anyone is

00:22reading it, that anyone cares is a prof- I mean that's the greatest gift that you

00:25can give to an artist is to pay attention to their work. Time is your

00:29most irreplenishable resource. You'll never get more of it on the- you know,

00:32you can get more money, you can get more other stuff, but you're never gonna get

00:35more time. And the fact that people are giving 10, 12 hours to a story that I

00:40wrote is the most gratifying thing in the world. And what does martyr mean to

00:46you? Well, I wrote a book about it. I wrote a- I wrote a- I wrote 85,000 words about

00:54what the word means to me. And honestly, I'm still quite confused. I don't know

00:58that I'm any close. I think I've only deepened the mystery, but I think I'm a

01:02little bit more comfortable sitting in uncertainty without groping desperately

01:06to resolve it. I think that's a good outcome of having written the book. And

01:11kind of like turning to something else, I know that you have offered to help

01:16students who've been protesting for Palestine to help them with their

01:20writing. Yeah, what do you think is the sort of importance in artists stepping

01:25up in those moments and sort of taking a stand? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's

01:30an act of genocide happening in Palestine, and it's spreading into Lebanon,

01:35and there's an act of genocide happening in Sudan, and our young people have

01:42their morals well calibrated enough to say, not in our name. And there are

01:48institutions that are trying to squash that, and it just seems so backward. So if

01:53I can, you know, I'm offering one channel of support, you know, through this

02:00action that you speak of, and, you know, one tries to open as many channels of

02:05action as they can in their living. So it's my luck to be of any use, any bit of

02:10wind at their back.