There’s No Such Thing as Someone Else’s Children: Fanonian Zones of Being and Non-Being in Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Abstract

Omar El Akkad’s memoir One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025) documents how witnessing the Gaza genocide destroyed his belief in Western liberal values. The book is built around the idea that every child is someone’s child; no child should be seen as “someone else’s child.” This article analyses El Akkad’s book through Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial lens ,focusing on his concept of the “zone of non-being,” where colonised people are denied full humanity, and their deaths often go unnoticed. This study analyses how the phrase “there’s no such thing as someone else’s children” (El Akkad, 2025, p. 88) captures Fanon’s concept of “zone of non-being”(Fanon, 1952/1986, p. 10) while also examining passive voice headlines and numerical abstractions as a technique to hide Fanon’s concept of dehumanisation. This research reveals many important aspects. El Akkad’s idea that no child can be described as someone else’s strongly connects with Fanon’s concept of the “zone of non-being”. Passive voice headlines by Western media make the colonial violence invisible by erasing the agent of violence. The phrase “tragic but inevitable” and the acronym WCNSF (Wounded Child, No Surviving Family) reduce human suffering to administrative terms. Western liberal complicity is exposed through the lesser evil voting logic. By applying Fanon’s 1961 theory to the 2025 text, this study shows that colonialism Fanon witnessed in Algeria is still operating in Gaza.