The Fire These Times

This is a conversation with Kate Zen . She’s an organiser with Red Canary Song ,  a US-based grassroots Asian sex workers coalition. They also organise transnationally with Asian sex workers across the diaspora in Toronto, Paris, and Hong Kong. “There are over 9000 workplaces like these across the country with no  political representation, or access to labor rights or collective  or...

This is a conversation with Wafa Mustafa , a Berlin-based Syrian journalist. We spoke about her father, Ali Mustafa, who was forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime on July 2nd 2013. Wafa highlights the fact that those who are forcibly disappeared are often depoliticized and coated in 'humanitarian' language. We spoke about how she participated in the 2011 uprising and how her activism actually s...

This is a conversation with Daryn Howland . She's a Beirut-based researcher who recently finished her MA thesis entitled "racist capital: the racialization of migrant labor under the kafala system in Beirut", the subject of our discussion. You can read the thesis in its current format here . Daryn argues that the racialisation and dehumanisation of migrant domestic workers under the Kafala system...

This is my second conversation with Timour Azhari , a Beirut-based Lebanese journalist with Al Jazeera. I wanted to talk to Timour because few people are able to explain what’s happening in Lebanon with such clarity.  We went through the economic crisis and its political roots, the local and regional dimensions and how protesters and activists have  been reacting. We also spoke about how...

I spoke with Jack Sapoch, coordinator of No Name Kitchen 's border violence reporting, itself part of the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN). We spoke about the EU's policy of violence against asylum seekers on the so-called 'Balkan Route' and how BVMN partners have been trying to document it and support those being victimised by it. BVMN works through a democratic and horizontal management...

This is a conversation with Ronnie Chatah, host of ' The Beirut Banyan ' podcast and organiser of the Walk Beirut tour. We spoke about Ronnie's experience with storytelling and his desire to maintain the memory of those we have lost in Lebanon such as Samir Kassir, the journalist and historian assassinated 15 years ago, and his father Mohammad Chatah, the Lebanese diplomat who was assassinated in...

This is a conversation with Zoe Smith , a London-based writer with connection to the Carribeans. Zoe had written two pieces for The Correspondent which I wanted to talk to her about. The unthinkable has become reality. How can we build back better? Mutual aid is sweeping the world. Here’s how we make this anarchist way of organising last So how do we make mutual aid last? Using the examples of Bar...

This is a conversation with Mohammed Sulaiman , a Palestinian writer and researcher who grew up in Gaza and currently works at the University of South Australia . The core of our conversation was Mohammed’s two essays for Hummus For Thought: Wretched of the Earth: Thoughts on Syria, Palestine and Discourse (2016) Israel and ‘The Right to Maim’ (2017) Topics discussed: growing up in Gaza and surviv...

This is a conversation with Peter Pomerantsev . He's a Soviet-born British writer and the author of two books: Nothing is True and Everything is Possible and This is Not Propaganda . He also runs the research initiative Arena based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), an innovative programme dedicated to overcoming the challenges of disinformation. Topics discussed: Russi...

211 Ghanaian citizens returned home after working as migrant domestic workers in Lebanon and this is what one of them had to say about what her living and working conditions was under the racist Kafala system in a racist Lebanon. The footage comes from a report on Ghanaian TV which was posted on Twitter by @ ThisIsLebanonLB : https://twitter.com/ThisIsLebanonLB/status/1275754162702041090

This is a conversation with Zeina Hashem Beck . She's a poet originally from Tripoli, Lebanon. We spoke about her poems of  course and about what it means to be thinking about Lebanon from outside  of Lebanon, especially since the October 17th uprising. We touched upon  mental health, struggling with poetry, and sectarian jokes. We also  mentioned our respective upbringings, he...

This is the audio version of Saleem Haddad 's reaction to the death of Sarah Hegazy, which he posted on Instagram and which I'm re-posting here with permission.  Sarah Hegazy was a Queer activist from Egypt who was arrested after being one of many who raised a rainbow flag at a concert by Mashrou3 Leila in Cairo in 2017. She was tortured in Sisi's jail, driven to exile and sought asylum in Ca...

This is a conversation with Rula Asad , the co-founder and executive director of the Syrian Female Journalists Network (SFJN) .  She is a freelance journalist and reporter covering women and human rights. She also reports on the issues faced by the Syrian Civil Society in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, in addition to being an experienced researcher and trainer focusing on women’s rights, gender...

(I accidentally uploaded the wrong file before so let's all pretend that didn't happen) This is a conversation with Yousef Kekhia , a Berlin-based Syrian singer, songwriter and producer originally from Aleppo. I spoke to Yousef about his debut album Monologue . I have been genuinely moved by his music and I think this conversation will show you why. Pluggables: Facebook , Instagram , SoundCloud an...

Trigger warning : gender-based violence is mentioned throughout the episode. This is a conversation with Chuck Derry , co-founder of the Gender Violence Institute and the Minnesota Men’s Action Network: Alliance to Prevent Sexual and Domestic Violence. Chuck has worked to end men’s violence against women since 1983. From  1983 to 1993, he worked with male offenders at the St. Cloud  Inte...

This is an in-depth conversation with Ziad Majed , a Lebanese writer and Program Coordinator for Middle East Pluralities at the American University of Paris . Ziad was one of the founders of the Democratic Left Movement (DLM) in Lebanon, one of the few independent and leftwing groups that came out of the anti-Assad mobilisation that followed the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005. The DLM soon...

This is a PSA from the Channel Zero Network . I'm posting it here in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter. Justice for the murder of George Floyd and for all of those brutalised and murdered by the police everywhere in the world. As protests heat up, the Channel Zero Network has some reminders on how to stay safe while out in the streets. Bring buddies and don’t let them out of the range of your voic...

This is a conversation with Bryan Farell , one of the founders of Waging Nonviolence . He also hosts the podcast City of Refuge , the topic of this episode. City of Refuge is a 10-part series from Waging Nonviolence which explores a little-known WWII rescue story, showing what happens when ordinary people won’t ignore the horrors surrounding them. It is the story of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small...

This is a conversation with Eliot Higgins , founder and executive director of Bellingcat , an online open-source investigation collective. Bellingcat rose to prominence over its team's investigation of the  downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July of 2014 by Russian-backed  separatists in eastern Ukraine, which killed all 298 passengers on  board. The evidence, which linked th...

This is a conversation with Ayman Makarem . He’s a Lebanon-based writer and filmmaker who recently wrote essays on mutual aid in Lebanon for The Public Source . One of the themes of The Fire These Times is to promote  mutual aid for the 21st century so I was really looking forward to speaking with Ayman about this. In addition to reading his essay, this  has been a topic that we’ve been...

This is a conversation with Brian Hioe , one of the founding editors of New Bloom Magazine which came out of Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower Movement, in which Brian also participated. The topics covered in this episode are numerous which is why I really wanted to have Brian on and use his encyclopedic knowledge of Taiwan and the region to give us an overview of the complicated history and recent politica...

This is a conversation with Lina Mounzer . She's a Beirut-based writer and translator who, like me, took part in the October and post-October protests. I wanted to catch up with her to talk about how she started preparing for the worst yet to come very early on. This anticipation - of economic hardship, of violence - is a widespread phenomenon in Lebanon but not a lot of people are able to express...

This is a conversation with Lebanese-British journalist and editor Zahra Hankir . She's the editor of the award-winning, best-selling anthology Our Women on the Ground which features 19 women reporters from the Middle East and North Africa. The book includes essay by Donna Abu-Nasr, Aida Alami, Hannah Allam,  Jane Arraf, Lina Attalah, Nada Bakri, Shamael Elnoor, Zaina Erhaim,  Asmaa al-G...

This is a conversation with writer Saleem Haddad , author of the novel Guapa and the director of the short film Marco , now available for free online. We spoke about both Guapa and Marco as well as his contribution to the science fiction anthology Palestine+100 . We also spoke about his connection to Fernando Pessoa’s the Book of Disquiet while living in Pessoa’s city, Lisbon. We spoke about ident...

This is a conversation with Zecharias Zelalem . He's an Ethiopian journalist with Addis Standard as well as a freelance journalist focusing on the Horn of Africa region. More recently, Zelalem has also been investigating widespread abuses of Ethiopian migrant domestic workers in the Middle East, and in particular Lebanon. This is why I wanted to have this conversation with Zecharias. The conversat...