On the show this week, I’m speaking to Assia Belgacem  a French-Algerian writer and book critic based in Bordeaux, France. Assia runs the Instagram account, @shereadsox, where she writes nuanced book reviews and gives excellent book recommendations. In this episode, we talk about Assia’s identity: Algerian and French, and also about being Muslim in an increasingly right-wing, France. With hijab bans in place in the country, Assia works as a teacher in a government school, where she is unable to cover her hair. We talk about so much, including French and Algerian history, political activism, books and so much more.

At the time of recording, It has been almost 70 days since the beginning of Israel’s most recent war on Gaza, where so far over 20,000 people have been killed. Thousands are still trapped under rubble, and shortages of food and water are becoming lethal. Naturally, we talked about Palestine today, too. 

Assia's work focuses on decolonization, French politics and African/Swana literature.

Follow Assia on instagram:
www.instagram.com/shereadsox

As always, I hope this episode is interesting and enjoyable! Connect with me on social media, as I'd love to hear from you.

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At the time of recording this episode, we are on day 62 of Israel’s most recent war on Gaza. The situation is beyond horrific, as over 20,000 Palestinian men, women and children have been killed and 1.7 million have been displaced from their homes. Numerous international humanitarian laws have been broken as civialian areas, hospitals and schools have been attacked, and white phospherous has been used on civilian populations, with catastrophic impacts. 

On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Rashid Khalidi, author and historian about understanding the last 100 years, in an attempt to truly understand and uncover what is happening today.  We talk about the Balfour declaration of 1917, the end of British colonial rule in Palestine, the growth of the Israeli colonial project, the ways in which Palestinians have resisted, and so much more. 

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. He received a B.A. from Yale University in 1970 and a D. Phil. from Oxford University in 1974. He has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago. He is co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and has served as President of the Middle East Studies Association. He has written or co-edited ten books, including The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonialism and Resistance, which we’ll be speaking about today. He has written over a hundred scholarly articles on aspects of Middle East history and politics, as well as opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune Vanguardia, The London Review of Books, and The Nation. Rashid Khalidi lived in Beirut, and was deeply engaged in Lebanese politics in the 70s, and during the Lebanese war of 1982. He has played an active role in peace talks and negotiations in the region in the 80s and 90s.

Buy The Hundred Years' War on Palestine here:

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-hundred-years-war-on-palestine-a-history-of-settler-colonial-conquest-and-resistance-rashid-i-khalidi/2901891?ean=9781781259344

If you enjoyed this episode, please do reach out and let me know! It would mean the world if you could rate, follow and subscribe, as well as leaving a review, as it helps more people discover the show.

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On today’s show, I’m joined once again by super talented writer, Etaf Rum. Etaf has written 2 powerful novels, A Woman is No Man, and most recently, Evil Eye. Her work is an intricate look into the lives of immigrant Palestinian families, dealing with serious themes of inter-generational trauma, identity, mental health, belonging, family, motherhood and so much more.  

As we recorded today’s episode, Israel has been relentlessly attacking Gaza, Palestine for over 50 days. 20,000 people have been killed, including 8,000 children and 1.7 million people have been displaced from their homes.  There is an increase in the spread of disease, and people are struggling to find enough food to eat or clean water to drink. With ruthless attacks on hospitals, the healthcare system has collapsed, and premature babies and Palestinian men, women and children are dying without adequate healthcare. Etaf Rum, a Palestinian-American woman herself has been vocally supporting the Palestinian cause and demands for an urgent and permanent ceasefire, but has come under fire by some of her readers, raising huge questions around whether or not readers are truly understanding the stories Etaf is telling around Palesine, the Nakba of 1948, inter-generational trauma and occupation.

On the show this week, Etaf talks about what she has experienced in her own life and in the reader community since October 7th. We talk about literary empathy, performative reading, inter-generational trauma, understanding mainstream narratives about Israel and Zionism and why these are harmful, and how the liberation of us all are inter-linked.

I'm grateful to Etaf for joining me on the show again today, and I hope you take something meaningful away from this conversation.

I'd really appreciate it if you could rate, follow, subscribe and like, as it really helps more people discover my show. Come connect with me on social media - I'd love to hear from you.

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TW: mentions of miscarriage, infertility and grief.

This episode was recorded in late October.

I’m so pleased to be joined by Huma Qureshi on the show this week, talking about her work and her first novel and latest book, Playing Games. Playing Games tells the story of two sisters, Hana and Mira, who like most sisters, love each other deeply but have a relationship that is flawed and complex. Mira, an inspiring playwright, overhears a very private and personal conversation her sister is having with her husband. Mira finds her sister’s words so powerful, they set off the cogs of writers inspiration in her mind, and she writes the scene of a play exploring marriage for a modern-day couple. Huma poses questions about using real life for fiction, and where the boundaries and lines are. Is it ever okay to write about someone else’s life, and what happens if that someone else is your sister? Hana herself is going through a tumultuous time in her marriage, as she experiences loss and deep longing for motherhood.

Huma Qureshi is the award-winning author of four books, including How We Met: A Memoir Of Love and Other Misadventures and the short story collection, Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love, both published to critical acclaim in 2021. In 2022, How We Met was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Non-Fiction award, and Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love was long listed for both The Jhalak Prize and The Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her first book, In Spite of Oceans, received The John C Laurence Award. In 2020, Huma won the Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize, with her story The Jam Maker. Her novel, Playing Games, will be published in November 2023. Huma writes the popular newsletter Dear Huma and teaches a variety of creative writing courses via her website, www.humaqureshi.co.uk

I really hope you love this episode, and as always I'd love to hear from you. 

Please do follow and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and consider leaving me a review. It really helps :)

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On this week’s show, I’m speaking to Palestinian-American writer, Sahar Mustafah about identity, writing, survivor’s guilt, and the current war on Gaza which has led to the killing of over 14,000 Palestinian men, women and children. Her book, The Beauty of Your Face is a stunning family tale of a young woman finding herself and her faith, as she explores her own identity. 

The daughter of immigrants, Sahar Mustafah explores her Palestinian heritage in her writing. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Columbia College where she was a Follett Graduate Scholar. Mustafah is a Willow Books Grand Prize Winner for Code of The West, was named one of the 25 Writers to Watch by The Guild Literary Complex of Chicago, and is a member of Voices Protest and Radius of Arab American Writers. Her debut novel, The Beauty of Your Face, was named a The New York Times Book Review Notable Books of 2020 and a Finalist for the 2021 Palestine Book Award. It was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Award and chosen for Los Angeles Times “United We Read.” Mustafah writes and teaches outside of Chicago.

The Beauty of Your Face tells a uniquely American story in powerful, evocative prose. Afaf Rahman, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, is the principal of a Muslim school in the Chicago suburbs. One morning, a shooter--radicalized by the online alt-right--attacks the school. As Afaf listens to his terrifying progress, we are swept back through her memories, and into a profound and "moving" (Bustle) exploration of one woman's life in a nation at odds with its ideals.

Buy The Beauty of Your Face, here: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-beauty-of-your-face-shortlisted-for-the-palestine-book-award-2021-sahar-mustafah/1261005?ean=9781789559736

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Come, connect with me on social media:

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On this week's show, I'm speaking to Dina Nayeri about the truth. In a growing age of false news, propoganda, smear campaigns and cancel culture, the sanctity of the truth and who gets believed is increasingly important. There is a difference between those who speak the truth, and those whose truth is believed, as sometimes it is the case that those who speak their truth are not believed, and the consequences are dire. We have seen this play out worldwide for centuries for women, refugees, people of colour and black people, among other minority and vulnerable groups especially. 

On this week's show, we unpack why some people are more believable than others, the role of the media, and the state's eagerness to push out certain narratives, even if they are not true. This has especially been the case recently since the increased attacks on Gaza, where news outlets have recalled harmful and incorrect statements.

Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and two books of creative nonfiction, Who Gets Believed? (2023) and The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), winner of the Geschwister Scholl Preis and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Kirkus Prize, and Elle Grand Prix des Lectrices, and called by The Guardian “a work of astonishing, insistent importance.” Her essay of the same name was one of The Guardian’s most widely read long reads in 2017, and is taught in schools and anthologized around the world. A 2019-2020 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, Dina has won a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, the O. Henry Prize, and Best American Short Stories, among other honors. Her work has been published in 20+ countries and in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Granta, and many other publications.  Her short dramas have been produced by the English Touring Theatre and The Old Vic in London.  She is a graduate of Princeton, Harvard, and the Iowa Writers Workshop.  In autumn 2021, she was a Fellow at the American Library in Paris. She is currently working on plays, screenplays, and her upcoming publications include The Waiting Place, a nonfiction children’s book about refugee camp, Who Gets Believed, a creative nonfiction book, and Sitting Bird, a novel. She has recently joined the faculty at the University of St. Andrews. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and consider rating and leaving a review. Also, connect with me on social media - I'd love to hear from you!

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This week on the show, I’m joined by two book-lovers, book bloggers and activists to talk about some really important issues: Ola Abou and Ilham Essalih.  We're talking about what books we should read to further understand the war on Gaza, and the war in Syria, and how the movements for liberation in Palestine and Syria are intertwined. 

At the time of recording (16th October), we were on day 9 of Israel’s war against Gaza, with the official death toll having reached nearly 3,000, 700 of whom are children and babies. For 9 days, the besieged Gaza strip has faced relentless attacks and a total land, sea and air blockade, cutting off its supplies of water, food and fuel to 2.3 million people. The situation is beyond horrendous, as hospitals struggle to cope with the injured amid a lack of medical supplies and doctors, and communities are being ordered to leave their homes due to imminent attacks. Even while leaving, passages that were previously declared as safe, have been attacked, sparing no one. There are also increasing reports on attacks in the occupied West Bank, and arrests of over 70 people. 

 The death toll has now exceeded well over 4,000 people, and schools and hospitals have been ruthlessly attacked. 

Unfortunately, Palestine is not the only place impacted by Israel at the moment. Israel has been bombing Syria, which since 2011, has been in a devastating state of war and crisis. Twelve years after protesters in Syria first demonstrated and rose up against the four-decade rule of the Assad family, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and nearly thirteen million people—more than half the country’s prewar population—have been displaced. Amid war, the Syrian people are suffering an economic crisis, and a massive earthquake at the start of 2023 cast much of the population in the north into further despair.

Follow Ola and Ilham on social media:

Ola: www.instagram.com/slowreadingola 
Ilham: www.instagram.com/ilhamreads

Books mentioned in this episode:

Palestine:
Classics

• Ghassan Kanafani: Men in the Sun, Palestine’s Children 
• Emile Habiby: The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist 
• Halim Barakat: Days of Dust (was meant to mention this book but I forgot but it’s really good!)
• Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish

Non-fiction/memoirs: 

Palestine writers:

• Edward Said: The Question of Palestine + his memoir Out of Place 
• Mourid Barghouti: I Saw Ramallah 
• Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (history)

Jewish writers:

• Ilan Pappe: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine + Ten Myths About Israel 
• Avi Shlaim: Three Worlds 
• Massoud Hayoun: When We Were Arabs (forgot to mention this, it’s another memoir about Jews from Arab lands, really essential for understanding Zionism)

Contemporary:

• Isabella Hammad: The Parisian
• Adania Shibli: Minor Detail 
• Ahlam Bsharat: Trees of the Absentees + Code Name: Butterfly 
• Mohammed El-Kurd: Rifqa (poetry) 

Syria:

-In Praise of Hatred, Khaled Khalifa
-What Strange Paradise, Omar El Akkad
-The Middle East Crisis Factory, Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash
-We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, Wendy Pearlman
-Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami
-You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, Alaa Abd El-Fattah
-The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy by Yassin al-Haj Saleh
-The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories That Carried Them Through a War by Delphine Minoui

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On today’s show, I’m speaking with powerful story-teller and writer, Etaf Rum. Etaf has written two powerful novels, A Woman is No Man, and most recently, Evil Eye. Her work is an intricate look into the lives of immigrant Palestinian families, dealing with serious themes of inter-generational trauma, identity, mental health, belonging, family, motherhood and so much more. Her work has connected with readers all over the world, evoking deep emotion, and shedding light on the traumas held and lived with every single day, of one of the world’s most persecuted communities – Palestine. I’m so glad she’s my guest today. 

 We talk about the importance of Palestinian stories, intergenerational trauma, mental health, healing, identity, and so much more.

While this conversation is not in light of recent escalations of violence in Palestine, I hope it helps inform and educate, giving insight into the lived reality of Palestinian families.

The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, Etaf Rum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She has a Masters of Arts in American and British Literature as well as undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and English Composition and teaches undergraduate courses in North Carolina, where she lives with her two children.

I hope you enjoy this episode, and would love to hear from you.

Come connect with me on social media:
www.instagram.com/readwithsamia

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On today’s show, I’m speaking with journalist and historian, Lucy Fulford about her non-fiction book, The Exiled. 

In The Exiled, Lucy delves into understanding the Asian expulsion from Uganda in 1972, which saw 80,000 South Asian Ugandans being given just 90 days to leave the country, by the dictator, Idi Amin. She goes way back, uncovering how the British empire led to so many South Asians finding home in Uganda, but how it also impacted the structure of Ugandan society and the impact on black Ugandans. The book is a mixture of Lucy’s own family history, interviews she has undertaken, and copious amounts of research. The book takes us from pre-1972 Uganda, to the expulsion itself and beyond 1972, as countless families in the UK and elsewhere strived to build a new life. This is a really thorough and nuanced exploration of that part of history, also sprinkled with Lucy’s own musings on race, identity. 

Lucy is an experienced multimedia journalist and filmmaker whose work centres on migration, conflict and climate.

After graduating from the University of Bristol with a first-class honours degree in History – writing a dissertation on the Rwandan genocide – she studied media law, shorthand and reporting with the NCTJ and worked as a senior reporter and acting editor of a press agency, covering breaking news, crime and courts for the national press in London. Growing up between cultures has led to an interest in exploring identity and in her book, The exiled, she explores the generational legacy of forced migration, inspired in part by her family history.

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On this week's show, I’m speaking with Kevin Jared Hosein about his novel, Hungry Ghosts. Hungry Ghosts is a remarkable novel set in the 1940s in Trinidad, following the story of two families, vastly different from one another, but whose decisions and actions have devastating consequences. In his book, Kevin explores so much, from race, class, religion, wealth and human dignity, to huge questions around one’s pursuit of escaping the life they don’t want to lead; whether we are the saviours in our own stories, and how the actions of one person or group of people, can have long-lasting impacts on others, spanning generations.

On the show we talk about morally ambiguous characters, learning about stories through gaming, colonialism, class, race and so much more.

Kevin Jared Hosein is a teacher and writer from Trinidad, where he lives and works. He won the Commonwealth writers’ prize in 2018 for his story Passage and he has written two novels for young adults, The Repenters and The Beast of Kukuyo. His first novel for adults, Hungry Ghosts, is set in 1940s Trinidad and concerns the wife of an overseer who goes missing and the attempts by one of his employees to move up in a highly stratified society.

I'd really love to connect with you, and would love to hear your thoughts on the show. Come find me on social media:

www.instagram.com/readwithsamia
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