Bringing back common ground (lecture and debate in Brussels)

I will be giving a talk and participating in a debate before an audience of EU and MENA youth hosted by the Friends of Europe (FoE) and the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation (ALF) on 4th and 5th November 2019 in Brussels.

“In an era in which we are facing global issues that demand quick and effective collective action, such as climate change, migration and growing inequalities, both politicians and citizens appear to be distracted and paralysed by polarisation. Trust in the rational and stable middle ground of deliberative party politics is disappearing, with people instead opting for strong emotions, populistic rhetoric and big personalities. Issues related to national identity, cultural values and ethnic origins have been prominent in the political debate worldwide, causing not only political division, but also cultural and social polarisation.

Many governments are unable to respond adequately to the growing social, ethnic and religious conflicts – or oftentimes even foment these tensions. Instead, antagonistic narratives seem to be the only way of conceiving the vote. Societal debate has been hijacked by the more extreme movements that instigate high-tension debates, in which more moderate voices and much needed debates about common concerns such as climate change are losing power and influence.

What is the glue binding us together for the future? What can be done to encourage moderate voices? How can we counter social and political polarisation?”

Berlin als Zentrum des arabischen Exils (A feature report on German TV)

A feature report on the Arab Berlin exile essay was aired on the Kulturzeit program on the German 3sat channel. Click here to watch the video.

“Berlin wird immer mehr zu einem Ort, an dem sich Künstler und Intellektuelle aus den arabischen Ländern zusammenfinden, um das Erbe ihrer Revolution zu retten.”

TV report on the Arab Berlin exile essay

A feature TV report Berlin als Zentrum des arabischen Exils (in German) on the Arab Berlin exile essay was aired on the Kulturzeit program on the German 3sat channel (17 September 2019). The video can be watched below.

“Berlin wird immer mehr zu einem Ort, an dem sich Künstler und Intellektuelle aus den arabischen Ländern zusammenfinden, um das Erbe ihrer Revolution zu retten.”

Exiled in your Room: Reframing Alienation and Rootlessness through the Language of Metaphor (workshop)

Osnabrück University – 10.30-11.30am, 5 August 2019

Edward Said wrote that exile is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.” Additionally, exile transpires irrespective of one being banished from the homeland, as the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once put it, “Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.”

With this backdrop, the workshop will seek to crystalize the phenomenon of exile, its toxins and “antidotes,” by developing the language of metaphors that can add linkages between the individual and the public, individual and the narrative, individual and the world. Globally, the metaphor has come under assault by the forces of literalism allied with declining education standards, distraction as a modus operandi, and neoliberal modernity that not only has little patience for the poetical intangibles and non-metricised languages, but has discarded vision and meaning in favour of addition and acceleration that operates through consumer desires, individual anxieties, emotional manipulation, and false promises that repeatedly drag humans away from the realm of communal authenticity.

The metaphor when employed compellingly in language, can add depth to the dizziness of exile, inject a re-perception of social problems, furnish a re-analogisation of the world, and kindle a reconstruction of imagination capacities needed for political thinking that can aid in a type of discerning navigation through a political and moral quagmire.

The workshop is part of the “Refugees and Home-Making in Osnabrück” event that merges academia and art and will be held at Osnabrück University from 5th until 7th August 2019.

Visually mapping Czech philosopher Václav Havel’s political thought

I will be giving a workshop session on 19 July at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen on how to visually map Czech philosopher Václav Havel’s political thought into a working methodology and reconceptualisation of his line of thinking for specific milieus in today’s Arab cities. This is part of the third annual conference on Private Pieties: Mundane Islam and New forms of Muslim Religiosity that will explore methods and concepts in undersanding the changing role of the religious, civic, and secular in Muslim societies.

EuroMeSCo Annual Conference 2019 (Barcelona)

It was an intense but rewarding conference of 140 experts from around the Mediterranean at the annual EuroMeSCo conference in Barcelona, 18 and 19 June 2019. The event reconfirmed how much the Mediterranean world needs to work with each other to fix the endless overlapping problems plaguing the countries hugging the splendid middle sea. Climate change was voted the most pressing issue and the one most likely to bring all countries on board to tackle it. The paper I presented was titled “Does the digital realm fragment civil society?” I am working towards publishing it with EuroMesco by the end of the year.

Arab leaders, what do you want?

A poem published in the Arab literary culture magazine, Asameena. It asks a simple question to Arab tyrants, what do you want?

“Dignity before Bread” (Image by Adriana Vidano).

You want it all.

You want nothing,

You want to brandish authority without legitimacy,

Elections without accountability,

Sing the merits of citizenship without citizens,

Praise civil society without the civil or society,

Boast of human rights without humans with rights,

Demand efficiency without transparency,

Hope for a professional press without its freedom,

Desire a robust judiciary without integrity,

Can one attain happiness without justice?

You dream of your universities entering the ranks of the most high, but critical thought will not qualify.

You summon gender equality without women,

You want to enforce religion without the divine reckoning,

You want to build mosques without a soul,

Churches without a voice,

You are all ambition without humility,

You are malls without public seats, malls without alternatives.

The speculative future without the touchable present,

You want the reap without the sow,

You want the glory of history without its lessons,

You want the glory of history without its preservation,

You want the glory of history without its inevitable equaliser – mortality.

You want the west without the east, the east without the rest.

Your world is a world of glistening buildings, solid bridges, and long highways, but no people.

You see no people, you hear no people, you know no people.

You are the slow release of anesthesia spreading through the decrepit hospital corridors under the rapid flicker of fluorescent lights.

~Amro Ali (Tunis, 31 July 2018)