On Motherhood & Memory, Trauma & Survival with Author HALA ALYAN - Highlights

On Motherhood & Memory, Trauma & Survival with Author HALA ALYAN - Highlights

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Novelist · Poet · Psychologist HALA ALYAN
Author of I’ll Tell You When I’m Home: A Memoir

I want to live a life of consequence, and I want to live a life that has stakes in it because that means that things matter to you. I think, in some ways, this memoir was a project of sifting through and excavating the darkest hours, both for me and for the lineage and ancestry that I came from. I think the darkest hours were experienced by so many people I come from who have had to leave places they didn't want to leave. I live in exile and have been forced to leave behind houses, land, cities, and people. Oftentimes, this has happened more than once in a lifetime, so they have carried that trauma. Of course, it plays out intergenerationally in many different ways.

I think it's a time of fear. I don't think I'm alone in that. I am scared for people that I love. I am scared for people who are quite vulnerable. I worry for my students. I am concerned for the places that I feel are engaging in complicity because that will be such a heavy legacy to endure later on, how people, places, and entities comport themselves in moments like this. They will be remembered. There will always be people who remember it.

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home - Author HALA ALYAN on Motherhood & Memory, Trauma & Survival

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home - Author HALA ALYAN on Motherhood & Memory, Trauma & Survival

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Novelist · Poet · Psychologist HALA ALYAN
Author of I’ll Tell You When I’m Home: A Memoir

I want to live a life of consequence, and I want to live a life that has stakes in it because that means that things matter to you. I think, in some ways, this memoir was a project of sifting through and excavating the darkest hours, both for me and for the lineage and ancestry that I came from. I think the darkest hours were experienced by so many people I come from who have had to leave places they didn't want to leave. I live in exile and have been forced to leave behind houses, land, cities, and people. Oftentimes, this has happened more than once in a lifetime, so they have carried that trauma. Of course, it plays out intergenerationally in many different ways.

I think it's a time of fear. I don't think I'm alone in that. I am scared for people that I love. I am scared for people who are quite vulnerable. I worry for my students. I am concerned for the places that I feel are engaging in complicity because that will be such a heavy legacy to endure later on, how people, places, and entities comport themselves in moments like this. They will be remembered. There will always be people who remember it.

Building Worlds Beyond Modernity’s Double Fracture: A Discussion with Azucena Castro & Malcom Ferdinand

Building Worlds Beyond Modernity’s Double Fracture: A Discussion with Azucena Castro & Malcom Ferdinand

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A Discussion with Azucena Castro & Malcom Ferdinand

Ferdinand discusses the “double fracture”—the environmental division of humans from their connection to the biosphere, and the colonial division instantiated by white supremacism and patriarchy. He insists that we not see these two phenomena as separate, rather as intimately connected. This double fracture makes any attempts to solve either environmental violence or colonial violence ineffective. In her foreword to Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecologies, Angela Y. Davis writes that as she read the book, she “recognized how perfectly his conceptualizations illuminate the frameworks we need for both philosophical and popular understandings of our planetary conditions today.” The conversation covers how art, film, and poetry can manifest some of those frameworks, and Azucena takes us into a deep discussion of this and reads two poems in Spanish and then in English translation and has Malcom gloss them for us.