85/ The Legacy of the Great Lebanon Famine (with Lina Mounzer and Timour Azhari)

This is a conversation with Lina Mounzer and Timour Azhari, repeat guests on the podcast, about the legacy of the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon (1915–1918) and its legacy today.

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Topics Discussed + Resources:

• What was the Great Famine? Causes and Context (Allies blockading from the sea, Ottomans barring grains, role of local elites like Michel Sursock)
• Hunger and Hallucination: Tales from the Great Famine (Lina's talk)
• An Abandoned Village Bears Witness to Lebanon’s Famines – Old and New (Timour's article)
• Parallels to today
• A Hungry Population Stops Thinking About Resistance: Class, Famine, and Lebanon's World War I Legacy
• Is there an amnesia problem in Lebanon? Yes and No
• The sense that history is repeating itself
• Working as a way of coping
• Thinking of leaving and of the established migration routes (belonging, identity, legitimacy etc)
• The role of the diaspora beyond bringing aid
• Across the Rickety Bridge by Farrah Berrou
• Akram Khater's Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Making of a Lebanese Middle Class, 1861-1921
• The gendered component of the famine
• The Megaphone short doc
• Maybe let's eat the rich
• Coexistence as being between rioters and peaceful protesters
• What counts as violence vs non-violence
• What we've inherited from the Lebanese wars (1975-1990)

Recommended Books

Timour:

• On the Road by Jack Kerouack
• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
• Citizen Hariri by Hannes Bauman

Lina:

• Beirut Nightmares by Ghada Samman
• A Month in Siena & The Return by Hicham Matar
• Yes, I am a destroyer by Mira Mattar