In episode five, we are pleased to welcome award-winning author Saeed Teebi who speaks to us about his powerful new book, You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times.
In our annual focus on the power of storytelling, we discuss what it means to be a Palestinian writer in these times, the challenges of writing against dehumanizing narratives, complicity in the attempted erasure of Palestinian life, identity and art through both violence and silence and how imagination, story and writing become profound acts of resistance in a time of genocide.
On the condemnation of Palestinian language and writing, Teebi says:
“In the face of actual violence waged against them, Palestinians are tried and convicted of presumptive violence for their language.Our words are assumed to be code words or dog whistles that mean something else necessarily more nefarious than what we say they mean … The usual language remains available to the rest of the world to use freely. It is only Palestinians and their allies who have been segregated out of it. A linguistic apartheid that applies to us wherever we are, in the same way that the geographic apartheid applies to us in occupied Palestine.”
About today’s guest:
Saeed Teebi is an award-winning writer and lawyer. His debut short story collection, Her First Palestinian, was a finalist for several awards, including the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize. His nonfiction has appeared in The Globe and Mail and The New Quarterly. Born in Kuwait, he resettled in the United States, then Canada. He now lives in Toronto.
Check out his latest book You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times
Transcript of this episode can be accessed at georgebrown.ca/TommyDouglasInstitute.
Image: Saeed Teebi, photography by Sarah Köhler (Used with permission)
Music: Ang Kahora. Lynne, Bjorn. Rights Purchased.
Intro Voices: Ashley Booth (Podcast Announcer); Bob Luker (Tommy)
Courage My Friends podcast organizing committee: Chandra Budhu, Ashley Booth, Resh Budhu.
Produced by: Resh Budhu, Tommy Douglas Institute of Labour and Social Justice and Breanne Doyle, rabble.ca.
Host: Resh Budhu.
