Legacy of the Great Lebanon Famine w/ Lina Mounzer and Timour Azhari (Part 2)

This is a part 2 of 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.

Twitter + Instagram @ firethesetimes

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