Nation of Strangers
For our first live recording, we host Turkish writer and political commentator Ece Temelkuran to discuss her brave and beautiful new book, Nation Of Strangers. In a world unmaking our sense of safety and belonging, Ece offers something we desperately need: a vision of the future we can create together and requiring all of us. Her most powerful insight? The unhomed among us aren't simply victims of our times. They're pioneers, already carrying the know-how we need to build our new home together.
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Transcript
Welcome to How to Save Democracy. The podcast for people who love democracy and really don't love dictatorship, but who also know that democracy needs to change fundamentally if it's going to survive. I'm John Alexander.
And I am Omezine Khalifa. And we'd like to welcome you to our first ever live recording as we hosted Ajay Temel Quran in London to launch her brave and beautiful new book, Nation of Strangers. We were honored to be joined by the legendary actress, Juliet Stevenson, who started us off by reading from AJ's book.
Berlin, July 2024. Dear stranger, the truth is the shortest distance between two strangers. That will be humanity's only remaining defense line to hold against the political and natural disasters in the new, un homed century. Following everything that's happened over the last two weeks and after a few days of silent thinking, I finally wrote these sentences in my diary this morning. I was thinking of Maria and me being two spots and the definition of a line in geometry being the shortest distance between two points in space. Also, a few other things happened recently that I have to tell you about so that the sentence makes proper sense. I was invited to a party. It was a small gathering of upper middle class Germans, a group of well educated white collar progressives who had all participated in the recent antifascist demonstrations. After we drank enough, the host suggested we play a board game called Secret Hitler. I'm not at all a game person, but I found this one exceptionally alienating. The game starts with players choosing from sealed envelopes in which they have their party membership cards. You're either a liberal or a fascist and you're not allowed to know the other player's political identities. One of the players receives a Hitler card and must keep that a secret. Before the game begins, everybody closes their eyes, and only the fascists open theirs to see each other. In another round of closed eyes, the fascists make a hand sign to inform Hitler who is on his team. From then on, it's a politically blind environment where everyone tries to manipulate each other to pass more liberal or fascist laws to get rid of the other team. As opposed to real life, the fascists follow the rules, and there is clarity both in victory and in defeat. I assume that Americans must have invented the game's terminology because there are no socialists or any party on the left, and everything is a nicely defined stark binary. The game is far fetched also because none of the shady real life details are represented. Crucially, neither the big capital supporting the fascists or the fact that fascism appears when everybody's eyes are wide open. In reality, you can watch the period of the grand normalization of political shamelessness and the fascists announce themselves proudly. What made the game even more morally problematic was the real life context or rather the dismissal of it. As we played, Trump was already walking to power with easy and confident steps, promising the mass deportation of immigrants. The Liberals were busy repeating the same line to themselves, oh, he wouldn't dare. The UK Home Office, run by conservatives, had shared a gleeful post on social media showing immigrants being arrested and put on planes with a statement that could have easily read, first deportation. Yay. The Italian prime minister, Maloney, famous for taking the lead in hostile European policies against refugees, was making deals with African countries to stop the flow of humans by detaining them in rented concentration camps, a policy met with enthusiasm by some European countries. All of this is to say we are already in the game, not playing but being played. Or should I say the game is happening to us. So many lives have been ruthlessly played out by the different shades of fascism, lives now left looking like torn, tattered cardboard. Still, too many of us are pawns, paralyzed by shock before the limitless shamelessness of the new world order as it is put together. As I left the party, I thought we needed a more up to date political board game, Betray. Since too many lives are being turned into insignificant specks scattered and dispersed on the whims of ruthless political trends and environmental disasters, a game asking us who we are ready to betray, to leave behind for our own survival, would be more plausible. Who would you sell out to survive? Because there will come a time when our survival will appear as though it depends on who we are ready to leave behind, either yet or later. When performing the dark art of survival, my dear stranger, you can never know beforehand who will dare to hold you when everybody starts to fall. If you have already experienced such moments of survival, you must have learned that virtue is tested in extreme conditions. Nobody is a coward until courage means you must be brave enough to hold another even when falling yourself. Once you've seen the dark side of humanity and survived, it is not easy to sit down and play pretend games like Secret Hitler and act like it's just for fun. Once you have seen it, you cannot unlearn this crucial information about humans. Even when you dare to think of yourself as secure again, you still view people distrustfully, perhaps just as a precaution against future disappointment. That is where the deep solitude of strangers stems from. The stranger becomes disinterested in those who have not endured a similar test of survival. This solitude can be shared only by those whose bodies, like litmus paper, have been dipped in the acid of survival and been irreversibly and fundamentally changed by it.
So we're gonna get into this conversation now, and and I I just wanted to share one little bit that really spoke to me, again, just before we go into it. Edjo, you wrote, the truly tiring thing is to watch those who believe that some patching up here and there will keep it together. Their stubborn refusal to see what's coming for all of us weighs on our shoulders. And you do right just after that. Of course, there is some sort of light there at the end of the tunnel, but not before we acknowledge our reality. And so where I want to start this evening, and then I'm sure Omezine will take us a bit further into it by challenging you from the other side. But take us into our reality. You've been writing about this for the last ten years, not just this book.
Where are we and where are all of we in this moment? Before getting into the really dark stuff, I wanted to say two things. Thank you for coming. And, Juliet, thank you. Finally, I am convinced that this is a very good book. It was amazing listening from your voice, my my my my my words. Where are we? We already have been in a very dark place since quite a while. It's just that it took western countries to accept the fact. And after Trump came to power, and now that word that I have been using, since ten years has become fashionable fascism. But then we have been here for quite a long time. What has changed, I think, today is that it once, for for once, everybody's even if they do not acknowledge it in, you know, clear terms, they are feeling it. They are sensing it. There's another bit in the book that I say we are already mourning in future tense. We are not mourning for things we have lost, but we are mourning for things that we are going to lose, be it democracy, be it this planet, be it all the good things that we have among people, so such as solidarity, joy of life, and so on. So, I think people started to feel that. So with this book, as opposed to how to lose a country, let's say, I wanted to give people something to feel less lonely because I think finally, more or less, we are on the same page. You don't have to call it fascism, but you know that something horrible is happening or is about to happen unless we altogether stop it. So this book is this this time, after ten years of writing about fascism, the solution to it with Together, This is more like a antidote to loneliness and of of this exhaustion that we are going through, moral and emotional exhaustion. And, also, I wanted to peel pea to tell people that we can do still do this together, but, just be brave enough, to acknowledge the reality that we you know, we should drop the act now. We should drop the act, of pretending that it's going to go back to normal. It's we're going to go back to the world order that as it was. Recently am I doing too much now? Okay.
I can go Oh, Omasin is the next one to come in, so your question is political. I can go on forever.
Recently, in Davos, economic forum, I don't know if you followed it, but there was this phenomenal, you know, it was very groundbreaking, so to speak, this acceptance of the reality. Canadian prime minister, in a very somber voice, said, I have to break it to you. There is no return to old world order order. Now we are going to live in the logic of jungle, and so on. And then as it is, a tradition, he made, Gramsci references and so on. The masters. Yeah. But those references have been so overused already since ten years by people who are aware of what had been happening. So, anyways, even the establishment itself, actually, liberal democratic establishment, let's call them, has admitted that they are broken. So that's that's where we are at the moment. Even the establishment itself is cannot see another way other than admitting the reality, which is this is all. It's going to be a new world now. Please go ahead. Yes. I'm gonna
I'm gonna just roll a little bit back to the loneliness you started to talk about. Like, the the book, how I definitely felt less lonely when I started to read it with the this experience of creating or calling it a nation of strangers. While a stranger by essence is this person that you don't know and is kind of lonely and, in their own word. But at the same time, calling it nation is creating this borderless group of people, that are connecting together. And so I was wondering in in in your question, John, when you said, where are we right now? And the fact that you're not asking when are we and trying to connect back to history and, like, events that happened in the past, but grounding us in space that lead us back to this feeling. Right? That how are we feeling right now? Because when you look at the space is you use your senses. You look, what are we looking at right now? What are we listening to? And how are we feeling in our body? And I feel what you're naming a nation of strangers and what you mentioned about the rule based order, international word order that is now acknowledged even by most liberal progressive leaders is that there is a sense of grief that we're not calling it like this. But I guess all the, quotes to Gramsci, etcetera, it's it's, the time of monsters. Right? Like, the the old world is dying and the new world is not born yet. And so it's when the monsters arise, even though Gramsci has never said exactly that. It's that we're grieving the world we thought we were living in. And and I would love to hear more about that aspect because I think we're all kind of in shock. So it's a natural human being reaction to feel like what's happening right now Mhmm. And to be in denial. And and a lot of people have been in denial that you're saying that we're not in that time anymore, not in that space anymore. Mhmm. So there are other steps that, I guess, happen after denial. It's not linear. But if we are grieving there, we all heard about the stages of grief and the anger and the negotiation and the depression and the acceptance that come and and and kind of have us a bit a lot actually power feeling powerless. Mhmm.
Let's talk about the strain concept of strangers so that will be an answer to your question. Nation of strangers, of course, you know, there's this talk about nation states are falling and so on. So I wanted to call it a nation because I wanted to tell people that we are in majority. Strangers are in majority. Who are strangers? Who are they? We are we are I'm not talking about foreigners only, immigrants, refugees, exiles, asylum seekers. I'm not talking about them necessarily, not only them. Or what I'm telling is, okay, they are they may be they might be the stranger, but you are also a stranger too. You feel unhomed in this world because there is so much cruelty that you are witnessing. You feel like you do not belong to this humanity that you're seeing on the screen. So you are morally unhomed. You're politically un homed as well because there is this moral outrage political outrage in you in all of us, and we do not have a political home, a political party that we can, inhabit with those or we can represent this outrage through. So that makes you politically homeless. We are also becoming spiritually homeless as well because language is being stolen by AI, this in inhuman entity, and there is an inhuman entity speaking the human language. So who are we then if we are not language? So we have to deal with that that unhomeless as well. So there are several ways of being unhomed in the world, and there is of course actual physical homelessness. People lose their homes, people lose their countries to rising water as well. So all these unhomed, people, when they come together actually they are the majority. They are the biggest population in the world. So I think we should feel that and we should feel the power of that when facing today's reality. Understanding today's reality or where we are is one thing. The problem is the crisis or the poly crisis as they call it is so complicated, so massive, so incomprehensively enormous that we do not want to understand it anymore, because we know that we cannot deal with it. And many people, understandably, by the way, want to numb themselves. They want to, you know, hide from the reality. That's why I don't say, you you deniers. No. Denial is a very, very human reaction to what's happening in the world, to Gaza, to all the mad people that's, you know, running United States or Europe and so on. So denial is understandable. So what I'm trying to do to tell that dear stranger, we can do this. We can understand it, but also I'm trying to give them a new language to deal with this reality. Because fascism, sorry, more than anything works in a, with a very specific kind of emotional machine. It's like an electric seesaw. It cuts our ties to our countries, to each other, to the grand humanity, to our future. It ties cuts all the ties, this massive emotional machine of fascism. So I wanted to give another machine that would work to reconnect those ties because this is what I this is what all we all need. We can understand the crisis, but to manage it, to live in it, in that uncertainty, you need others. So I wanted to tell people that you are a majority. There are many people like you. Just talk to them in the language of strangers, and then you will see that you are part of a bigger, very great nation, and that's nation of strangers.
I I have to I just wanna underline the the the the sort of reframe that I felt reading this book after reading your others, that that the the shift of the line of us and them, you you you brought me in as as part of the Nation of Strangers. In in a way where I felt in in some ways reading How to Lose a Country, it feels like a a warning from from you to us, from from someone different to me to me. With with Nation of Strangers, you're going, no. No. No. This is all of us now. Like,
come on in. See yourself on this side of that line. I wanted to turn the tables as well. You are a white man, Cambridge, of course.
You Sorry.
You are the guy everybody hates. You know that. Right? Yeah.
That's my role on this stage. Carry on.
No. No. The thing is I love him, by the way. He's he's a very dear friend. The thing is, when I say I love you, I I got distracted. The thing is, yeah, I wanted to tell people that all these homeless people, refugees, immigrants, exiles, asylum seekers, all these people who had lost home are the ones that is carrying that are carrying your wisdom with them. It's the wisdom of survival and also staying humane during survival. You might be a white guy from Cambridge but then soon you will need that survival, morality of survival, that wisdom of survival, in your life. Everybody will. Very soon, I think. And when you when I speak of survival, don't think that, like, you know, everybody's going to die or anything. It's not like that. But, we will have to we will have to face the fact that we might might find ourselves in situations that we have to protect ourselves, our career, our money, you know, our life, very small life, and so on. So those people who had lost home, who are unhomed in this world, the strangers, have this knowledge. Omasin can tell you a lot about that. She had to leave Tunisia as well. So
Yeah. I mean, you I think you named so many things I experienced in the book. I told John that it's like you shed light on small worlds that were inside of me that were completely in the dark. Because what what happens when you cannot go back to what you call home, your home country, your home, like the house, you know, where you grew up. It's like you have to act normal. And I think you said it in the book. Like, one of your interlocutors said, be normal people. Right? Like, you have to wrap that up, like, close it up, close the door, and just carry on. And with naming all of these parts that are part of the human being experience, you made it normal to me to carry all those parts as well. On top of the normality, I also carry all this experience of you call it wisdom. I don't know. You you kind of make me feel happy about myself. I carry all this wisdom, but actually there these are terrible experiences that I, as a person and so many other have to go through when, you know, you participate in building a democracy and then you dedicate ten years of your life as a person, but as a collective as well. And so many of my friends and, and, and colleagues, and even people I don't know are in prison, because they spoke up, because they, oppose the new dictatorship that is installing, itself right now. And in Turkey, you have even a longer tradition of academics, of intellectuals, of artists like yourself, who have been spoke speaking about, you know, the authoritarian regime, and at the same time, having to bear the consequences of every all the values that in liberal democracy, you guys have been like, it's a normality for you, but for us, it's a struggle. Like, freedom of speech, like, believing in institution and criticizing them when they don't work anymore. Well, this country has just
had to go to court so that the, people who are resisting for Palestine, to prove that those people are not terrorists. So you're not in a very great situation either. Let's make it when I say we're finally on the same page, I'm talking about these things. It you know, I was called an exile. There's a bit of that in the, book. By the way, the book is very personal, part of it. It's very personal, and I tell my personal story. And John knows about this for ten years. There's this word stuck to me, exile, exile, exiled, you know, writer, exiled thinker, and so on. I think that word, was there not for me, but for the western societies. Because when that word is there, exile journalist, exile writer, then the western countries feel good about themselves. They feel like, oh, we're still the safe haven for these people. So So it wasn't for me. It was for them. And now I am rejecting that word since ten years, but now very actively because it gives too much credit to Europe. It gives too much credit to The United States. And, also, there is the moral factor, you know, when there are so many refugees pushed back to their death in the Mediterranean, it is absolutely ridiculous that I am giving these spaces and these spotlights. And tell me your story. It's it's it's a basic, exotic thing, the damsel in distress, story, kinda. So, yeah, it's good that you said that, you know, those words. Of course, you have the wisdom. All of us who are unhomed, and I'm sure there are some Turkish or Kurdish, people in the audience, of course, we have the wisdom because we survived losing home, which is the one of the biggest traumas an individual can go through, and we still stayed humane enough to come together this evening to create some beauty. You stayed as a beautiful human being. And many people, especially after I wrote How to Lose a Country, asked me about hope because many people think that we are going to survive on hope. No. We're going to survive on our determination to create beauty, to create moral beauty, political beauty, aesthetic beauty, emotional beauty. So, yeah, this is the wisdom you have. Be proud. Be a proud stranger in a stranger's island, island of strangers.
I want to come back into this conversation about, coming together to create beauty, which I think is the core of your prescription. But before the before we go there, I just want to go a little moment into the question of how did we get here. Partly and you write in the book about an experience at Davos at the World Economic Forum. And and, obviously, we we have the context at the moment of the of the Epstein revelations and so on. And so I'd love you maybe to just say a word about those experience and how you're reacting to Epstein and all of this. Yeah. But, also, I my sense is that you're you would go a lot deeper than that in in in in answers to the question, how did we get here?
There is a story in the book, among the very funny stories. This is I think this was the funniest and the most painful to write because, I was together with very filthy, rich, tech bros on top of mountains in Alp on the Alp Mountains in a ultra, ultra, ultra luxurious, luxurious resort. And then they told about their future plans. And the funny thing about their future plans is that humans are are not included in these plans. There is no politics in their world. There are no social movements in their world. Democracy? Excuse me. What? Like, you know,
so it's a funny thing. So after two days, I I I I May may I just read the little section? Yeah. Sure. So I just wrote, finally, he asked me, you know why they do what they do? Money, power? I asked back. No, he said. All these tech bros know that the future will not be human, and it is just that they want to get there first. That's it. To be the first. They do not know what is ahead, and they do know and they do know that they don't. They're like adolescents setting the house on fire just to see how the flames will look. It's as simple as that. Suddenly and absurdly for the first time, I saw the terrifyingly bottomless emptiness of the entire game.
Yeah. This was one of the good guys who gave me the inside info. So yeah. And then I realized that, after two days, I couldn't write anything. I couldn't say anything because it was so dark what I've seen. And if I told about this, I I felt like nobody would believe me because it's too crazy. It's absolutely too ridiculous what I've seen. Anyway, so and I wrote this sentence. If you stare at the dark for too long, the eye loses the will to see the light. So look at the light. Look at the light. So when you ask how did we come here or where are we, We all know how dark it is. But how did we come here? You know, I have a explanation for that. That is mostly the criticism of capitalism. But, do we have to talk about that? Not now. I'm like, I think part of me rejects to talk about that because this is a very nice moment, this book wants to do, wants to give people the the the not the courage necessarily, but the will, more will, of to create beauty. So I don't want to talk about that much. But then very very briefly, you know, it's going to be fast forward, so listen very carefully. We all thought that fascism was buried in the battlefields of second world war. And we thought that, you know, once we buried the Nazism, fascism disappeared, whereas it actually embedded itself in the ideology of neoliberalism. So at the heart of capitalism or current form of it, neoliberalism, there is fascism. But all the people who talk about fascism, and this was, intentionally made, you know, to look like that, they wanted, you to think that fascism is Nazism. It comes with uniforms and military boots. It doesn't. It sometimes comes with hoodies, which is the case today. So, and many people when they were criticizing, the rising far right or when they were criticizing the lack of democracy, they didn't want to touch upon capitalism. But as Marx Hockenheimer once said, if you cannot talk about capitalism, you have to shut up about fascism. So this is my general analysis. So you can understand why I am not in the mainstream media because mainstream media wants to hear what you said in the very beginning. They want to hear these quick fixes. Like, we can, you know, get back to democracy if we can get just get rid of Trump. If we can get just do this. No. It won't happen like that. And what Canadian prime minister said actually was this. And finally, unfortunately, very belatedly, they admitted this. And there will be no liberal democracy. There will be a better democracy, but there won't be that democracy. And what you are trying to do, what amazing what all of us are trying to do to get to that real democracy. So I'm done. I'm not talking about the city.
I want to talk about nice Should I take since the it's the next question, Omasin. What do you think? No. I I'm very happy with that. I mean, just for context, folks, I've spent most of the last five years being criticized by Ece for for for being for being to stare at the light and not talk about the darkness enough. So I've I've just been fully ripped tables reversed and put in my place. Yeah. Let's talk about the light.
Let's talk about the light. No. Seriously. I I do believe that because because I keep saying this, we are on the same page, and I know how exhausted all we are. I am. And the only way I could find while writing this book, to heal my exhaustion is to learn to to look at the light each time when I get dark. And when I say light, obviously, I don't mean in religious way. The light is in other people. The other night, I saw, you know, two nights in a row, I took I saw two women on the street at night shouting exactly the same sentence in London. I am exhausted. They were screaming and I thought, yeah, this is the human condition. It is the human condition. And what I wanted to say that you're exhausted because you're feeling homeless. You know, you don't have to lose your home to feel homeless. You are feeling homeless in this world. You are feeling stranger to this world. And there is nowhere in this world that holds you, that allows you to fall back. And I understood that the sense of home after losing my home, I understood that the sense of home or the definition of home is people holding you even if their hands are full. And people should feel that, that they are part of a I don't want to say community, but they are part of a network, let's say, that holds them. And that's on that's the only way they will feel at home, and they will find the courage and the strength to create beauty. Any kind of beauty, moral, political, aesthetic, or emotional beauty. Yes. By the way, I am not saying sometimes I say these things, like, we need kindness, we need compassion, human love. And then I feel like, okay. These people perhaps do not know where I'm coming from. I'm coming from hardcore political theory. But then when I use these words, it feels like I'm I'm talking like those gurus, like, you know, love. You know? Let's hug trees and so on. No. I am trying to say that we need a moral transformation, even a moral revolution, and then the new politics will trickle down from that moral transformation. Because many people think that we if you could, you know, change few things in the political mechanism, things will change. No. It won't change. Because what is wrong in today's world is the fundamental definition of human that has been imposed on us by neoliberalism. We are all defined as selfish, self centered bastards, And we're feeling unhomed in that definition. That's why we are exhausted because it's morally this entire world is exhausting in that sense. So we want to feel like humans. We want to feel beautiful. And that's why I wanted to do what I want to do with this book. You are beautiful. You are beautiful, and you know things, and, you know, you have to feel at home. Maybe not with this cruelty in the world, but you have to feel at home with each other. Because you said in the beginning, yeah, the definition of home. Home is other people. End of story. There is no perhaps there might be no place. And I hope none of you will have to go through that, but people, many people, are you know, they do not have a place to go back to even. So hope becomes people for them. And I think this will be the human condition very soon. We will have to understand that. And once we understand that, we can be humble enough to accept our reality, which is we are all in the survival mode. You don't have to be, you know, running in the streets to survive. You are in your survive in survival mode in your office. Sometimes your survival depends on stepping on the other one. That makes you, you know, you know, that brings the question of morality of survival. And that that's why I keep on talking about beauty. If we know that there are other people who are choosing beauty over this morality, this ugly morality that we are imposed, we are we have been forced to live, then they might have the courage to be more beautiful. Because I think what we need is this courage to drop the act, accept that we are in a survival mode, and then decide and be determined to survive together by keeping ourselves as beautiful human beings.
Yeah. And I think in in your experiences describing this feeling where the state actually of being unhomed is your experience with people who helped you along the way, which I totally identify with, which is also in total opposition with the societal norms of neoliberal societies who tells us that we are individuals who can only survive by being against each other, competing with each other, not helping each other, that we have all so much to deal with in our own lives that we cannot look at someone who needs our support. But so it's all interconnected. Right? Like, when John asks about why did we get here and you, and you say, okay, we shouldn't be talking about that. But actually the conclusions you come up with, which is the political concept of solidarity, but I think you better even define it. You give it even another word. It's more humane in the book. And I would love to you to hear to to hear about it, is that the solution actually has been lived in our experience of being welcomed and supported in our experience of being unhomed. So it's like we are precursors of what the society or the next step Exactly. Of society could be. Yes. Exactly.
And in the book, there are many beautiful people that you're going to meet along the way. There's Maria, this woman, Romanian woman who sells homeless magazine in on the street. And there is Susana, who's a homeless lady, Germany. She actually, last week, had a home finally after years of being homeless. There's Ayad, Syrian young Syrian man. There's Zico, another young Syrian man. These people, although they are, going through far more difficult things than I do, they have been my true home. And I'm not just saying this to be nice or it's not just, you know, beautiful words. I really mean it. There were really difficult times, that I struggled in Berlin. It's in the book. And Ayad, who is who doesn't have a job at the moment, who is living in a interesting place, who who who's living in the most uncertain, you know, conditions ever, he's the guy who cheers me up with a very, very dark humor, but he's the only one who can do that. Like, you know, how are we going to commit suicide? Let's do this. Let's do that. So by by humorizing it, we we we make it, what do you call it, obsolete. So yeah. Because, you know, I'm constantly on these stages and nobody really asks me the actual questions. You know, we're talking about politics, human condition, but I am living that in that human condition. You know being unhomed is being precursors of humanity. Exactly strangers are the precursors of humanity. So I those people who are going through that condition, that human condition, are the people that I am speaking in this language, smoking a cigarette and getting depressed with and then laughing about it. Zico, another friend in Hamburg, who really did the actual road, like, you know, through Mediterranean and so on and so forth. He finally survived, and he's a, you know, he's a theater person, theater producer. He he told me that this is how I got into this circle of people. He told me his story because I'm from that part of the world in detail, like, horrible details. And then, at the end of the I'm listening. And then in the end, he said, of course, I don't tell this to Germans. And then I said, why don't you tell it to Germans? They would be traumatized. So I think that language, that humble, beautiful, truthful language should be our language because we are not so different. Yes. We are more sick living more secure lives, perhaps. But at the very bottom of it, we're all surviving, and our language should be as humble, as truthful, as funny,
and as compassionate, I think. Yeah. I think you may you you make me think about this notion of safety. Right? Like, what is safe enough to share that wouldn't alienate people's vision or, like, how they perceive us as human beings as equals. Mhmm. So you you you learn how to what to hide and what to what to share. But at the same time, like, it's also questioning what is safe for someone who has is still home to watch, to listen to. And and I can also relate in, like, if you you feel safe enough in your life and the only trauma you see the only sorry. But it's trauma enough to watch children being killed, in the Palestinian genocide or in Iran and the Iranian revolution, like people dying and knowing and and and not knowing exactly what's happening and and other horrible crimes in Minnesota and other places. And at some point, it's too much. It's overwhelming. So you have still the choice to turn it off. But what do you do with all the feelings of being traumatized? And how can you shift the sense of safety where people could say, okay, I empathize enough and, like, I wanna do something about this.
Minneapolis is a very good example to talk about because it is micronation of strangers. What had happened there, what what what recently happened there had been happening in other parts of the world, in Tunis. I was in Tunis. We were together in Tunis, by the way, during the uprising. It happened in Tahrir. It happened in Gezi uprising, in several uprisings, exactly the same things. But then when it happens in The United States, of course, everybody knows about it. We all know the details and so on. What happened there was absolutely amazing, and I didn't know I wouldn't imagine that the world would prove me right so quickly after publishing this book because people came together as strangers, and they protected each other from, violence, from state violence. They protected their home, and they protected their sense of home, which is even more important, I think. And they told the world that we are at home only when strangers are at home. So this was amazing. So what they did was to hold each other when their hands were full. So they act they literally performed the thing, they performed the reality or the ideal that I am explain telling about in the book. So that's why I'm always also saying that it's coming closer and closer. And in this country there are so many people who protected the foreigners when they were being deported. They tried to protect it. But speaking of watching the reality, there is this, I think, wrong perception about, about those who watch. Many people think that reality is harder to live in, whereas watching it is easier. Actually, it's exactly the opposite. I've been a journalist, so I've seen a lot of horror stuff, like, from torture to war, you know, you name it because I did journalism in Middle East, so worst of worst. And I know that within reality, there is dignity, there is resistance, there is joy, there is faith in each other, there is hope, everything that is beautiful. Otherwise, they couldn't have survived many of the things. So when you are watching, you don't have those things. And there is always I say in together, like, you know, we are told to protect ourselves from reality, to be safe. That is another moral mistake that has been or moral wrong that has been imposed on us. No. Reality has the cure in itself. Whatever is happening in reality, disastrous, horrible, terrible, it also has the cure. There is poetic, there's something poetic in reality, that will cure you if you are if you just can take it one step further to get closer to reality or be in the reality. Because, it's not safe or it's there is not really safety when you try to protect yourself because you are ruining your humanity while doing it because you're feeling helpless, because you're an audience. You cannot do anything, and that's taking a lot from you more than being endangered. That that is that is, that is a moral crime that you're committing on yourself because you're not allowing yourself to experience the poetry that is happening in that reality even if that reality is, horrible.
I I keep coming back to the way you're
Thank you.
I keep coming back to the way you're shifting the line, the us and them line.
Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah.
With the language of that we talk, the language speaking the language of survival, inviting those who look like me and sound like me into that conversation.
I don't want to other you.
And challenging maybe us to come into that conversation. And with this, the idea that actually the solidarity of those who watch and that there is a powerlessness outside of the moment. I wanted to share a little bit my favorite words that you've ever written actually. Really? I have read pretty much every word you've written, I think. So this is from the end of Ed Che's book Together, of which I have a very old, shabby edition. Yeah. There's a new edition with a new foreword. But I insisted that all her books be all all three all three of her major books be be, I'm saying the wrong things. All three in this series be here tonight, so you can get all of them. But this this these are my favorite words. You write that you write that to be disappointed in humankind is such a banal reaction, and that such heartbreak requires no labor at all. To love other humans is not a broken hearts club. It is a philosophical and political responsibility that should be worked on with all the faculties of the mind sometimes pushing our mental and emotional skills to the limit. It is a perpetual political action and a moral stance that is not for the faint hearted. It is the most serious invitation to challenge the bloody history of humankind. Sort of my last question for you for now is just to take us back into what you're starting to tiptoe into, I think, with Minneapolis, where you are taking us from that that very personal, very immediate one to one connection that you insist on with the idea that home is other people. That it is about meeting someone you don't know and and involving them in your sense of self to a potential new politics. Because you are you are you are hinting in that direction, and and you're saying to us it's not just about it's not gonna be just about voting for someone different. Yeah. It's more than that. Can you can you just point us a little bit in that direction? Like, how do how do we go from what seem like the tiny gestures of relating to one another differently?
The the main arc of this story is my personal story. Or, you know, for three years, I wrote letters to dear strangers. And throughout these three years, actually, throughout last ten years, actually, so many so many people have become my home. You are one of them. You are one of them. And there are in this room, there are people who have been my home. So last word, thank you for coming. At the end of the book, there is something, and I think people do not take it seriously. I actually mean it. Last letter ends with saying that I am expecting you to write back to me. So I'm looking forward to your letters after you read the book. So perhaps we can really build a nation of strangers. If not, it's just tell me your thoughts, writing me letters. Thank you so much. John, thank you so much, and, thank you for coming. Thank you.
And with that, I will invite Juliet to come up and close us out.
Well, I will do that, but I've just got to say I mean, I've I'm just sort of reeling I'm just mind blown by what you both all have been talking about. And I feel like I feel like, you've been naming and framing things in a way I've been kind of hungry and desperate for, and you've been and you've done that this evening, and you've done it with with incredible amount of light and beauty, actually. And you seem to be the living embodiment of everything we're talking about, and I feel very privileged to be here. Berlin, late February twenty twenty five. My dear stranger, a minute ago, I was putting the books I bought in London and Brussels on my empty shelves, And I ran into the book I bought for my secular godson, Valentino. This lovely pop up version of the Odyssey has been sitting there since I was last in Greece. And now, looking at it, I wonder if all my letters to you are a struggle against this ancient story. Thousands of years ago, a Greek man called Homer, when finishing his colossal poem, The Story of Odysseus, decided that the hero should make it back home to Ithaca. More than creating, he composed the stories told by his ancestors. He most probably trimmed the unruly ends. The written word and paper belonged to those who built the cities. Thus, the grand finale had to be within their walls. So Odysseus returned home and the story ended. Since then, we call the time in between a journey. Even if it is a lifetime, we tend to imagine it as a temporary state of existence. When there is no going back home, this is the fact you try to come to terms with. This is your life now, a permanent temporality. This will be the hardest part to learn for all those whose lives are now shattered by political and natural disasters. They will have to accept that this is life now. Yet they will still, in their hearts, carry that old story of home, where the road means nothing until you arrive back at the old home. This is all because since the Odyssey was written, only the return has given meaning to the journey. The road is deemed pointless until it circles back home. Odysseus was a floating stranger, a nobody unless recognized back home. His story was told only in hindsight after he made it back to Ithaca, his island. And the gravity of the story endured as the cities stood still. But now as the cities physical or virtual are coming down. But the reason I am writing to you is that suddenly while looking at the book many elements of the story made sense. The mast, The sirens. The comrades. Only those who have never left or lost their home can believe that the Odyssey is about the return to Ithaca. Those who have never seen the monsters will wait impatiently for Odysseus to reach home. One needs to be a stranger to read between the lines and see the friends who are hardly mentioned by name. The Odyssey has never been a story about returning home. It is an epic about the horrors and desires of the road, but more so the friendships and promises, or better put, the many homes found on the road. So here's a version told through the eyes of the stranger in the language of the nation of strangers. Odysseus embarks upon a journey to help a friend. The trip gets out of hand for many years. During this period, his sailors walk him through various troubles and adventures. They are the ones who save him from ruining himself. They tie him to the mast. And when the dark sirens tell him to give up, they are the ones who refuse to let him loose. And finally, only thanks to them, the clueless king gets to Ithaca in one piece. Yet in the last storm on the road, the friends are devoured, and the king arrives at home alone. When comrades are no more, home becomes a battleground. Odysseus is unhomed now, not on the road but in Ithaca only because the strangers, the Ithacus, are no longer there. It takes a small army of strangers to protect the unhomed during their journey, not from the monsters of the road, but from themselves. What breaks the stranger is not the exhaustion of becoming unhoned. It is the loss of faith in the home, in the self and in others. That is total darkness, the ultimate shade of black. There, the stranger can still do everything that imitates life, eating, working, having sex, aging, laughing, drinking, planning things for next summer, but without the essential joy of life. After a while, even the attempts at joy become meaningless. The basic human urge for beauty disappears. Going on living while waiting to return home becomes no different to busying yourself with a magazine in a dentist's waiting room. Life freezes. And that is when you learn that as a stranger, you need somebody else to speak with you in your strange language in the waiting room to melt the frozen silence. Sometimes it is a friend, and other times it is a random person telling you something, anything that tightens the ropes that tie you to the ship when you'd otherwise throw yourself into the darkness of the waves. People are the mast, the solid, the centre and intermittently home. Once you leave them, then you are truly homeless. A stranger's home is with other strangers. Now, my dear stranger, read this letter once again for all of us who are and will be unhomed by fascism of this or that shade, by dictators and their techno cronies, by by environmental disasters eroding the planet. Tighten the ropes with friends and rage, rage, rage against the ultimate shade of black.
The bar is open. There is another bar on the 3rd Floor, where there's more of a gathering. Thank you so much for coming. Do come and join us again.
This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy, but know we've got serious work to do to save it. This episode was hosted by John Alexander and me, Omezhinh Liefer, and produced by Joe Barrett. The studio engineer was Christian Kabwita.
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