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"Metaphysically homeless..."

“I don’t know what home is,” says Palestinian writer Samir El-youssef. “I was born in a refugee camp, and once you are, you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘home’.” His books explore issues around identity and ideology, with The Illusion of Return focusing particularly on the need we all have to identify with and lay claim to a place we can call home. He asks: “To what can we return? A piece of land? To places we have never been or which have changed beyond recognition? Is ‘return’ just about escaping the inhospitality of the world?”

El-youssef is taking part in the Beyond Faith and Reason event at the festival on 16 April. You can hear him discuss rhetoric, the power of literature (“you discover your humanity”) and events in the Middle East here, in an interview from August 2006 with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, the American National Public Radio show.

Writers' excerpts - Places and beliefs

Alyssa Moxley, currently looking after all things podcasting and social media at International PEN for the Free The Word festival, writes:

Heaven and Earth seems especially appropriate as a theme for a literature festival, writing being the medium that so directly represents thoughts as they make their way from ethereal perception to manifest communication. These events are chance to witness first hand, and off the cuff, the embodied and human reactions/discussions of these far-flung correspondents of the human story, where one would normally encounter only their disembodied words. 

I thought I would post a few links to the creative output of the writers for the first event, Beyond Faith and Reason.  It's food for thought and gets the mind hungry to hear what they will discuss.  What has struck me about these writers' works is how they describe the interaction of place with society altering beliefs and personal emotional responses.

Nadine Gordimer’s Loot, plays with language and emotional responses to history in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.  It comes from the eponymous short story collection.

The introduction to Tariq Ali’s Clash of Fundamentalisms discusses the history of beliefs and what is considered rational argument in relation to current global conflicts (physical and ideological) between and within America, Europe and the Middle East. 

Samir El-Youssef explores issues of identity and locality in this travel piece.

Tahmima Anam poetically ponders the effects global warming on Bangladesh.