Welcome to The Fire These Times, the podcast bringing you conversations at the intersection of politics, culture and the environment. 

I’m your host Elia Ayoub and today we’ll be talking to Musa Okwonga. Musa is a writer, broadcaster, poet, speaker, musician. author, sportswriter, broadcaster and commentator on current affairs. He’s also the first person to come on the podcast three times (twice here and once in the previous ‘Hummus For Thought’ one).

He most recently published a wonderful short book called “In The End, It Was All About Love” and published by Rough Trade Books, as well as “One of Them: An Eton College Memoir” published by Unbound.

The Fire These Times is available on Apple Podcasts, Anchor, Breaker, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Castro, Vurbl and RSS. It is also on YouTube.

Topics discussed:

• Brexit
• Leaving home
• Racism
• The Holocaust
• Being a migrant
• European fascism
• Living in the future
• Visibility as racialised people
• Ethics of taking certain gigs as freelancers
• Going to Eton
• The importance of doing therapy
• The role of football

Books Mentioned:

• The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs
• Songs My Enemy Taught Me by Joelle Taylor
• Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home by Nikesh Shukla

If you like what I do, please consider supporting this project with only 1$ a month on Patreon or on BuyMeACoffee.com. You can also do so directly on PayPal if you prefer.

Patreon is for monthly, PayPal is for one-offs and BuyMeACoffee has both options.

If you can’t donate anything, you can still support this project by sharing with your friends and leaving a review wherever you get your podcasts!

Music by Tarabeat.

---

Transcript prepared by Yusra Bitar and Antidote Zine:

Brave, beautiful people all over the world are being murdered for doing the right thing, and they’re dying in isolation and in horror—and that’s sometimes why the killers are doing it. We saw it in Syria. They take a particular delight in isolating and brutalizing these incredible human beings that this world doesn’t deserve, to death. And it sounds very dramatic, Elia, but I write my work to honor people like that.

Elia J. Ayoub: Musa is the first person to come on this podcast three times. He most recently published a wonderful short book called In the End, It Was All About Love, which was published by Rough Trade books, as well as One of Them: An Eton College Memoir, published by Unbound. 

We spoke about a number of things, from Brexit to the pain and difficulties of leaving home, the difficulties and challenges of living with racism, the legacy of the Holocaust, the difficulties of being a migrant, ongoing fears regarding European fascism, how we both live in the future as a way of coping with the present, and a number of other things. We spoke about visibility as racialized people, the ethics of taking certain gigs as freelancers, the fact that he went to Eton college, the importance of doing therapy, the role of football. 

I hope you find this conversation interesting, I think you will.

Musa Okwonga: Hi, my name’s Musa Okwonga. I’m an author, broadcaster, podcaster, occasional musician and poet, and I broadcast from an undisclosed location in East Berlin. Great to be back.

EA: Great to have you back. I decided we’re going to call this episode Hello Everyone and Welcome to Therapy Session with Musa Okwonga. No, the title of this episode is the title of your book that was just released, called In the End, It Was All About Love. Let’s get right into it. None of my questions are light—I just read them before we started talking. I apologize in advance; they’re not easy questions.

So what is the book about and why did you feel the need to write it?

MO: First of all, shoutout to Rough Trade books because they put this book out and they did an incredible job with it. I want to shout them out because it’s a book, as will becomes clear as we go on, that a lot of people didn’t feel was quite right for them. But they understood exactly what I was trying to do, so I want to shout them out at the top. 

What inspired this book? It’s a couple of things: a personal and a professional answer. The personal answer is it was 2017. I just had a sci-fi novel rejected by everyone I’d sent it to—a book I really believed in, a book that people really showed interest in, and then when I finally delivered the manuscript, they were all like, No. That was one of the first times in my life where I was like, I might not be good enough to go as far as I want to go. I was spiritually overwhelmed. I was like, I don’t think I can be a writer, I’m not good enough. So instead of creating another piece of fiction which I was not confident would be published anyway, I started a reflection on where I was in my life at that time. 

This was also a time when the far right was absolutely surging everywhere you looked. Austria—in Berlin itself, they went from nought percent up to forty percent out of nowhere, the far-right. Orbán. Poland as well. Look at Serbia—which is going under the radar; people aren’t talking about Vučić enough. There was the referendum in the UK, which was run on a far-right platform if we’re being honest. And then we had, obviously, what’s happening in the US. I won’t speak the individual’s name because he’s dominated far too much of people’s time already. So basically I wrote this from a place of spiritual exhaustion. 

And then also, on a wider level, I look at the whole world of fake news that we’re in, the disinformation, misinformation. I hate that phrase, “fake news,” but you know what I mean by that. In a time with so much dishonesty and deception, I was like, Radical vulnerability is maybe the way forward. The only thing that shatters this veneer of the unreal and the strongman and the machismo is something confessional, because the thing about confession is that confession inspires confession. 

So I thought I’d go for it with this, and the way I wrote it was to write each paragraph with the greatest intensity I could. I wrote it in bursts of two hours at a time, and that’s why, despite it being very short, the book is quite intense, and that’s a deliberate effect. 

My father passed away when he was forty years old, and when I began writing the book, I was approaching my father’s age. He was killed during the war in Uganda, the conflict for Uganda’s future, and when I started writing this book I was thinking: By the the time I pass my father’s age, will I have done him justice? Will I have lived a life worthy of him? That was the impetus. 

There was also a thing—as a Black person living in Berlin, there were questions of how you navigate love and grief, and life in the city, and racism, at a time when the climate is approaching a certain point in ecological collapse, and a time when I’m really worried about what the far right has done to policy across Europe. It is mainstreaming its policies in quite a dangerous way. I felt it was a moment in time I wanted to capture in writing, as a form of resilience maybe, as catharsis, and maybe even resistance.

EA: I am approaching thirty in a few months, and it just so happens that thirty was the age that my father left Lebanon to move to Switzerland. This was in the context of the end of the civil war in Lebanon, and quite a lot of people going back to rebuild the country—but quite a lot of people leaving as well. For him (we’ve spoken about this), he was working in the Red Cross. It’s an important detail. He witnessed quite a lot of horrors, including a number of massacres, and he just couldn’t take it anymore. By the time the civil war ended, he felt he had done his dues and he just couldn’t take it. He didn’t want to spend his thirties and forties fixing what other people broke. 

The other thing—these are not directly related thoughts: a couple of weeks ago, there was the assassination of a Lebanese activist Lokman Slim, and it just so happens there’s a link with the mainstreaming of far-right policies you were talking about. The last time I had seen Lokman was in 2018 when he was on a post-performance panel discussion on a play about Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supermacist and terrorist. Lokman spoke about the usual stuff he used to speak about: a lot related to memory of the civil war, the ongoing hauntings of those who were forcibly disappeared but never acknowledged. Pretty heavy stuff. For me, in the back of my mind, as we’ve both been witnessing in the past five or six years, in my case since moving to London in 2015 in the run up to the Brexit vote, I started seeing this mainstreaming of policies and I started thinking of this young man, Breivik, who wanted to cause irreparable harm to multiculturalism—did he succeed? I am not one hundred percent confident in saying No, he lost.

MO: Absolutely, I agree. I don’t believe he lost either. I think he fired the opening salvo. They’re going to look at that moment, Breivik, like they look at the Oklahoma bombing. The Oklahoma bombing—people did not fully understand what that meant (the tradition he emerged from—they understand fully). They look at it as a “lone wolf” because it’s convenient to do that, but he was the culmination, just as Breivik was the culmination, and if you look at the academics that inspired Breivik, the writers, the columnists—they’ve still got jobs. There were no consequences for them, so they’re creating new Breiviks with their narratives. And to be honest with you, they’re secretly proud of it.

One thing I’ve done, Elia, that saved me so much time in the last few months and years: I have stopped wasting time refuting bad-faith actors. I was rereading Letters from a Birmingham Jail, and Dr. King talks about how he doesn’t engage with critique of his work because he’s too busy. Not because he doesn’t care, but because he’s too busy. And he replies to this particular person because this person approached him in good faith, but he said, If I were to reply to all of you, I wouldn’t have time to do the work I have to do. But Dr. King was assassinated at thirty-nine, and it got me thinking: if you just focus on making work, books people can pass around and consume, leave them on coffee tables, leave abandoned in youth hostels—my dream is for this book to be abandoned in youth hostels in different parts of the world, translated to different languages, for people to pick it up, reflect on it, discard it, and be able to pass it on. That is my dream, that is my ambition for this book. 

And engaging with this debate, this culture debate—it’s actually there to maintain the status quo, to an extent. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we shouldn’t reflect critically on our ideas. But if we look at what the far-right is doing, if we look at what it’s sowing, the discontent—the most powerful things I’ve seen against the far right are being created by people who don’t engage with them.  

The grassroots organizing, all these people—You’re wasting our time. Even the athletes, the activists in the US, the people in Georgia, the authors, the critical race theorists—they don’t engage at all, and look how successful they have been. They are the only reason that America is not now a fully fascist state, and none of them engage with the far right, none of them. I can bet you Stacey Abrams did not do a single moment of debating with any of these Rush Limbaugh or Tucker Carlson types.

EA: Rush Limbaugh recently passed away, I should say.

And yes, and I can corroborate that. I was listening just yesterday to adrienne marie brown in an interview with The Final Straw (which is an anarchist podcast that I was on some time ago), and she has a recent book about cancel culture, and the way she was talking about it was from the perspective of transformative justice and intersectional feminism. “Calling in” instead of “calling out.” But when people hear “cancel culture,” they are leaning into this monster essentially created or at least imagined largely by those on the right.

Her response to that was that she had no idea it was also used that way. She had heard of it but that was not her intention. Her intention was to bring people who are on the other side—I won’t get too much into it, but there’s a certain tension when someone has done some wrong. adrienne maree brown has been trying for years now to think of how we can create not just accountability but transformative justice—find a way to transform that person as well.

MO: Of course, absolutely. The challenge I would have for her is that you need to give it new words. A friend and I got asked to be in a conversation about identity politics recently, and we said no, because it has been coopted by the right to such an extent it has no real value. Even if you have the most nuanced conversation about that, you’re just marketing their ideas. Now, there is a real challenge; you need to name things in terms of the vision that you want. 

One of the reasons my book is called In the End, It Was All About Love is that I want people, whatever they’re referred to in the book, to talk about a positive thing. It is not an anti-racist book, it’s not an anti-fascist book. I’m not against those concepts, don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying, in this particular context, I want people to be like, This is a book about optimism, because hope is a radical act. Look at all the things the right has managed to market so aggressively. They manage to market cynicism and irony and snark. Someone said to me this book was very earnest, sometimes painfully so. And I was like, Good. 

We could do with a bit of that. We can do with earnest. So yeah, here ends the lesson.

EA: I totally agree with that, and the title is amazing. It’s very Ocean Vuong-y. I don’t know if you’ve read his book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It’s really good. 

I’m trying to do something new with the podcast, situating not just where we’re talking—you in Berlin, me in Geneva—but when we’re talking, so when people are listening in five or ten years, there is some kind of relevance. We’re speaking in February 2021. We’ve been dealing with this pandemic for over a year now. The last time I had you on was April 2020, and back then we were already seeing the difference between how your home country, the UK, and your adopted country, Germany, have been dealing with COVID-19. 

The difference is still very stark, but at the time it was even more stark. Obviously that’s very painful for you; it is for me as well. I lived in the UK for four years, and it has become almost normalized, unfortunately, to say that things are bad in the UK. That’s something that still bothers me; as of now we’re not seeing any kind of strong political action to counter the cynicism that you are talking about. 

How have you been dealing with COVID-19? How are you dealing with the situation? Has it changed since we last talked? Have there been habits that you’ve picked up? You’ve just written a book, so it seems some productivity has come in. How would you describe it?

MO: I would say that I’ve learned to focus only on those things that I feel I can control or influence (not in an authoritarian way), or at least get done. In terms of my output, I can deliver to the best of my ability—if I can do this as often as possible, that’s the key for me. There is a value in doing this deep work, creating books and podcasts, because we get emails from people saying this provides comfort. With our podcast, we chose to double our output from once a week to twice because people were saying, This is really helping my mental health. It’s probably something for you as well, because you provide that food for thought. 

It sounds ridiculous, but I’ve started visualizing what long term happiness looks like. I’ve imagined going on holiday to particular countries a year and a half from now, and even if I don’t get to go on that holiday, but I’ve got a plan in my head. By the time I get to the end of the year, the optimism would have gotten me through, so I’m almost idealizing a particular future that might not arise, but it’s helping with my stamina. Almost automatically, as soon as I’ve got a goal, that’s better for me. It helps that my mother recently got a vaccination, which is great. I mean, she’s a doctor in London. She sent me a picture of herself in basically a radiation suit. What she goes to work in, effectively it’s like a radiation suit and a plastic visor. It’s unbelievable.

What’s also helped me, Elia, is that a lot of my friends and family members work from home, or they’re extremely sensible about this because we’ve got relatives who are doctors. At this point, if any of my relatives get anything, if I get anything, it won’t be because of recklessness, it’ll just be bad luck. That’s how I’ve navigated it, and it’s been fine so far. Also my cooking—my cooking was good before the pandemic, but now its gone to a different level.

EA: I jumped on the bandwagon of learning how to bake bread, and I’ve been doing it quite a lot as well. 

The book In The End, It Was All About Love is an ode, a love letter to Berlin in some ways. As most good love letters, I suppose, it’s very nuanced. You’re not uncritical towards Berlin. Bad stuff also happened there and is still ongoing—I never even asked you, when did you move to Berlin?

MO: October the first, 2014.

EA: And how would you describe the move? We did mention this a bit the last time we spoke, but I regretted not asking you a bit more on that because you moved at a specific time in London’s history. How would you describe that time, for posterity, for people listening to this in ten years who will hopefully be beyond this normalization of Things are bad in the UK?

MO: Good question. I felt something was coming. The reason I left the UK—so I was in Brazil for the World Cup in 2014, for that summer, one of the greatest experiences of my life. It’s the longest I ever spent outside the UK in one continuous go, a month. The longest I’d been away from the UK was maybe two or three weeks maximum. So I was away for a month working, and I watched the headlines from the UK, and the anti-immigration sentiment was off the scale. I remember just reading Migrants, migrants, every day Migrants, because that’s all I could see in the country. And I said to my mom, They hate us so much. I don’t want to retire there. I don’t want to spend my entire life in that country. I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it. They just hate us. We’ve given this country so much and they hate us. No sense of gratitude from the country—it’s always like, Immigrants need to be grateful, but the countries aren’t grateful. 

So I decided that summer to leave the UK. And it was funny, because I got back from the World Cup, I was in the UK for a couple of weeks, and then I went flat hunting in Berlin almost immediately. And I found this flat in Berlin (which I am living in now), and I was back in the UK very briefly, just one more week, before moving back here, and I went for a drink with a friend, and he said, You’re so on edge. We’re in Camden, we have to drink. This was the mood in London as I felt it. He was just like, You’re so irritable, you’re so on edge! And I was nervous. Having found this amazing place in Berlin and planned this new life, I was nervous that at any point in that final week, something would cancel it. Like the flight would be canceled, or the lease would be canceled, and I would have to stay in London. At that point I was like, My goodness you really want to leave. 

There was something about the energy in the political conversation. We’d had the London Olympic Games in 2012, and there was all this talk about how the UK was “united.” But what’s interesting, and something that wasn’t talked about so widely, was that when we had the London Olympics, the backlash from the far right about the images from the Olympics was so brutal and so sustained. Because what had happened was that for the briefest moment, the Olympics painted a picture of the country that the UK could have been—and the far right hated it. They absolutely took a chainsaw to it. So in retrospect, if you look at the 2012 Olympics, and you look at the far-right backlash to that, that will tell you all you need to know about where we are now, because they really mobilized. And that was the context when I moved to Berlin.

EA: Whenever this chapter of history is written—there will be 2008, the crash and everything; then 2012 is when we start to see the backlash ramping up, and then David Cameron’s promise of a referendum would be the second step in the story. There is a section in your book towards the beginning where you write, “With each passing year, your identity is being divided up, with each element progressively more dangerous,” and then you say, “Look at the way you think about yourself now. African, dark-skinned, migrant. Fifteen years ago, you were simply British.”

That description mirrors a bit something that I went through between 2015 and 2017. It’s a bit different for me. I can pass for like southern European, which I partly am, so there’s a bit more to this. But I’m someone who enjoys being invisible. I enjoy not standing out, and sometimes I can do so, but something happened in those two years, 2015-2017. I think of them as symbolized by two violent events: in November 2015, there was the Bataclan attack in Paris, the ISIS-inspired attack, and it happened to follow an attack in Beirut—there was an attack in Beirut the day before. I was in London (it had been two months since I moved there), and I remember feeling a deep sense of sadness, but I didn’t feel any fear. It didn’t “come to London.” It wasn’t “too close.” There was some distance. 

The sadness was for the loss of life in Lebanon, the loss of life in Paris, and because of my personal connections to both countries—growing up in Lebanon and having family in Paris and having gone there many times—I was able to write an article as a blog post on my phone, and it was published on Global Voices (I was writing for them at the time) and it went viral. This was my first experience in the media spotlight, and the person writing that article was confident, at least to a certain extent, about the fact that he—me—was able to identify somewhat as French, or as having some connection to France even though I don’t have the nationality. 

That self-confidence was slowly eroded over the next two years. By the time the Westminster attack happened in 2017, my self-confidence had so eroded that now I felt extremely self-conscious about the fact that I looked the way I do. Before then, growing up in Lebanon, most people look like me. I didn’t really stand out. It wasn’t that big of a deal. It wasn’t any deal—it was just not a concept. I didn’t think about the way I looked. 

But there’s this section in your book: you mention that you’re very self-conscious when you enter a public space or a bus or a train and there are other Black people on the bus. Somehow, when I started feeling this, when I saw other Arabs or other Middle Easteners, anyone who vaguely looked like me, I felt like, My presence right now is a bit too much. I’ve actually gotten off buses in those situations, where I felt that it’s too much and if they start speaking Arabic, attention was going to come towards them, and by default might come towards me. This discomfort became so overwhelming that it took me quite a long time to get over it. I would argue that I am still healing from that process. It took at least two, three years to realize that the way I looked or the way my body represented me to the outside world was different from how I thought of myself.

MO: Yes, absolutely. Perfectly put. Our presence is a provocation, and it has always been, to some people. The frightening thing is, the worrying thing is—”frightening” is a strong word, but I mean it. The frightening thing is, there are some people for whom one of us was always too much. 

I was told by a taxi driver once—this was before the referendum, when I was working in the UK. I’d now gotten a job in Berlin, and I flew back to Edinburgh (where you were studying I think), and gave a lecture at the University of Edinburgh (which I’ve now lost because I didn’t back up a lot of my website—this lecture is now lost to history, which is sad). But I was giving a lecture at the University of Edinburgh, and I was driven there by a taxi driver, white Scottish guy, and we were talking about culture and politics and multiculturalism. Great conversation. He said, You’re an interesting guy, we got on very well, very friendly conversation. Then he said to me, What would you say to someone like me where I feel like I’m losing my culture and like things aren’t what they were? 

Basically he was saying, There are too many foreigners here. He didn’t say it outright, but he was, effectively. And the worst thing was, Elia: I have no answer to that and I never did. That sort of question frightens me, because if there are too many Black and Brown people in a room—historically, we know what has happened when people felt there were too many of those lot. This is the reason why history repeats itself. Why does nobody learn? It’s because history doesn’t repeat itself. It remixes itself. The things that triggered the old stuff won’t look the same this time around. Before, there was a particular sentiment of antisemitism, but the way it’s going to look now, when things start again—this sounds dramatic, but we’re going to get some bad times again, Elia. When the financial crash hits Europe, it’s going to be really bad. And the people who engineered that crash are not going to take responsibility, because they’ve got a ready-made scapegoat. 

This is so obvious what I’m saying, Elia—it’s so obvious, but it worries me because I don’t have an answer for the taxi driver, and it’s bothered me ever since that conversation. There’s been no amount of Oh, yeah, but our Olympic team, look at this diversity. No, That’s the problem, he said. 

The problem for Jewish people—whenever people talk about, Oh, just integrate and you’ll be fine, I say, I cannot name a more integrated population than Jewish people in Germany in the 1930s, and look where it got them. It’s offensive to the memory of all those Jewish people who were murdered: They didn’t integrate enough, or They didn’t debate enough. They massacred some of the greatest minds this world has ever seen, and if there was ever a fair debate between far-right people and Jewish intellectuals—they could have sent one person, they could have sent a teenager, and that teenager would have destroyed everyone in the debate, and those six million Jews would still be alive.

EA: I was reading Stefan Zweig’s memoir (Hannah Arendt critiqued it, and that’s a different story), and one thing that really struck me was how he came from a fairly well-to-do background, he was middle class, and he was shocked that the violence came to him personally. He thought that his connections—he was one of the bestsellers of the time, a most-translated author. He thought that would protect him, and he learned the hard way that that wasn’t the case, and he died by suicide in Brazil in exile.

MO: Right, because it stayed with him. I was thinking of this two weeks ago.Brazil, the country, the future. Zweig—I was thinking of him. I was thinking of Walter Benjamin. Walter Benjamin didn’t make it. He didn’t make it and he made this crucial work. I’ve been obsessed with this concept of people who saw it coming and they escaped, or they escaped physically but not spiritually. Stefan Zweig fascinates me because even being in Brazil wasn’t enough to save him. Even being free of this.

EA: Primo Levi became a bestselling author and a well-respected intellectual largely after the Holocaust. That also did not save him. I take that in sometimes, and part of why I often seem like I’m overreacting in a situation with other people who are either in denial or—I’m not going to judge; it’s also a coping mechanism. But part of the reason I have this different reaction is that I’ve read a lot of Jewish authors. I did my masters thesis at SOAS on Hebrew and Yiddish, so I spent a lot of time taking that in. I started with Primo Levi and Stefan Zweig, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt. It’s something that I ended up internalizing. 

One thing that struck me in Primo Levi, a man I deeply admire, was how he said (he was in Auschwitz if I’m not mistaken) he felt intellectually superior to the German guards, or to the Nazis in general, and it took him some time to realize that wasn’t enough, that didn’t matter in reality. What mattered is that he didn’t have the power to do anything about it.

MO: Yes. I’ve said this a thousand times. My friend would always say, Oh, let’s debate them. I’m like, How many Jewish debating champions retired undefeated? Retired undefeated and taken in trains. There were people who were taken to those chambers that never lost an argument in their lives, based on logic. People are going to realize too late that it’s not actually about winning arguments. It’s about fighting for the retention of structures, and it’s also about knowing, if those structures are failing you, how and when to retreat. 

One thing that fascinates me, Elia—I’m obsessed with the Jewish people who decided when to go, who left in the dead of night. I talked about this with a Jewish friend of mine and he was like, Funny you should mention that, because my relatives basically were told one evening by a neighbor who really liked them: “My cousin is in the SS; you need to go tonight,” and they were gone by the morning. The amount of Jewish people who left Europe in the dead of night without telling their friends or family they were gone, and all they found was an empty apartment. You talk about this, you say that you’re being “dramatic” or whatever, but you’ve got a good radar for this stuff, Elia. 

There’s a great article by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. I keep returning to it. He talks about “calm skepticism,” about how he’s a calm skeptic about how the far-right will play out. I’m a calm skeptic. He said the problem is, sometimes being excitable is the correct answer. I’m a calm skeptic, he said, but I’m also the age of the kind of person who downplayed it last time around. It was absolutely fascinating. Here’s the thing, Elia: if you’re excitable about these things, as Gideon said in his article, and your work preserves those structures, everyone would be like, Oh, Elia is exaggerating. So you have to run the risk of appearing hysterical. 

In my book, I talk about the far right and I run the risk of appearing hysterical, but I don’t care. Because the other day I was on the train, near my stop, and there was a guy with a fascist haircut. I saw him and he saw me, and we both knew what the haircut was, and I was like, This is how it is. They’re right there in plain sight. And I live a twenty-minute walk from a major organizer of the far right. I know where they live; I know their addresses because antifa have it on their websites, so this is known. We’re not exaggerating it. 

So, we have to almost live in the future. You asked how I navigate COVID; I navigate it the same way I navigate the far right. I try to live in the future. I try to project ahead where things might be, and plan accordingly.

EA: I do the same thing. Just this morning, I was reading about the horrible power outages happening in Texas. I listen to podcasts when I go on my morning walks, and I was listening to this podcast Worst Year Ever (people should check it out if they want to follow American politics, and the “worst year ever” referred to is 2020, but they had to extend it to 2021). One thing I didn’t know about Texas is that it has its own energy grid, disconnected from the rest of the country, and it’s so dysfunctional they had to take energy from Montreal and Mexico at some point. There is this story that symbolizes the absurdity of American capitalism: there is one of the richest neighborhoods in Texas, and it did not lose power; and it’s surrounded by what looks like a black sea on a map. There’s no light at night. They got some heat for it on Twitter; some journalist pointed it out, and they decided to make themselves feel less guilty by opening up a community library for a few hours during the day—not even at night; people should know that temperatures are freezing right now in Texas. But they felt that it would be enough that between ten a.m. and five p.m. the library is open as a warming center. 

It just symbolized so much to me. At some point, either those people around that neighborhood (and hopefully some people within than community as well) do something about this inequity, or this will continue playing itself out. We’ve been seeing this time and time again. One thing that I personally believe was the most powerful insight from James Baldwin and from his work in general, is the notion that those who are under, so to speak, those who are oppressed, know the oppressors. Not just how the oppressors know the oppressed, but better than how the oppressors know themselves.

This is my weird insight. I went to London just to do my masters—I didn’t have any grand plan. My plan was to go back to Lebanon after that, but I was placed there at a certain political time; there was something happening that was out of my control, and my specific positionality and background—I come from a privileged background in Lebanon, but that privilege didn’t do much for me in London. There was a power differential between my past self and my present self, and I kept on bouncing around between the two; I would visit back home for Christmas, and then I’m back in that former self. At some point this ping-pong between those two selves allowed me to see both sides, because I was in between all the time. I was no longer at either pole. When I went back to Lebanon the third time around, let’s say, I was no longer as comfortable—privileged, let’s put it that way—as I was before. I actually became much more uncomfortable in my position, questioning new things. 

Same for London. For me, Brexit was very clear what it was about, from the very first time I heard about it: xenophobia, isolationism, imperial nostalgia. That was very clear to me; I had no doubt. I wasn’t participating in the manufactured debate as to What is this really about? We can’t say the R word. We can’t say racism. We can’t say the X word, xenophobia. We can’t say all these things—we can talk about everything except the underlying causes. For me one of the most unsettling things about Brexit (other than the sadness that we’re seeing right now and that is probably going to last for quite some time) is that a lot of this was predictable.

I will transition back to the book: you contrast genuine self-help, genuine mental health and paying attention to what our bodies and minds are going through, with the concept of “resilience.” As it happens, I published an article right after the Beirut blast about how I think the concept of resilience needs to be replaced. Something about it no longer works. In the context of Lebanon, we’re not resilient, we’re broken. 

I think very visually, and what stuck in my mind is this story—I heard two different people tell the same story, two different friends: their fathers, two different men, as soon as the blast happened, within the hour, were already rebuilding parts of the house. For me, this would usually be interpreted as: That’s because Lebanese people are resilient, that’s because the Lebanese people have endured so much. I’m not going to say we haven’t endured so much—we have. But I don’t think that’s what this was. I think that if our initial shock isn’t allowed to be played out, if we’re not allowed to transform it into anger, if we’re not allowed to transform it into demands, into something transformative, it goes back to automatic mode. Right now we’re seeing—even after the assassination of Lokman Slim—the same impulse, the same Lebanese machinery of denial.

MO: It’s a deeply traumatized society.

EA: Very much so. And for me, resilience has a way of hiding that trauma in ways that are not helpful.

MO: Absolutely. Resilience is unprocessed trauma in that context. Unprocessed trauma, or trauma that is not being given room to be processed. When I saw that explosion happened, I was horrified because I remember thinking, There is nothing else, this is the last thing that Beirut or Lebanon could take, at that point with all the things it has gone through. It was like the Haiti earthquake. The Haiti earthquake was so devastating with all that Haiti had been through—Haiti had been through enough, and for the earthquake to happen was just shattering, horrifying. For a country that fought so hard to be free, so hard that it changed the world, and then to experience that, was when I felt bereft. 

I’m not a religious person, and I’m glad for that, not because I don’t think faith provides solace, but because I am really glad I did not have to think about the fact that this is all part of a system; I’m glad I didn’t have to rationalize this and be like, There’s a reason these explosions or earthquakes are necessary. I’m not attacking the religious at all, don’t get me wrong. I’m just really glad that I don’t have to wrestle with those complexities within my faith.

The Beirut explosion, the murder of Lokman Slim—he was not a human being a knew about. I didn’t know his name until that morning I read the news, but I’ll tell you something Elia, since we’re talking: I was in tears reading that news, not because I knew anything about his life, but because looking at his profile and what he’d done, I was like, That must have been so terrifying, so lonely. People look at these activists as a bit different than any of us. There was a woman, a photojournalist in Central or South America, and she was in her late twenties, and she was murdered in her flat; her job was not paid that well of course, and she was renting a small flat, and she would go around taking photos of protests by feminists. That’s what she devoted her life to, and she was murdered and perhaps sexually assaulted in her flat, surrounded by her work. What a lonely, painful, horrifying death. 

That’s why I was in tears. Because these brave, beautiful people all over the world are being murdered for doing the right thing, and they’re dying in isolation and in horror, and that’s sometimes why the killers are doing it. We saw it in Syria. They take a particular delight in isolating and brutalizing these incredible human beings that this world doesn’t deserve, to death. And it sounds very dramatic, Elia, but I write these books, I write my work to honor people like that. All these people—Anna Politkovskaya, all of them. Look at the way they die: they die in this terrible isolation, and they do work that transforms the world. 

Sorry to go off on a bit of a rant, but this is why I live the way I do. The reason I am so emotional to have this book published—this book is exactly what I wanted to say about the world at this point in time. Every single syllable in the book, I swear by it. It’s my rejection of going quietly into the night, as they say in that poem. It’s my absolute rejection of that.

EA: I can definitely see that, and there’s lots of different themes in the book. You speak of this doctor Oppong, and this concept of “Black Gravity.” I will quote a couple of sentences in it: how racial oppression could be described “as a form of pressure, a physical force that stormed Black people the second they left their front doors, a thing you can measure or sense, like temperature.” I’ve seen or read similar things from other Black people. I quote James Baldwin and others; everyone knows by now. He had a way with words. One thing he said is he did not know he was Black before the age of six or seven. Because he lived in a white world in his time, television and everything, he just assumed he was as well. He did know that other people saw him as not like them.

This is why I identify with him, although it is a very different experience, much worse in many ways. But this in-between-ness, this tension of being within—he was an American; he identified as an American but also he was not; something about the identity of his nation did not make room for him personally, and he understood at some point. This is where the power came from, because a lot of people know that they are being oppressed, obviously. This is not a statement of judgement, like they haven’t managed to overcome it. That is not an easy thing. I am not going to say he managed to overcome it either, but he got to the point where he understood that his oppression was not about him. His oppression was about the oppressors. He was their problem. He told them, You invented the N word. You invented him. You invented that character. I’m not him.

MO: So ask yourselves why you need it! 

I wrote this poem “Black Gravity.” It’s the first I’d ever had published in a journal. Shoutout to Sharon Dodua Otoo and Neue Rundschau, they published me. Maria Bichler as well; Maria Bichler is an amazing Austrian artist who makes art out of found objects, based in Graz I think. Maria is brilliant, one of the best artists around in Europe, and she asked me to write a poem for an exhibition, and I wrote “Black Gravity.” And the thing about this was: I wanted to express, in a form that people could readily understand, how racism felt, in a way that was not Black people’s fault. And the way that I did this, the way I constructed this concept was: imagine the air is just thick with racism, to the point where it physically harms people. 

In that poem, in “Black Gravity,” every single place I mention is a place where a friend, or a friend of a friend, was racially assaulted in the city. Every specific area that I reference refers to an injury sustained by myself, a friend, or a friend of a friend due to racial assault, in a period of about a year in Berlin. As we know, nationalism is a kind of fever: it catches on. And the far right was really resurgent halfway through 2016 to halfway through 2017. The far right basically gave birth to that poem.

EA: For me, I imagine—again, very visual memory—I imagine two poles or two sides, and this poem is on one side (where I would stand of course), and the other side is the numbers, the statistics, the rise of the far right from X percent to X percent and xenophobic attacks have multiplied by a hundred and thirty percent or whatever. What gets lost in the details is that it doesn’t just mean that someone was physically assaulted on a Monday and then Tuesday was fine. I personally started viewing racism, discrimination, and racial oppression through an understanding of structures of power—and it’s not like, Government and police do these things and that’s bad, but it’s how it seeps in. When we say “normalize,” what we mean by that is (to go back to my own personal experience): I need to be constantly on high alert. That’s what it means.
It doesn’t mean that today something is going to happen to me—maybe not next week, maybe for the next year I’ll be totally fine—but I need to understand where the risks are coming from. I started becoming a mathematician, calculating probabilities and risks. I need to know that if I go to this specific place at that specific time, this could happen—and that mental energy is exhausting. Now I’m slightly better; I am trying to convert that energy into the podcast, into writing, into other things that are more transformative than just feeling overwhelmed. But for people who don’t experience any discrimination or oppression, or who may not even know people who have, which is quite a lot of people, that is the main thing that they don’t seem to grasp.

MO: They don’t have to think about it. They don’t have to think, There are parts of the city where I will never go. I tell these stories to friends of mine who are white, and they’ll be like, Oh, I wouldn’t go there either! and yeah, but here’s the difference: the consequences for us are very different. If I’m in a specific area, that is extremely bad for my physical health. It is extremely inadvisable. Like, it’s actually dangerous. 

I have a friend who bought a house in an area which would be dangerous—I could never visit him in that house. I have another friend renting in a particular place; I cannot go to dinner. The reason why I can’t go to dinner with that friend is because to get to him, or to get back from him at eleven on a Saturday night, it’s an area I would be extremely unwise to go through. 

Here’s a better example: I was going to band practice for a gig at Christmas—this is how it affects everyday life. I was asked to do a gig at Christmas for a band a couple years ago by a friend of mine. We never got to practice together because the practice session took place in a part of town where I was about to go on the tram, and they were like, Where are you going? and I’m like, I’m going here. They asked, How far is the studio from the station? When are you going? and I gave this information, and three white people came up to me separately and said, You’re not going there, Musa. You cannot go there at that time of day. This was me, fully empowered to go, and they’re like, No, Musa, you’re not going there. Don’t do it. Get there by taxi, or not at all.It isn’t safe to walk fifteen minutes in that part of the city as a dark-skinned Black man. 

And that is from three white people. One of them, when he heard I was going there, actually came through from the back of the cafe to be like, They’re completely right, you’re not doing this. At seven p.m.! These calculations aren’t ill-founded. I might have gone there and nothing might have happened, but then you hear so many stories. How about the story of this white American friend of mine who went out to the country, not far, just outside the city, and they stumbled upon a bunch of neo-Nazis doing weapons training. Yeah. They were extremely hostile towards them. They were like, Get the hell out. 

I had a friend that went on holiday to an area I could never go to. It’s such a lovely place! We got a nice little house here, we rented a place. They told me where they went and I was like, That area is known. Like, when the wall came down, the Nazis retreated there. they had loads of social services, education, and then the ideology came. They embedded themselves, and now they run a huge area. They run it. 

These are places I just can never go. I would be extremely ill-advised if I went there. Knowing you are hated to that extent—it takes a spiritual toll.

EA: Very much so. I mean, I always quote Baldwin; he had leave America in ’48, and it took him a decade before going back. For me and I suppose for you, I have this mental map now. I have a map—not a perfect replica of a real map, but I have vague notions of where I can and cannot go.

Again, I am not a dark-skinned Black man, so I suppose there are more places I can go, but as with my partner, as a woman, there are places I know it is safer for men to walk, or for a visibly-coded man to walk, in certain parts of town at a specific time, than for female-coded people. And we were in situations where she had to call me to go and pick her up from a bus stop. For me, the contrast was very sharp, intense. It overwhelms me when I start thinking about it, because I felt very comfortable walking at two a.m. in Beirut, because the streets were empty and because I look like most people there, and I’m pretty tall and usually I don’t feel that I am under threat. But when I met up with a friend of mine who was also a woman, also at three a.m., I had to pick her up from her house to go somewhere else.

Those things—that’s what I mean by the “ping-pong” thing. I would go back to Lebanon after experiencing London, and there would always be something. A part of me would always go back to my old self, because routines and habits are difficult to overcome. But then there would be this new doubt in my mind. It ends up impacting everything. It ends up shaping me in ways that previously weren’t possible.
Here’s an anecdote that is very revealing: when I was asked What’s your favorite superpower? as a young kid, I used to always say it would be the ability to be invisible. In my specific case, that wasn’t racial. I was a big guy, and also I’m on the spectrum, and I didn’t like being in spaces where there were too many people around—it’s a whole mess. It doesn’t really matter to this conversation, but that feeling then ended up being racialized. That experience ended up having a different word for it, and it so happened that I had this previous experience to be able to deal with it in ways that some of my friends from similar backgrounds weren’t able to.

MO: The consequences of visibility are so severe. They’re so severe throughout history. Once you realize—in my case, I realized I had no option but to be visible. What do you do with that knowledge and that information? In a way, someone like me has an advantage, because my visibility will always be a factor, will just always be a thing. It will always be a problem for some people; it’s really what I choose to do with that. And you know, leaving the UK was partly out of frustration, but maybe a strategic move as well: to be constantly in a place of agency. 

Being in Germany, with all its challenges, has changed my career. My creative output has just blossomed here, even with the challenges I’ve had. The professional respect for my work has just grown, even back in the UK. It has been remarkable, and I guess it was always about having a place of agency. Because if I was in the UK right now, I would be very much the victim of events, and responding to events. I feel like with the work I’m making, I’m not. I’m initiating. 

I’ve got a book coming out later this year which is about the class and race issues growing up with my private school education. I’m being proactive. I’m making the work I want to make, and I don’t think I’d be doing that if I was still in the UK. I think I would be reacting to events, other people’s narratives. 

Are there going to be any hard questions? I’m a bit disappointed Elia. I was expecting the heat, come on man!

EA: I have three more questions. One of them is more of a positive one; we’ll leave this one to the end. Two things—I will start with one of them, and they’re interrelated. You talk about imposter syndrome, and how you start blaming yourself because you don’t have enough money, because you’ve turned down these jobs—jobs that wouldn’t even be public, but you felt uncomfortable taking them due to ethical concerns. 

I’ve been in those situations many times. I’ve vocally criticized Hezbollah online and that sort of thing, and Arab regimes, and so rival governments would want to have me on. The Turkish government wanted to have me on because I was criticizing the Assad regime—but a condition for me going there is not to mention what the Turks are doing. And therefore I didn’t go. This has happened a number of times, and some other things I don’t want to mention online, in public. But I did also have these thoughts at some point. Now I’m okay, but the nature of what I do—I’m also a freelancer—is that there are a lot of ups and downs. There’s a lot of uncertainty, difficulties planning long term, difficulties saving for the long term, and so on. 

So I’m very curious, how has this imposter syndrome worsened your financial situation? And how do you think you could have done it differently? I won’t give away the book, but you do feel bad about it, and you do feel it has impacted your life. It harmed you in financial ways, and therefore mental health ways—but do you think you could have done it differently?

MO: I don’t think so, this is the thing. I think about it a lot, and I think at each stage in my life, I tried to make the best decision. The reason I am living in Germany now is because years ago, I figured that German is a very hard language to learn, in comparison to French or Spanish or Italian: German is the hardest in terms of the main business languages; let me learn that one so later in life, if I want to learn a different language, it would be easier. So I chose to do French and German, and that was one of the best decisions I could have made. So I’m really good at making strategic long-term choices, right? I’m really good at doing that in relation to my career. 

The problem is, as a friend pointed out, I blame myself for situations beyond my control. So I wasn’t anticipating the internet would come along and destroy the value of the written word or the value of music. Two of my biggest skill sets are songwriting—I’ve written music for TV adverts—and journalism. In a different society, in a different world—if you look at my CV and who I’ve written for, in a different world, twenty years ago, that amount of income has me with a really nice mortgage. But the loss of advertising revenue through Facebook and social media—you couldn’t anticipate that. 

The choices I made, I feel, were fairly smart ones, and I didn’t give myself enough credit for the resilience, the flexibility I’ve shown, the ability to adapt. I look at my life and think about the choices I made, and each of the big choices was a good one. Each of them. I’m just someone who is very hard on myself, and in relation to the work I turn down—I mean, Elia, I can disclose this to an extent: I was offered money by bad people. When bad people want to gloss a project, they’ll throw money at you. Some work I did, I’m pretty proud of it; I did some work for foundations trying to get donors to give more, and some might say it was misguided to work with people to try to get them to give more to renewables and so on, but I don’t regret those years. 

We never had a Greta Thunberg; when I was working at these organisations trying to help them give money away to different causes—good causes, in my opinion, fighting climate stuff—we never had a Greta Thunberg come along and say, Sort yourselves out. I would have loved to be a communications director for these organisations in her era; I reckon we could have leveraged what she was doing to get them to really shell out. 

But in terms of the dirty money I’d turned down, I don’t regret that at all. I got offered some money by a particular organisation at a time when—how do I say this? Let me be frank and just say it. I got offered money to write a documentary about the World Cup in 2018, and I just couldn’t do it, knowing what Russia was doing in Syria at that time. I just couldn’t do it. That money that would have had a real—they asked me to write the official documentary; that would have been very good money. But I just couldn’t. I knew the second I got the email that I couldn’t do it. And I felt sick because I really needed the money, and the money would have been great, but I couldn’t do this work. 

And I told friends what the situation was—and I didn’t tell them because I wanted them to say, Turn it down. I told them because I wanted them to know the cost. The funny thing is, Elia, I will never forget my friends’ faces when I told them. They were like, So what did you do? Some of them still expected me to maybe just take it and not put my name on it. But I said, Yeah, I said no to it. We were drinking in a bar at three in the morning, and one of the my oldest friends in the city turned to me and said Musa, the impact of that decision goes far beyond what you think. This sounds dramatic, but they looked at me like there was shock, there was a positive form of shock, like a real respect, of like, Wow, he actually did it. Like, That guy really isn’t earning as much as he should be. 

But the funny thing is: since making all those choices, my life has changed, because we got approached by Spotify to host this podcast and now I get paid a salary that would be a comfortable living if I did nothing else, and I’ve got other stuff that I’m doing as well, books like this. So it’s funny: a year and a half after I turned that work down, I am now earning money I am not ashamed to earn. I’m not saying, Hang in there everyone, you’ll get what you should! because I don’t think that’s true. I got very lucky. But that luck means I can sleep at night—not only can I sleep at night, I can actually plan a future, save money, and live in a way that I feel comfortable and write the things I want to write.

EA: Speaking of writing, one of the reasons I started doing therapy again—I started again while I was still in Edinburgh; now I’m continuing via Zoom as many of us are—well, there were many things, that’s an episode in and of itself. But I didn’t fully understand why I was so unable to—I was able to read a bit of science fiction and fiction; I was able to get some books done and read them; but I was having difficulties writing. I was having difficulties writing anything that was out of the ordinary, in the sense that it wasn’t “real.” 

There isn’t that much science fiction coming out of the Arab world. Now there is much more than before, and largely as a legacy of the 2011 uprisings and the good effects of that. But there isn’t the equivalent of Lord of the Rings and those sorts of things—to write a book like that you need a lot of time and mental space. So I started asking myself what it would take to get to that mental space. I might not be able to replicate it entirely; I’m not going to be a middle-aged white Oxford dude. It’s not going to happen. No offense, Tolkein. But what would it take, in terms of the emotional energy, emotional resources, mental resources that would be required? What would I need to do in a healing process to get there? 

Because I had identified, I think correctly, that I wasn’t able to read that much fiction (and science fiction especially), and I wasn’t able to write at all, because I was overwhelmed by reality. I was overwhelmed. In order to write fiction, there has to be a way of dealing with this state of being on high alert all the time. This is one of the reasons why I started doing therapy. 

A pretty significant percentage of this book is about the decision you took to do therapy. Can you talk a bit about that?

MO: Of course, yes. For me, going to therapy is a bit like getting MOT [Ministry of Transport emissions test] if you’ve got a car. You don’t go when the car is bust—you go when it’s like, Let’s get a check up and see if there is anything going on. It’s like going to the dentist; you don’t go when it’s absolutely critical, as I have sometimes done. You go in good time. For me, I was like, Let me go and sort some things out. Let me just go and talk some things out. Maybe there are issues I haven’t dealt with, trauma I haven’t processed. 

The fact of the anniversary of my father’s death coming along, the timing of it, really weighed on me—the fact that I’ll be older than my dad at some point and I didn’t feel like I’d achieved enough—it felt like a good moment to go and talk about it. And two books basically emerged from those therapy sessions. Without therapy, this book wouldn’t exist. There’s a line that became the title of the book—I was in a therapy session, and I was talking about all the things that I’d created and why it was important to create them, and I said, “In the end, it was all about love.” That’s a sentence I said, and I stopped and I said, I’ve got to use that. I’ve got to write a book and call it that. 

The second thing was when I wrote this book about private school. My therapist was like, You talk about your race and you talk about your sexuality, but you never talk about being in private school. I was like, Oh my god, I’ve got to write about that. Those two books emerged directly from conversations with him, and those books are both extremely personal. People can go, Oh man, you’re so personal, you’re so open. The reason why there’s no shame attached to any of that is because the trauma is processed. A lot of shame is unprocessed trauma. This thing happened to me, this experience. I’m not ashamed of it. Oh, you talk about this? Yeah, I do. 

But that’s the human bit: like, if you were in my situation, that’s the thing you would have done and that’s the thing you would have felt. Of course you would have felt it. So it is extremely empowering. This vulnerability actually intimidates some people, to be honest, because when you have that level of disclosure, people are like, Oh my god, you’ve been through this and that. Well, of course I have. What would you expect? Of course I’ve been through it. That’s natural, that’s normal. The funny thing is, I wrote these books, both of them, without the validation that comes from—they’re written from a place, in a funny way, of pure self-care, pure honesty, and pure strength, and no need for validation. That’s why I’m so proud of these books: because they don’t come from a place where it’s like, Accept me! They come from saying, This is how things are. This is what happens when life throws multiple hand grenades at you and you somehow find the self-love and the self-care to adapt and to persevere and to endure. 

These books are not about resilience. They’re about: Yes, I’ll be vulnerable. Yes, I’ll absorb all these blows, and I will proceed. That’s the message. Both of these books have a similar ending, too. If you read both the book about Eton and this book, you will notice similar endings in them—and that’s deliberate. Those endings are deliberately similar. They work conceptually, but they also work spiritually.

EA: Can you mention the name of the Eton book?

MO: It’s called One of Them. It’s about being at that private school, and the reason it is called that is because I didn’t want to be like Oh, I’m just a dispassionate observer who was there, and I didn’t really engage and benefit from it. No, I benefited from so much privilege. At the same time, I see how that privilege is corrosive to a fairer society in many ways, and I want to interrogate that and interrogate myself. Which is what I do in the book.

EA: You mention in In the End, it Was All About Love that you told a friend one of your anxieties is that your accent reminds you of those people. I don’t know if people listening know about Eton college. Would you mind giving a few words, in case someone is not familiar with how massive that institution is, in terms of its political impact?

MO: Okay. It’s a boarding school, private school, fee-paying school in England, in the UK, which was attended by several prime ministers through history. There have been maybe twenty, twenty-one prime ministers who went through that school, and it’s provided several more politicians. Some of the wealthiest people in the world, some of their children have attended there. It is basically at the heart of the English establishment, and I attended that school for five years, from 1993 to 1998. At the time I was there, there were also a lot of the political and social figures who are now quite prominent in the world at the moment. 

I wrote the book to go back in time to try to understand what it was about that environment that creates individuals like this. What is it about the networks? It felt elusive at a certain point. The conclusion I arrived at (I don’t mind giving this away) is that ultimately, these environments revere power without context. If you see a statue of the prime ministers who have done so much to damage this country, fifty years from now on a wall, you’ll just see the statue and they’ll say it’s important to be grand. It’s as simple as that. There’s no critique like, Actually that person was not a great leader. That person did something that was worthy of a statue or a bust. It’s a very insidious form of influence. There’s something offensive about it. Oh, there’s a statue of Henry the Eighth! Henry the Eighth did terrible things to women, but you don’t look at the statue and think, He murdered women he didn’t like. We studied it like, Oh yeah, he beheaded—we normalized that a king came along and beheaded women he didn’t like. That’s an astonishing thing to be made normal!

EA: Isn’t there a song? I just remember I heard that somewhere.

MO: Right—it’s like a joke, it’s so normal. My book is about the insidious ways we revere power without context. Here’s the thing, Elia: I look at life, and I criticize it a lot, but actually, one thing I had to do in the process of writing these two books was, How about you give yourself credit for doing it right? How about, This is how hard it is to make every choice as morally as you can, as ethically as you can, and along the way, to be judged by some people. I’m not having a go at them, but for some people, they look at me and my background—one of my best friends, an amazing human being, he said: The first two years that I knew you, I thought, “I’m not sure about this guy.” This is someone who I revere personally and professionally. He was like, I knew where you’d been to school, and your background with those people, and for the first two years I was like, “Nah, not having it.” 

That was heartbreaking for me to hear, because I could feel that distance. Knowing him, I could feel it. Now we’re really close; it would never be a problem. But that coldness, that isolation was very painful. I never complained about it, don’t get me wrong, because I understood where it came from. I understood that suspicion on a human level. But it wasn’t easy to take, because it was like, I know that I want to give so much to this world and this community and this society. But the heartbreaking thing, Elia, was feeling that because of who I was seen to be, I would never get to contribute as I wanted to. 

This is partly why the journey was so long, because I’ve had to defeat people’s preconceptions, which in many ways are well-earned. I’m not even having a go at them. I’m forty-one years old, Elia, and I’ve arrived here at exactly the right time. Every project I’m doing now—the two podcasts I’m doing, the three books coming out this year, the other plans in the pipeline—every project I’m fiercely proud of, so maybe this was just how it was meant to be for someone like me.

EA: Speaking of the podcast, I would be remiss if I had you on and did not speak about football. I’m not much into sports. I do occasionally follow tennis. I used to be pretty good at it, and I’m trying to get back into it. I’m legally obliged to say that I support Argentina or France at the World Cup.
It’s a big part of your life, so feel free to plug the podcast as well when you answer this. You mention how you were setting up a team with some people that you met—I know this is the power of football and of many sports. I’m quoting: “You’re all on this team to build the same thing, and although you may not be the star architect, there is an equal value in laying down the bricks.” This is something I admire in friends of mine who are really into sports, into football particularly, who are passionate about their teams, and who—contrary to what many people think—are not happy with how things are; they’re actually very critical of the business deals going on and all of that stuff. 

What can you tell us—how would you describe the role of football, given everything we’ve spoken about over the past hour. What has football done to you?

MO: It has an immense power, football. It taught me the value of the team, of contributing to something bigger than yourself. One of the best seasons I’ve played, which is referred to in the book, we went training in the snow. In most teams I’d played in, I’d been one of the better players. I’d been playing football since the age of about eight. I don’t play regularly now anymore, but I’d been playing football regularly from about the age of eight years, and on all the teams I’ve played, I’d been one of the best players—and I get to this team in Germany, and I was one of the worst. Technically I wasn’t as good as these other players. The technical level was very high, still is. The physical level was very demanding. By that time, I was thirty-seven years old. So I was now going from starting as a striker to being maybe the number five or six choice striker. I would play, on average, twenty minutes a game. And it was one of the best seasons of my life. I loved it. I absolutely loved it, because I had a particular job. 

I’d prepare myself the morning of the game watching highlights of my favorite strikers that played. I looked at Patrick Kluivert when he went to Barcelona, when he wasn’t that quick anymore. I would watch Patrick Kluivert highlights every morning of every game. I’d listen to particular music. I get myself psychologically prepared to contribute, in a very limited role, to this beautiful team I played for, and it was one of the best seasons of my life, Elia. It was completely self-sacrificial and I adored it. 

So football taught me to take responsibility as a star player in a sense, at my amateur level. It taught me to take that responsibility, but also to take a back seat, to be in service of a team. I played for a team in the UK called Stonewall FC, which is a queer football team, and no one played as a defensive midfielder on that team. No one wanted to play there, so I chose to play there for an entire season even though I’d never played there in my whole life. I played for them and I was proud of the self-sacrifice. 

If football taught me that, it taught me about love, really. Like, I played for some great teams, and we lost players—I lost one of the best footballers I’d played with in my life, a guy called Ollie Broom. He died in a car crash a few years after we played together. I lost another guy, Richard Eagle. We won the championship together at the university in Oxford. We won the university championship; I played up front with Richard; I scored twelve goals that season and he scored eleven. We won the league and he died of leukemia the morning of the championship dinner, without warning. It was undetected, it was a very rare form.

My whole footballing life, playing football has been punctuated with joy and tragedy. So it has taught me so much; one day I’ll write about this, maybe. What football taught me of the human condition has been extraordinary, and the role it has now in society—we see that it is such an incredible tool for sports-washing. We see these political projects which are fronted by people who are sports-washing. But we see the social power of it: look at what happened in Egypt, the fact that those Ultras who were murdered were doing incredible anti-fascist work. The anti-fascist work being done across Europe: look at Bayern-Munich and those Ultras, and how critical they’d been at the World Cup in Qatar. So football has been an incredible social force, for good and bad. 

The podcast I run is called the Stadio podcast; I’m also a guest on the Wrighty’s House podcast. Both of those you can find on Spotify at a feed called Ringer FC. On the Stadio podcast, we talk about football in the geekiest detail, but we also talk about the social-political aspects, because I find it so important to critique football as a social phenomenon, because it means so much and does so much in society, good and bad.

EA: So the last question I ask guests is: what are three books you would recommend to listeners and why?

MO: I’m going to recommend a book I just picked up. It’s called The Three Mothers by Anna Malaika Tubbs, about how the mothers of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X, and James Baldwin shaped a nation. There’s a book of poetry by Joelle Taylor called Songs my Enemy Taught Me. It’s an incredible piece of poetry. There’s a book about parenthood as we live today by Nikesh Shukla called Brown Baby. Nikesh is someone I know personally, for full disclosure. He was the editor of a book called The Good Immigrant about race and immigration in the UK, and I’m really excited for him, because this book was his first chance to take center stage, and he’s executed superbly. Those are the three I recommend.

EA: Amazing. I didn’t know there was a book about the mothers of Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. I’ll check all three of them out. 

Musa, amazing to have you on. Again, I think you’re the first one who came on three times.

MO: Oh my goodness! You have no idea what a compliment that is. I’m going to embarrass you, but that’s such a huge compliment. Because there are people whose opinions you respect, like yourself, like Asteris Masouras—there are certain people whose critiques are like, when you see them writing online, there’s a precision of thought. I’m not an expert in a lot of these areas. I always try to think critically, so the fact that you’re like, Let me talk to that guy—that’s just a huge compliment, honestly. The whole Global Voices crowd are just absolutely dons. I love them. So yeah. Thanks, that’s a huge compliment.

EA: No honestly, it’s my pleasure. I’m looking forward to the second book as well. Can you mention both books as well, in case people missed it during the conversation?

MO: The first book is In the End, It Was All About Love from Rough Trade books. It’s best to buy it directly from them; it’s an independent press and they’re doing incredible work. The second book is called One of Them; it’s about being in the private school Eton college and it’s on Unbound publishers. That’s available almost everywhere, but you can also find it directly from Unbound publishers themselves.

EA: Musa, thanks for talking.

MO: Absolute pleasure, man.