This is a conversation with Lina Mounzer and Timour Azhari, repeat guests on the podcast, about the legacy of the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon (1915–1918) and its legacy today. This is episode 85 of The Fire These Times.

Topics Discussed + Resources:

• What was the Great Famine? Causes and Context (Allies blockading from the sea, Ottomans barring grains, role of local elites like Michel Sursock)
• Hunger and Hallucination: Tales from the Great Famine (Lina’s talk)
• An Abandoned Village Bears Witness to Lebanon’s Famines – Old and New (Timour’s article)
• Parallels to today
• A Hungry Population Stops Thinking About Resistance: Class, Famine, and Lebanon’s World War I Legacy
• Is there an amnesia problem in Lebanon? Yes and No
• The sense that history is repeating itself
• Working as a way of coping
• Thinking of leaving and of the established migration routes (belonging, identity, legitimacy etc)
• The role of the diaspora beyond bringing aid
• Across the Rickety Bridge by Farrah Berrou
• Akram Khater’s Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Making of a Lebanese Middle Class, 1861-1921
• The gendered component of the famine
• The Megaphone short doc
• Maybe let’s eat the rich
• Coexistence as being between rioters and peaceful protesters
• What counts as violence vs non-violence
• What we’ve inherited from the Lebanese wars (1975-1990)

Recommended Books

Timour:

• On the Road by Jack Kerouack
• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
• Citizen Hariri by Hannes Bauman

Lina:

• Beirut Nightmares by Ghada Samman
• A Month in Siena & The Return by Hicham Matar
• Yes, I am a destroyer by Mira Mattar

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Music by Tarabeat.