(AIA Interviews) Daniel Drennan El-Awar - Lebanon, Culture, Love and Hope (2023)

Ian Anderson: This is Ian Anderson here on behalf of Sina and East is a podcast. I'm talking with Daniel Trennan-Eloar. Is that how I say your last name?

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Eloar, yes.

Ian Anderson: Okay, awesome. You are currently based out of Vancouver and you teach at an arts and design school?

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: That's right, Emily Carr University in Vancouver.

Ian Anderson: Awesome. Awesome. So do you have tenure or do you dream of it? Because... Sorry.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: No, no, no. I made promotion and got tenure, I think, when was that? Two years ago? So, yeah.

Ian Anderson: Awesome. Awesome. Well, we are here to push those bounds.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Well, you know, people say to me, oh, you can relax now. You have tenure. And I'm like, no, I don't relax ever.

Ian Anderson: That's very real. So if you could just like, because I've been the last like week or two, I've been like reading through the very extensive blog that you wrote. That'll be in the podcast blurb. And yes, if you could just like give us some background for people who otherwise don't know who you are. You moved back to Lebanon in 2004, right? That's right. Yep.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: So, yeah, I was working, lived and worked in New York City for, what, 17 years and grew up in the States, grew up in New Jersey. And as an adoptee, as someone adopted from Lebanon at age 40, decided to go back. I needed to answer certain of my own questions concerning identity and what it meant to be of color in the United States, as it were. And so I went back to Lebanon in 2004, rather sight unseen. I was teaching at the American University there, and I lived there for 12 years.

Ian Anderson: Yeah, you actually came over to the U.S. like before you were even like the whole age of one years old. And if you don't mind my asking, right, like you're reconnecting with all of that, right? That wasn't motivated by, I guess, like the previous three years, right? Like just absolutely insane, everything to do with the war, America's bloodthirst. right not that i'm trying to assume that right but it's it's just to give you some some context right like i'm i'm 29 right i was born and raised with cnn blasting videos of just invasion the bombs over baghdad right rainy shitty footage of just bombings over and over again you never were given context right of of any of this it was at least in like the news and it But as a kid, you grow up with this desensitization and simultaneous lead thirst, right? Of just, I mean, for me, not that I literally did, right? These are things that kind of were like culturally ingrained in that time and period in space.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: I think it's interesting to hear the generational shift. Things were a little bit different for me in many ways, some of them contradictory. For example, we came back to the States. Actually, I was five years old. We lived in Iran and also Australia. My father was working overseas, my adoptive father. Came back to New Jersey. And in fact, my hometown in New Jersey has a huge Lebanese population. And this didn't sink in until the name started clicking when I was back. But You're talking about a generation that was hell-bent on assimilation. So there wasn't any of that culture brought forward. And at the same time, you know, living in... I remember the demonstrations against the war on Iraq in 2003. And... As much as I obviously willingly participated in that, wasn't able to answer questions in my own mind as to what my connections were to that. And so a lot of things building up at the age of 40, deciding to go back, like you're saying, a lot of that happened to be, I need to be able to come up with an answer. to what I'm seeing politically, economically, in terms of imperialism of the United States. I need to be able to answer to that, but from a position of being grounded. And I didn't have that grounding growing up. You know, you grow up in a white household and white community and all of that kind of thing. And so you don't have the support structure of your forebears, your ancestors. And so 2004 decided to go back and I can say now I have that grounding and I'm grateful for having spent that time there.

Ian Anderson: I've spoken with a lot of friends and like the family structure there is incredibly different from what you would get here, right? Like the way that family there operates is just you have these massive extended shared names means that you're probably by blood going to know that same person, right? And here, like there's no guarantee. I mean, if you have a really unique, fascinating last name, it's possible. But I grew up knowing one, two generations of my own family and then really not. My grandfather constructed a family tree and that was it. This is a white American Protestant culture and it's terrible. That is to say that there's not like that same kind of cultural familial ties. where i'm getting with this is like there's been this i mean right now we're we're facing down like mass killing of so many palestinians and part of the reason that i i wanted to get you on is because there's so much like shared history just knowledge and everything else culture culture that goes along with your background the palestinians like you were even there for the 2006 war i mean i've read some of your your blog posts like that

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: happened during that time and i i think it'd be really fascinating to get into that no absolutely and before doing that i might touch back on your eye your notions of family structure which are absolutely spot on and i extend that now how to put it the idea of that network extending into the fabric itself of society is something that fundamentally doesn't exist in global northern cultures anymore. Perhaps it did at one time, but words like ma'un, which is often translated as the small kindnesses, it's a surah of the Quran. And so you can see how it doesn't really have a single translation, but that idea of every day it is obligatory on you, whether it be in your neighborhood or your community, family, to reconnect those connections. to reweave the fabric of society at every given point through things you say, things you do, and putting the burden of kindness on oneself. I think that extension of family into community is something that I really miss. And looking at those diary pages, luckily I was able to salvage them from... nightmare of WordPress and turn them into a website. But I'm really struck by the playbook and the similarities. You know, a few things have changed along those lines, but the playbook is there and it's exactly the same. And it's as I remember it, you know, this was back in 2006, obviously. But what worries me a little bit is energy spent imagining that playbook to be reality, if that makes sense, meaning we're reacting to what is scripted. And so it doesn't make sense to fulfill one's role within the play, as it were, if we think of it along those lines.

Ian Anderson: We can't let things get sucked right back into what it was rather than... We are watching the leaders of the Palestinians. They're reforming the entire militant format. They're changing everything that's going on right now. And it's incredible. You have... just with the brief truce like the ceasefire right they brought them back to day one the initial demands the initial ask all of that was met right for the days that that held so now they've they've set new terms because they can't this is so crucial to just keep in mind like like we can't Just think back to those things, which struck me, right, is that, like, I was making, I was putting these files together for one of the previous anti-imperialist archive sets, and you have these interviews with doctors from that time period, almost word for word, giving the same kind of, like, talk about what was happening to the Libnani people of, like, how phosphorus bombs worked. right it 40 years ago and and we're right back to the same tactics the same weapons it's like virtually nothing has changed except the tech has gotten worse the zionists are more cowardly than they were before just like funding the proxies now and death squads and everything else yeah and now you have these these like escortless tanks right it's i mean go for it well you're you're

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: We're looking back at how things rolled out. And I have to say, in 2006, I had only been there two years. And so my Arabic was still fledgling and I was still coming to terms with being newly there and being in a new neighborhood and that kind of thing. And what I remember is still holding on to what I remember from 2006. you know, and as adoptees, we talk about this all the time, you're acculturated into particular class status and sense of self as citizen. And so you appeal to what you imagine to be the moral similarities of those that you see as perhaps class similar. And what strikes me now, and what I say now is, you know, as Sata Shakur said it better than I'm about to say it, but You know, no one, paraphrasing, no one in history has gotten their liberation by appealing to the moral sense of those oppressing them. And so, and I extend that further. I look at it in terms of to make an appeal about one's humanity, one has to be seen as human. And that's missing absolutely from history. this entire context, but all of the aspects of the war in 2006 are present here, including, you know, the idea of human shields and the idea of rooting out these terrorist pockets and the phrasings that they use. It was exactly the same with the Hezb in Lebanon and, you know, that the Dahi, the southern suburbs were home to the quote unquote terrorist group. And so that needed to go. And all of the protests concerning whether it be phosphorus bombs or, you know, bombing of ambulances or bombing of funerals of people burying their dead from the bombings the day before. I mean, you're, you're making, we were making appeals as if there were, you know, reciprocal sense of bestowed humanity. And that's what has changed fundamentally in, for me now. But I also remember, you know, what's changed now too is, like you said, the tech aspect of it, you have artificial intelligence controlling your sorties. I don't know what to say to that. That's like a fricking Terminator movie right there. And the idea, you know, and everything, everything, I was just looking back at the diaries today, the feigning of appealing to you know the the powers that be appealing for humanitarian corridors and we were like every single road every single bridge has been destroyed linking the north and the south the airports and neighboring countries have been have been like where do you expect this humanitarian aid to come in and so the the ability to look at what's happening now with I don't wanna say jaded or cynical, but just a much more, the ability to remember all of this and to keep it in mind as all of this unfolds. And I have to add, given the context of You don't even want to admit it or say it out loud, but a country like the United States that's willing to see or allow a million of its citizens to die of COVID in the name of its economy, what appeal is possible to make to such an entity?

Ian Anderson: We live in a modern-day death cult. Honest to God. I think that's really the only true reading that we can get out of this. It's the only way to make money is through blood on a larger scale, right? You mentioned, if you don't mind, did you go into the South? We're looking at that same like nowhere is safe. We've been pushed into Khan Yunus. I think I'm saying that right. I'm not sure. Khan Yunus, yes. even there is is being bombed uh the territory that's right underneath that is is being bombed there's no winning it's and see the article you mentioned that there's an article that came out like a couple days ago right and it basically says that every single target uses the phrase mass assassination factor right and there's this ai-based system called habsara uh, the gospel that generates targets at a rate that like normal people could never do. And so when you read about like the different martyrs, right. Uh, and, and who they were, things that they did, these are, these are things that made them threats, not, not because they were, they were dangerous, but because they were pillars of the community. I did want to get into, did you ever go to see the South? Like after the war, I know that you were still new there, right. But what, what kind of, what, what did you take away from that?

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: The neighborhood that I lived in, Ras Neba, is situated, for all intents and purposes, is still the green line separating east from west Beirut, and just not too far from the southern suburbs. And at a certain point, the bombing of the southern suburbs was so intense that my neighborhood pretty much emptied out, and I went and stayed with friends in Hamra, which is closer to I was focused on the relief efforts that were taking place through the faculty of, I believe it's health sciences at AUB, packing supplies for the South. To remember is that, you know, literally it wasn't possible to travel at the time. And to do what one could meant working with the relief efforts that were being organized in Beirut. There were huge population groups. that obviously left the southern suburbs and displaced persons from the south all moving north. And we're seeing it also now in Gaza. I believe the intention was that everyone would run for the Rafah border and demand to be let out, which was part of the plan. But everyone's holding their ground. And in the same light, when the ceasefire finally started, came into place in Lebanon, a million people went south. They went back to their homes, and that effectively drove out any last remaining occupying forces, you might say. I've been to the Melita Museum in the south. I've been to the south many times. The march to the border with Palestine in Marun Aras, I was there. So I'm familiar with the south. I know Sur pretty well. But during the war, I was focused on Beirut and relief efforts there.

Ian Anderson: And just to go back a little farther, in the time that you spent with people, what is the cultural memory of the 20 years of occupation and then the war? I mean, it's very different from here where people are slowly starting to stop saying, oh, it's very complicated. It can't just be explained in a few minutes. The tolerate to that is that it's an immeasurable thing that you just don't know about anyway. Americans, despite literally being the cause of so much violence across the world, having this literal military worship, death cult worship, every other person is so ignorant of death and destruction that it just happens in their name every day.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Yeah, and you're touching on something that I often bring up with my students in terms of the idea that a so-called democracy like the United States needs to have that excuse to go to war. And so the Gulf of Tonkin and the USS Maine and the weapons of mass destruction, and you name it, there's an excuse for it, Pearl Harbor. And the fact that none of this is learned, none of this becomes part of our acculturation to speak this way in the United States ends up sounding like conspiracy theory on some level. But what was interesting to me in Lebanon was the imposed notion of sectarian difference, but the reality of class difference. In my neighborhood, my neighborhood was one of the few, well, I'll put it this way, AUB didn't want me living there. Like they didn't want to sign a contract because they didn't think a professor from AUB should be living in this neighborhood. And so, well, it was really interesting. It was quite telling. And I remember the guy from the housing office saying, are you sure you want to live here? I was like, well, yeah. Yeah, I do. And it was one of the few neighborhoods that allowed for migrant populations to live. And I'm not saying it was a welcome. It was more like this building is not tenable anymore. Maybe a landlord is going to rent it out to whether Syrian workers, Egyptian workers, Sudanese, Filipina workers. Ethiopian, whatever the case may be. And so there was a class difference and distinction in my most local population, such that when I went to AUB, it was literally like going to a completely other, another world in terms of class. And the ability to speak without needing to explain or without needing to fall back on ideas of it's complicated. There's a knowledge and an understanding within certain class strata of the of the country and the region of the past, whether that comes from poetry or history or the Quran or wherever, there's an understanding of what's taking place in context, that it's not just something that happens. And I remember, you know, the hue and cry that went up, oh, if only the Hezb hadn't done this, or if only, you know, the idea that we don't want... there was a prevailing idea among the bourgeoisie that Lebanon was going to be safe from foreign wars on its soil. And, you know, this gets into ideas of, well, the day-to-day violence of just living in Lebanon is in itself a kind of warfare against the population. And the fact that we were able to, or the fact that one made a distinction, usually at the behest of foreign powers, including European and North American foreign powers. It was, it became very clear with whom I'd rather hang out, one, and then two, you know, if I have to, I'll put it this way. What I remember most clearly is Whenever I was talking to somebody from the bourgeois classes or upper classes, and I would mention that I was adopted, the usual phrasings came back. Oh, you're lucky you were chosen. Oh, how good for you to be brought up in the United States. And whether they be Syrian workers or Palestinians or Bedouin that I was in contact with at certain points, the response was always haram, meaning that's a shame, that shouldn't have happened to you. You know, the idea of being removed from one's place or one's source is so ingrained in the mentality of certain segment of the population that I found solace in that. And so, you know, as I leaned forward, as I continued to lean away from, for want of a better way of phrasing it, the class that I was teaching or the class of AUB that I was expected to fulfill as a professor and how I was seen most locally within my neighborhood and otherwise, that became a contradiction that, you know, eventually resulted in having to leave the country. But that's another discussion. My point here is that, you know, I didn't, and it continues today. If I'm if I meet someone from Lebanon here in Canada and their first question is, you know, what's your family name and what village are you from? I know where they're coming from. And that whole sectarian who's who and what are your politics and all of that. And I say, well, why do you even ask that question? And I know, I know that conversation is going to go. And so I don't, I don't pursue it. Whereas, you know, there's an influx, there's been an influx of Syrian refugees into Canada. And I've had conversations with many of them and it's a completely different conversation.

Ian Anderson: I'm white. I mean, I should, I should, you know, say that, I guess. Like I've seen that, that whole like conversation play out because the people that are from the South, right, are going to be wildly more, ideologically charged right because simply because of like the local knowledge of what they've been put through and like the you know just just everything and then that's going to to contrast with virtually everyone else or at least the people who are in a a position to do as they they will right so i i guess that that leads me into like two different questions here right like There are a good number of American schools in Beirut, in Cairo. They're spread across the region. And I wondered if you could comment on their role as this literal academic ivory tower, right? Where it's a very different landscape from what you would get going to one of the more local schools. And then on top of that, right, like you touched on this, right, but you read about the secondary status of like Palestinians that live in the country. And I mean, they aren't allowed to erect like actual buildings. Now, I'm sure that some of these have eventually happened, right? But there's like legal second class status that is imposed upon them both as a supposed like moral valuation of the fact that they belong outside of in their actual country, right? But at the same time, it keeps them in this, this hovel. It bars them from the entry into what could otherwise be a normal life there. And this, of course, ties into the fact that, So many different towns or cities or gathering places are known as camps. They're places that are not actually these fully formed places. They're transitional, right?

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Sure. Well, I used to refer to AUB as the first footfall of the jackboot of American imperialism in the region. That's right. I remember when we were working on, a colleague of mine at AUB taught at Mahmoud was putting together a theater play. And the idea was, what would Malcolm X say to us were he to come back to the region and to Beirut, where he spoke a few years before his assassination. And in doing research, we found out that the president, who was always an American at the time, said that Malcolm X was forbidden Forbidden to speak on American soil, basically, in speaking of the American university. And I found that quite telling. The fact that the university started as a missionary school and the language of instruction was Arabic is quite telling in the sense that this was during the Ottoman Empire. And in using Arabic as the language of instruction... it fomented a lot of literary, cultural, linguistic pride. Things were, you know, the anti-Ottoman sentiment was being revived. And so as a antidote against that, English was brought in as the language of instruction at the American University. And so the use of language as a barrier and also like a tactical tool of imperialism, you know, should not be lost on us. I used to Sometimes I wonder, and this comes from discussions mostly with adoptees from Korea who are entitled to a special visa and are allowed to go back to the country, but we talk about it and I think it was similar for me. I was seen among the bourgeois class as a perfected Lebanese citizen, meaning acculturated and speaking perfect English, coming back to speak eloquently about the American dream and life-awaiting outside of this nation state. And I'm here to find my family, find my roots, find my culture, find my language. And so to be forbidden from speaking Arabic in a classroom or to not be allowed to work with local, whether it be philosophical, political, economical readings or treatises or whatever the case might be, history even, you start to see you start to see the imposition of education as an imperial foothold. And it's the same throughout the region. And the fact that the majority of universities in Beirut are either French or English language tells you all you really need to know. In terms of the Palestinians and their place within society, I mean, you can go back and look at the headlines that were published in the wretched rag and the heart and displacement of the Palestinians was seen among a certain section of the population in Lebanon as, you know, the wave, the terms that were used, quite racist. And I've always marveled at The Lebanese bourgeois, yeah, the Lebanese bourgeoisie's ability to be racist towards Syrians and Palestinians has always just boggled my mind and, you know, their reaction when, you know, when they asked me where I'm from and I say, you know, Damascus country. Greater Syria, you know, they go ballistic and that's quite telling as well. But I think the ideas of sectarian balance within the government structures as imposed by colonialism back in the day meant that anyone coming from the outside was met with hostility and above and beyond that, a group of people that doesn't see itself as Arab or wanting to distance itself from any possibility of being seen as muslim gives you the ability to keep people sequestered in like you said what we refer to as as camps but which are really ghettos i don't mean you know there's not even a there's not even a kind way of putting it and this is for the most part something that that is kept in in other countries that house like large palestinian populations in jordan and

Ian Anderson: I do plan to put this into a kind of like two part and get more into like adoption with you later on in a second part of this. I am aware that you're read a good bit. Your, your mom is Cruz. Yes. I was just curious to see really fascinates me. There's always this every now and then you, you hear about how the Raley's have a Cruz population and, and they just, they welcome, welcome them into the idea somehow mystically mysteriously a part of the israeli population with no historical background i'm sure you can absolutely give us some more background on this this is always something that's just it's so funny to me finding out that i was from that i was from the druze sect was

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: kind of, it was overwhelming in the sense that, you know, I don't know that it's possible to find a smaller group of people that has a collective name to them, and to all of a sudden find yourself, you know, and, you know, a little bit more seriously, I had built up narratives in my head of where I was possibly from, and that was absolutely not one of them, and so to find that out meant I had a knowledge of their history and what became intriguing to me was the stories that I heard previous to the imposition of the occupying entity in Palestine.

Ian Anderson: The fact that borders were

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: pretty much open and transparent. And the Druze populations, whether in the Golan or in Galilee or within the mountains of Lebanon or wherever they might be, there was exchange and back and forth, and this was completely undermined. And so again, getting back to how we started talking about family and community, the undermining of community to work as community becomes a fundamental aspect of what's going on here. But I mean, this is propaganda. This is Hasbara from the occupying entity.

Ian Anderson: You know what I'm saying?

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Like the idea that the Ethiopian Jews or the Yemeni Jews or whomever were welcomed back with open arms. We know this isn't true. And we know to this day that in many ways, I'll phrase it this way. It's so similar to me. Where does the U.S. Army do its recruiting? You know, Times Square in New York City used to be an army recruiting station. And invariably you would see someone from America's minority marginalized populations in there becomes, you know, if I think back getting completely theoretical, if I think of settler colonialism and the nation state that it ends up propping up, these are, you know, I'm not, these aren't my words. These are from the people who were in support of of such entities back in the day, but there are three roles that are allowed you within such a nation state. One is work, one is procreating, and one is fighting. And so it makes sense on some demented level that people would find you're looking for survival, basically. How are you going to survive in this society?

Ian Anderson: Right.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Well, we can pick this up in a second in another conversation. But what became really intriguing to me as I researched, I did a DNA test and that revealed I was from the Druze community. And the more I researched, not propaganda, but scientific treatises on DNA referring to the Druze population's refugium, meaning this is a word taken from like marine biology, where A wave washes in, an animal is left in a tidal pool, and then the waves wash out and it's left behind. But it's not of that place. And so the Druze populations, as much as they might be used as props within the military operations of the country, they're not. The welcome there is a false one. And so they're also seen as a population that needs to be gotten rid of.

Ian Anderson: One of the, I guess, more fascinating pop history things that I've learned is Casey Kasem. I think he was like the original America's Top 40. Scooby-Doo, just an all-around great guy. It was also very pro-Palestine in a time when that was almost like an unthinkable, just completely unknown concept. You know, he was Druze. This was just like the sign of solidarity decades, decades ago.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: I was going to say, you know, it was very intriguing to me in going back to the theater play I was talking about that we did at AUB. The young man who was playing Malcolm X in the play family name Awar, and turns out to be a distant cousin, which is very interesting. But he introduced me to his father, and his father's a doctor up in our family village. And the understanding of the Druze as a monolithic population is a false one. And the stories, you know, there was a very funny moment when... Dr. Alwar said to me, basically, I was being, you know, it was stated to me, we'd be happy and proud to know that you were part of our family as we're researching. And, you know, I, of course, burst into tears. To kind of bring it back to a point of levity, he said to me, well, you know, this branch of the Alwar family has been Communist Party since then. forever, since the days of the beginnings of the revolution. So we're going to need to register you with the Communist Party. And I looked at him and I said, well, you need to wait a minute. I need to meet them first and I need to determine whether they're communist enough for me. And he looked at me and he just said, you are a member of the Auer family. You are definitely an Auer family. And I remember calling my sister later that day and saying, I don't know how this works, but politics is genetic and it's been passed down. So, you know, growing up in a very conservative Republican household, I don't know, I'd come home. But anyway. Yeah.

Ian Anderson: There's also this follow into that. There's this very like unique eye of the ways that your family as an extended structure work carries a parent ideological structure that carries a political half from living in In the West, where your parents are going far right, and then you're going to be also far right, maybe a little more liberal, maybe like we. These are such marginal, minor issues that don't have any bearing on the realities. Politics and political structure is a real thing.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: I ascribe it to the fact that In pursuing that conversation later, I learned a lot about the history of resistance among some of the Druze, not all of them. I mean, there were pro-American Druze leaders in Lebanon as well, but that the history of resistance and the ideas of Arab nationalism and all of these things were just lived, it was lived experience for parts of this population. And I think this is what's missing. The promise that the United States made after World War II to the middle class basically will keep you in a bubble as long as you support the wars that are going on endlessly. Exactly. You know, this is what's starting to fall apart a little bit. It's often said the Romans and the Roman Empire didn't need to know what was going on in England or Syria or wherever. You know what I mean? Like the Americans aren't, it's not required for an American to understand any of this, but to know that, you know, it's so-called economic aspects of it are providing safety and comfort along certain lines. This has been, I think this is what's breaking down as, you know, for want of a better way of describing it, I refer to it as the dragon of capitalism dying and becoming most dangerous. And it's death throes, you know, the ability of people to see to see through and to see past the mythologies that were required for them to prop up their own lives and to survive and to understand that there might be something better beyond this. I think this is becoming quite apparent to many people throughout the world at this point. And, you know, joining 95% of the global South that has known this for the past 500 years, basically.

Ian Anderson: Just in the last two, three years, I mean, the cost of living in the poor has just skyrocketed as contradictions get worse. We're left with an increasing number of people who are forced right into the margins despite making 5, 10, 20 times what someone in the global south does. There's this small proletarianization of a population that has otherwise never felt that before.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Exactly.

Ian Anderson: At the same time, we're literally watching the mass death of a people who are dying for our own sake. They themselves are martyrs, not just for themselves, but for the booming of American military companies and the American state.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: I would add to what you're saying and touching back on the idea that there's something inherent to, say, the history of populations in Greater Syria that doesn't exist, say, in North America. It actually does exist. If we look back at the history of labor, the IWW, of unions, I'll put it this way. I think it is possible, and I've done this many times, when faced with somebody who's presenting as, whether it be supporting Trump or I'm a MAGA or whatever, it's very possible to quickly determine, you know, things, the familial class struggle. Where did your grandfather come from and where, you know, what union was your family a part of when you were growing up? Or, you know, when did you, this is my favorite one, especially with Irish, Welsh, Scots, others, I remember when I was growing up, the newest immigrant waves were coming from places like Poland and Eastern Europe. I often say, you know, when did you become white? When did your family become white? And, you know, this is something, the denigration not only of the of the working class in America, but the white underclass is not to be underestimated as a leverage point for having these discussions. You're reaping the benefits of whiteness, but that's not a given. That's only as long as you're useful. And at a certain point, there's obviously Strength in numbers, in coalition building, in bridging across these identity structures that are kind of being imposed at this point. Those aspects of looking at someone's familial history, I think this is something that goes really untapped within the American left and even here in Canada today. It becomes a useful strategy to have a conversation with somebody and reveal their assent, their class assent, if you will, within the society.

Ian Anderson: So, so often it's to ask someone what their grandfather did for a living or to ask someone like what their grandfather was, was a part of just, you know, more generally is such a fascinating thing. This is again, to, to tie it in, like to tie it into what's currently going on. You get these mass Los Angeles, Iranian protests, which I not classify by any stretch of the imagination as a massive mass. That are dedicated to proving their love and worship for this death cult. That are coming from a diasporic people who are so in love with the idea of destroying their own homeland. Who have no desire to reconnect with their own land ties and their own people. And then tie all of that right into more death. It's mind-blowing.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: It is mind-blowing, and I come across it quite often here where the word Persia and Persian is used instead of Iranian, and I get myself in trouble. I mean, there's an Iranian population in Lebanon, and that's how they would refer to themselves, and so I carry it forward, and I'm corrected. And again, it's like a Lebanese person asking me what village I'm from. It's like, oh, you need to say Persia. It's like, okay, fine. I know where we stand and this conversation should probably stop now. But you're right.

Ian Anderson: And if I think of it in terms of, I used to describe the United States as...

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Well, you would always hear people would say to you things like, well, why is everyone trying to get here? And I would say, well, when you're a battleship blowing every other ship out of the water, where's the only safe place to go? And once you're on that ship, what is the only safe thing to say? I mean, you know, the logic there is not rockets.

Ian Anderson: It's not so much that this is a good place to live. It's that this is a place that has strip mined every other ship. Good place to live.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: No, it's really true. What's striking to me, I mentioned speaking with Syrians who have found asylum here, for example, and at first the conversation is a little bit, hmm. You know, they're trying to figure out what kind of Lebanese guy I am. Like, am I one of those racist assholes from back home or am I good people? And I can't count the number of times the conversation turns to, you know, living in Canada or living in the United States. And the expression used is, there's no life, but you're not living a life. You're existing in a place. And perhaps that life is mimicked within a community, but life was back home. And this is heartbreaking as much as it is telling and revealing that there are groups, immigrant groups, especially. I look at my sister-in-law, who's from Chile, who insisted on Spanish language in the house and the culture. And the idea that that becomes a form of resistance against the domination of a nation state only points out how ludicrous it is for whether they be Iranians in Los Angeles or Cubans in Miami, like, what are you doing? What are you doing?

Ian Anderson: Yeah, I live in a, I guess like a moderately large city here and there's no cultural fascination here. It's breweries and it's landlocked and there's nothing here. And I have such a hard time like explaining this to people like the life that you have to make in these places is so much something that you set for yourself more than something that is defined by the city itself. And this is something that is unique to American cultural culture. mores. You go anywhere else and there is life, there is culture all around you and it's waiting for you to participate in it. Whereas here, it's so much something that you have to almost create from scratch. Right.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: And this is a really good point that I often bring up with my students. And what we end up talking about is the fact that what you're talking about is a process of commodification and co-optation, whether it be cultural or otherwise. And yet, by virtue of my students being in an academic setting or a university where they are presented with a sliver of an art economy as the goal for their graduation, there are places I look at, they happen to be mostly majority minority cities, say, in the United States, whether it be Oakland or Detroit or Newark, Philly, places where because of the denigration and the positioning of certain people as not having humanity or value. You don't, we don't read that culture. We don't see it, but it is present. And the history is overwhelming. I taught a class with a colleague of mine, Maiman Afarhat in Fresno, and we premised, it was a printmaking class. And I was kind of tangential to her presentation of local culture in terms of radical unionization, the UFW movement. But also we looked at local poets and the literary aspects of the city and the Central Valley. And we pulled all of this together and the students did amazing work. But in their day to day, they might not see that or they might, especially in an academic setting, they're not going to be presented well. with that. Fresno had a really amazing, vibrant, and communal culture by virtue of those that are within the bourgeois art realm that I'm forced to deal with as an academic. This is without value. This has no currency, literally, within the dominant culture. And so my focus has always been, especially, you know, we started a collective in Beirut, and part of our goal was to see, like, We're not, like you said, I don't want to start something from scratch. What was here historically? How do you build into that? There's so much there. There's so much there. I mean, the dominant culture has done an amazingly and sadly complete job of making sure that that is either defanged and completely made inert or co-opted or obliterated completely.

Ian Anderson: I know you've talked about this in different interviews prior, but could you expand more on the artwork that you did?

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Sure. So... Like I said, I was at AUB. I was looking to find cultural inroads into the local culture. Working with some of my colleagues at AUB, discovered just the amazing realm of what is the local poster tradition there, especially in terms of resistance art. I want to choose my words correctly. correctly. The artistic, the inherent artistic value of calligraphy as a mode of communication, but also beautification and its use. There were a lot of different strands that formed the complete thread, as it were, but I started researching local art collectives, everything from artists like Burhan Karkutli from Syria, but also who was working out of their basement in some tiny neighborhood putting up calligraphy banners across the street. What was the cultural production on the most local level? And a lot of it was happening in the Palestinian camps. And whether this was via NGO or other incursions, it was still speaking to imminent, if you will, or inherent cultural expression.

Ian Anderson: You see a lot of this in a place like Oakland, where just so much of it is covered in this gorgeous art that is a testament to the population's act of creating their own world, their own sense of self.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Yeah, I was in Oakland in 2010, speaking at a socialism conference there. I remember it was right after the Oscar Grant trial. The city was plastered with posters and memorials and all of that kind of thing. As a point of contrast, in Vancouver, there's no community ability to put up a mural of any kind. It's all vetted by the city, and it becomes a symbol of gentrification, usually. If you see a mural going up, you know your neighborhood is pretty much doomed in the next in the next few years but getting back to the idea of putting together a collective really to be really honest it was a it was a proof of concept like is this something that could still be doable in a formal sense And I remember talking with some friends who were lawyers and they said, well, you need bylaws, you need charter. Here's a template. We can do this in a month or two. You know, the template was typical, like corporate verbiage, 50% plus one voting, elected officers, quorum, you know, rules of order and all of this stuff. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. We want consensus. We want no hierarchy. And the response is, well, you need to write that up yourself. And so it took us two years and we wrote up bylaws and charter and were approved by the government in record time. And I think that has a lot to do with us not playing, like talking about assimilation in the core. An NGO in Lebanon often will have as a premise, we are secular or we are not tied to any religious political faction here. And at which point it's like, well, then what are you doing? What is the reason for you being here? And in our bylaws, we state we're not tied to any one particular sect or political party, but this does not prevent our members from belonging or being of faith or anything like that. And I think that perhaps was, who knows, a bit refreshing to the government at the time that we got our approval. And we've been, you know, it's been harder I was more or less forced to leave, forced. The visa that was allowing me to stay was reneged upon, and so I had to leave the country. The port explosion, total collapse of the financial system now, a lot of the members are now in the diaspora. But what's amazing to me is our ability to persevere, but then also seeing diasporic movements like the Palestinian youth movement just taking the reins and doing amazing, amazing, not just organizing, but reviving revolutionary language and cultural form in ways that I have not seen in a long, long time.

Ian Anderson: That's real. I mean, they've been able to completely put life into the hands of people who otherwise would have never seen that kind of content. Absolutely. I did want to ask you, I mean, you've kind of glanced over this, but I certainly don't want to totalize the conversation about this, but like, What was your contact with Lebanese fighters, people who are now literally on the, if you did have them?

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: At the time, I'll be perfectly honest with you. At the time, I was, let me take a step back. So what became very clear to me at a certain point was, as I ended up raising it, there are levels of political embodiment. wherever one exists. And I often refer to these as citizen, denizen, and alien. A citizen supposedly fully embodied politically, but then realizing that my American naturalization did not afford me that. Meaning with the Patriot Act and other Or the fact that adoptees are slotted into the country through immigration law and not through any kind of, there's no automatic citizenship. And so that this could be something that as easily given as easily taken away, basically. And also I had an amazing, amazing lawyer who was just beyond belief, incredible person. literally at the point of establishing my nationality in Lebanon based on my adopted name, not the name the orphanage gave me. It doesn't sound like much, but it was a huge thing. And I was like, no, it has to be, you know, I wanted to set a precedent. for adoptees coming back to the country to be able to pursue nationality. All of that to say, there were aspects of my day-to-day that I could put myself forward and be a part of things, but there were others that I was very wary of. Because I understood looking at academics in the United States under fire all the time, whether it be Columbia University or a dear friend of mine, Laura Sheehy at George Washington University recently, the attacks on you, whether you're doxed or whether it's just constant classroom harassment. I'm not putting myself in leagues with them, but just to say that I was consumed with what is it I'm capable of doing? What are the limits of what I'm able to do here? And what are those boundaries? And some of those boundaries included, you know, I remember when I was made aware, like coming back to my neighborhood at the end of the day, talking to denizens of the neighborhood, if you will, realizing that my privilege, my ability to make my way around Lebanon had been shifting over the years. So arriving as an American speaking, no Arabic, I had open access. Like I could go anywhere and I did. And I brought my camera everywhere. And whether that be North, South, Beirut, wherever, but then as that started to shift and my sense of self, but also perception of my existence shifted into the Lebanese and that started to be restricted along lines of sect, along lines of political affiliation and that kind of thing. So such that by the time we determined that I was from the Druze community, I didn't tell anybody in my neighborhood. I told my Syrian brothers at the corner shop that I was Druze because I knew that for many people, it would change their perception of me. That's the extent of sectarianism in the country. I'm not answering your question. I'm still fully avoiding answering you. But what I mean to say was – and I've said this in response to people here who – you know, Canadians who feel the need to lecture me about history or politics or, or whatever. And I'm like, you, I could get on the phone now and have X, you know, X, Y, or Z on the phone with you. You want to argue with, you know what I mean? Like, so there's, there's an aspect to it where I had to be savvy. I had to be careful, but it didn't prevent me from organizing or working with or anything like

Ian Anderson: I guess that's a very long, extended way of saying that you either were very limited in contact or it was one of these zones of that was kind of like an untouchable space for you as you became...

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Yeah, I wouldn't say it was untouchable. I would say it's tangential. Like, I remember my colleagues at AUB after the war in 2006 ended, you know, singing the praises of the resistance and, you know, proclaiming that they were going to convert to the Shia. And I was like, well, I can bring you to the Hussein and we can talk to the Sheikh. You know, those connections are there is what I'm trying to say. But it wasn't, it had to be, I'm looking for the context.

Ian Anderson: the right word.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: It just, I had to be savvy. I had to really do it in a savvy way.

Ian Anderson: I just, now it's been such a fascinating thing to revisit. Now you look at what was going on for many years and then the war just years later, it's, you have this, this auxiliary force that is almost a shadow government to the Lebanese government itself. And so many people that are a part of it are, are, seen as heroes to the South, to the people of the South. It makes me wonder, in that sense, the kind of contact the average person would have.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: I would clarify and say they are in fact part of the government and part of the elected government. And I remember after the march to the border with Palestine, and we were 70,000, went down to Marouna Ras, and the day ended with a dozen young men being killed by sniper fire from across the border. But the naysayers after were not from the resistance. They were bourgeois, secular academics. Oh, we shouldn't have affiliated with Anyone waving a religious banner, it's like, well, you try and go to the South without speaking to these parties. You try, you can't do it. So it's not like there's no luxury or privilege of choice. If you're going to organize and march to the South, or if you're going to go to the Southern suburbs after the war ended, there was a victory from God rally that took place there. And what I remember most was joy. It speaks, it sounds weird to speak of it in the context of what's going on in Palestine now. But I, you know, I remember, I remember a million people heading back south to reclaim their land and their villages.

Ian Anderson: Yeah.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: And it was joyous. And the mood in the Dahi was one of, we've held them off again. Thank God. And on some level, like 33 days, we were lucky. You know, every day here, every day talking about Gaza, they're giving the count. And I'm like, God, two months, 33 days. And what we went through, what I went through, an infinitesimal, minuscule percentage of what Gazans and Palestinians have been going through for 7,500 years now. But just to say, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, how that unfolded and how the ability to understand that you're being... targeted in a dehumanizing fashion and that that dehumanization carries forward to those that you would pretend to go for assistance or support or help. That was cognitive dissonance on a level I've never experienced before.

Ian Anderson: I was just going to say, like, people in Gaza now, like, they don't have places to go. They don't have the north. They don't have the space to go and to leave and then come back. This is something that is an ever-present, I mean, concern, bringer of death. Yeah. Leads into, right now, every other settlement that is surrounding Gaza is being completely, all of these settlers are leaving. They've literally publicly expressed... that they would never come back. They would never go back. This is kind of like this act of decolonization. I mean, whether it's by implanted fears, right? Or whether it's by the literal act taking these people out of this land.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: They have no ties to that land. And, you know, you can look at their own leaders who express this. I believe it was Ben-Gurion who said, a people tied to its land will not tire so easily. The fact that they get tired after a couple of rockets rain down tells you the fact that they burn olive trees. You know, somebody who's indigenous and connected to the land would never consider a tree that's millennium, you know, thousand years old. I'm going to burn this. I'm going to get rid of this tree. Yeah, that's that to me, it's in these, the details of the day to day of the apartheid structure that you see the cracks and the fissures because it is easy to get them to leave actually, especially when you know that they're, they're speaking with Brooklyn accents or French Parisian accents or whatever the case might be.

Ian Anderson: My Lakowski I mean. His son was in Miami until maybe a week or two ago, and then he started phone banking in Tel Aviv or something for the IDF. These are not people who are serious stewards of the land.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: No, and this is where it gets really interesting because I remember when Canada has a federal statute, I don't even know what they call it here, equating support of BDS with anti-Semitism. And a couple of years back, the Vancouver City Council decided that it needed its own local variation of that for some reason. It's like, okay, you know, my tiny town in New Jersey wants its own Second Amendment. Like, okay, however that might work in your mind. I was working with some local organizations and I wrote a response, basically equating Canada as a settler colonial nation state with the occupying entity in Palestine. And the support for apartheid and the, as a crown colony, the extractive economies that exist here, it's part and parcel of the same thing. And What I remember most, though, is it actually didn't pass then, but it passed last year. This gets back to my sense of security with tenure. I'm absolutely not secure. It's like the sword of Damocles that hangs over my head. at all times. But the fact that you're in researching for that letter that I was expecting to read at a city council meeting, you don't have to go back far to the writings of the Palestine Communist Party, for example, and find that it was the Christians and Jews and Arabs and Muslims of the place, indigenous to the place, who were fighting both British colonialism and the land usurpers from Europe, the Zionists. And the minute you're made aware of that, all of the other crap and garbage just has to fall away. It has to. Because there's no point, like age-old religious hatred. Well, point them out. Please find them for me historically. Because, you know, I can take you to downtown Beirut, where the Grand Synagogue of the old Jewish quarter has been rebuilt. And it's exquisite. It's beautiful. And every political entity within the country supported it. that rebuilding. And in fact, it was the U.S. supporting factions of the government that came with their bulldozers to tear it down. And it was the pro-resistance newspaper Al-Akhbar that sounded the warning as an official sect of this country, you cannot destroy this religious edifice. So, you know, the contradictions are incredible. And this is what sits in my head as I'm going through the, I try to avoid mainstream media as much as possible. But in the analysis, it's like, at this point, we're dealing 100% with, as we were discussing before, propaganda, Hasbro aimed at propping up a dying political and economic structure. And realizing, I mean, what becomes frightening for me is the realization that to them, this becomes an endgame of sorts. It's not a lot of things that used to be on the table, obviously, are now off the table. And that's where it becomes distressing. But the points of hope that I see when the USPS union and the UAW unions are coming out with statements in support of Palestine or ceasefire. When I see the Palestinian youth movement rousing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in cities across the states, like, okay. And you start to see the class disparity. I joke with my students sometimes and I say, during the era of the communards in Paris and the working class uprisings that were taking place there, the French bourgeoisie preferred to be taken over by the Prussians. instead of having a pluralistic society that allowed for everyone to exist together, they preferred to be invaded and occupied. And so this is the bastions of supposedly liberal progressiveness in the United States. You can see it writ large in their op-eds and the way they frame things. And again, literally from a playbook that I documented those 33 days, and I can look back and say, oh, yeah, this is exactly what they did back then, and it's exactly what they're doing now.

Ian Anderson: I want to say we're currently facing this bizarre discursive moment where instead of aggressive liberal movements, whatever that may be in an American context of like, forthright. We live in Hitler's dream. You know what I mean? Like everything that he wanted to make real, make happen, this is it. You got it. You got McDonald's, you got everything.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: George Corm in his book, he makes a point of stating that European nation states stagnated at the ethnocentric, ethno-nationalist transition to a pluralistic society, which again, makes perfect sense and just echoes what it is that you're saying. And so the ethno-nationalism of a nation state like the United States or Canada, especially the settler colonial nation states like the United States, Canada, et cetera. Well, yeah. And, you know, and again, you don't have to dig deep to find Hitler's inspiration from Henry Ford or, you know what I mean? Like it's not, it's not like, it's not conspiracy. It's literally there. Yeah. In the open. And yet we pretend that it's like, oh, how, you know, how can you possibly imagine that that could come from here? It's like, well, yeah, it did.

Ian Anderson: We're seeing this discursive moment from like the American liberal left, whatever that may be, of just instead of full-throated solidarity with the Palestinian people, with people who are facing total annihilation. who are facing targeted assassinations i mean i just read municipality of gaza is essentially shut down because they murdered or injured all of the firefighters all of the paramedics largely they target ambulances and then the zionists just make up excuses and then this is echoed and It's bullshit. In the middle of this, it's 2023. It is December. It has been October. It's been November. It's been December. We are a year away from elections at large, right? And we're seeing this kind of this liberal left push to accept this moment as what has to be or what should be or whatever else in the name of reelecting Biden. While he arms these horrible people, Israeli state is no different from the South Africans, from the Rhodesians. It's no different. It's the same. It's been given the firepower to keep going when right now military officials have basically said the only reason we are still fighting is because of the support of the U.S. Of course. The Iron Dome wouldn't exist if not for American money.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: During the July War, those were American ships parked off the coast. I remember there was an interview with Norman Finkelstein on one of the local TV stations, and you could tell that they were trying to manipulate him into understanding where they were coming from. And he was like, no, no, no. He basically said, whatever you might think of the resistance in this moment, When somebody is taking your land and destroying your infrastructure and imprisoning your people, what is your response? Is this your response? I'm going to welcome Condoleezza Rice to this country for a diplomatic solution? It becomes a no-brainer when you're in that situation. And the only way of selling it to the Democratic Party, don't get me started, but they've lost all credibility going back for decades when they stopped... imagining anything other than the middle of the road population that's going to set the electoral college to their advantage so literally like we're controlled by what a hundred thousand people in three swing states who get to decide

Ian Anderson: What? What is the system we're living under?

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: And so when American and Muslim organizations are coming forward and the hashtag is Abandon Biden, it's real. And to understand that this, that the support of this party was not 100%. It was always qualified under those protection of the community being seen as a valid part of the fabric of society. But now I was just having a conversation with a former student and I was saying they weren't expecting resistance they're facing and so now they don't know what to do and they don't know how to react and so the potential is there for them and we're seeing it i mean the israelis are berserk in their punishment of Gazans and the enclave there.

Ian Anderson: There's the concept of the existing paradigm. You have this statement put forth by the Palestinian militant. If you attack the Al-Aqsa Mosque, we will fire back. We will continue the existing paradigm in which you will suffer as a result. This is real. It's reasonable. And look to look to keeps getting violent.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Yeah. And look also to if we take out ethnicity or religion or anything like that, the poorest Arab country, the one country that had communist government, socialist government, Yemen doing the most. With the least. You know what I'm saying? And it's like, okay.

Ian Anderson: Building a navy from scratch. As we see it, it's real. The entire paradigm upon which the settler colony is made to exist and has sustained itself, that's falling away. That's falling apart. And we see it in the ways that it interacts with every country around it. This is especially why I wanted to talk to you about how this all works. You've been there. You've seen it.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: What I'm very conscious of now is the fact what I remember, like I was saying before, what I remember most was starting out with very, you know, these ideas of. I think back how ridiculously naive I was. Oh, if we just have a candlelight vigil down at the Martyrs Square, then Western media will pick it up and, you know, things will change. Really idiotic stuff and signs in English. And, you know, whom are we speaking to at this point? We're not speaking to anybody local. You're pleading. foreign entities to recognize your humanity that's obscene that's like that's the the definition of of obscenity like i have to prove myself and so now with what's going on. And as much as, like I was saying, I see the playbook unfolding, I'm confident and I'm going to go broader than just Palestine. I'm confident in the ability of Indigenous peoples to form the core of resistance that will change things in the global picture. And the lessons that we learn locally in Canada, for whatever reason, every protest in Vancouver stands in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery and waves signs. And in my mind, I'm like, what? The consulate is five blocks away or something like that. Why are we in front of an art gallery? Meanwhile, the indigenous are blocking the single train tracks that link the province to the rest of the country, blocking the port, blocking the airports. We know where the the sensitive infrastructure is, and it wouldn't be too hard. And this is where I see the growing unionism and labor activism and organizing along those lines is quite important and tying in What have been up until this point, I'm going to say it along very particular lines because I'm old enough to remember when we shifted from liberation movement theory, theoretically, to postmodernism and identity and that kind of stuff. The shift back to what are liberation ideologies and, you know, there's... It's not enough. I say if any of my students are listening, they're going to be laughing and rolling their eyes. But what I say is fighting for acceptance within bourgeois society is completely different from fighting bourgeois class. If we're talking about our class status and what we're hoping for the future, something beyond that bourgeois structure exists. doesn't require me to fight for ideas of identity, if that makes sense. You know, keeping that in mind, I'm looking at the resurgence in poetry, Palestinian poets, and the songs of resistance from the past, and this kind of cultural going back and bringing all of this forward. It's very heartening to see.

Ian Anderson: Back in 21, we had the Block the Boat for, I think, Zim. And then you get Block the Boat in 2023. And then in this same year, you get Block the Boat, but from Yemen. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's these kind of like transcontinental solidarities.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: But think back, think back to the IWW and the longshoremen, and this in a day when there was no internet, the ability for longshoremen around the world to organize and prevent shipments of armaments to warring countries, it's really phenomenal. You know, you bring up a really good point because so many people, I fear, see what's happening now as new, when in fact, you know, the blockade has been in existence for two decades and the occupation for 75 years. And, you know, I have a dear friend in New York whose family is in Gaza, and I don't dare ask anymore, like,

Ian Anderson: how things are because I anyway I have a number of Palestinian friends and like you generally the last name matches you generally know that's it of course and like I said that's a fit and you look at the death registries and it's just it's brutal

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Interesting you bring that up. Two things I was going to say. One is my sitting vigil here waiting for daybreak in Palestine to hear from my friend. You know what I'm saying? Like waiting to hear news. That started summers ago. This is, you know, this has been going on for a long time. It was intriguing also to see, just like you're saying, one of the martyrs was listed with a family name Awad, which I know exists in the Galilee as well. And so it just, it sounds like I'm trying to tie myself into it and that's not what I'm doing, but it's getting very much to your point of, Speaking to inherent indigenous resistance and the connections that emanate out are as imminent and actually need less energy to activate them. This is what I think is going to be interesting, especially in North America, especially primed by the summer of 2020. Again, which was primed by movements before. And what is the potential now for where this goes and what becomes of it?

Ian Anderson: It's one of these things where we can't lose hope. We can't lose sight of what's to come. As hard as it is, as hard as it is, I see...

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: You know, and whenever I say this, I start to, you know, I burst into tears sometimes. But, you know, despair is not a valid option. Despair is something that's put on us as much as PTSD is put on us. Like, I'm sorry, but there are people that don't even get to the post part. Like the trauma has been generational and unending. So the despair as a construct of inability to react or to activate, it's like, no, there's no room for that. Whatever energy, whatever emotion one is feeling, how do we channel that? How do we channel that into something active? As small a gesture as it might be or as large a gesture as it might be?

Ian Anderson: For the most part, I want to believe that this kind of conversation, the work that I've been doing with the Anti-Imperialist Archive, these are things that can propel that forward.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: You have no idea. I have students from South Africa. I have students, Leila Khaled, hearing all of that compressed together. Just brilliant. And it speaks to, again, like... I'm interrupting you to tell you that it's being listened to and it is reaching an audience and that historical relevance is what carries us forward. There are no wheels to reinvent and there's no need to make a name out of this for oneself, right? It's a continuum that's been going on for hundreds of years and we happen to be a part of it and there's no letting that flag down.

Ian Anderson: Now, talking to that, I don't feel a need to include my own voice in that project because it's not about me and it never will be. This is a labor of love. That's just it. For a lot of us, when we work from that kind of mindset, when we work from that sense of of reality that's what forms the basis of community i mean it there's this idea of love that we get from like che that is it's just love is is how we express solidarity it is how we we take care of the people in our our lives absolutely and it is how we form a revolution And for me, at least, I haven't stopped thinking about that since I first read it. I haven't abandoned that kind of concept because I don't think that you can. I think it's good to kind of like end on this high note. Absolutely. When there's so much just sadness.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Well, of course. And what I would only add, like what you're talking about, what you're describing, you know, I was referring to it as in the the Arabic of Maun and what... And since then, I've been also looking into... radical psychologies, most of which are premised on collaboration, communal activism, working with the community, denying of the individual. And when you start thinking of it that way, when I think of what capitalism, colonialism, imperialism impose, a sense of individualism, a sense of private property, a sense of ownership and dog-eat-dog, all of the counters to that, all of the antidotes to that exist within the cultures of the global South in no small way. And Like you're saying, whether it be Che or Mehdi Amel from Lebanon, precedent is there and it's waiting for us to discover it again, if need be, and carry it forward.

Ian Anderson: This is the perfect moment. I am going to list log your site in the podcast. What are you currently doing? Like, what are you currently trying to work on? And that can be like right now in Lebanon. moment that we're experiencing, but also obviously outside of that.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: Right. Most immediately, the collective has been working on a couple of projects and working with them along those lines. I've been on sabbatical this past semester, and so the work there was to be devoted to writing about adoption and also a memoir, but very much premised along ideas of targeted look at political embodiment and what it means and how that's navigated. and what it means to find oneself. If I don't use the word adoption and I use the word dispossessed or displaced or disinherited, who does that tie me into? And what groups just form a hundred percent affiliation along those particular lines? So keeping busy, I've been working, like I said, a couple of projects have come up. Some of our members are back in Beirut and some things are presenting themselves there. We shouldn't forget that they've been targeting the South as well. They've been targeting the Syrian airport, the Damascus airport, and that the displacement of the South, not in the same numbers as before, but has been starting up again. So much of the work that we do is, how to put it, it's proactive and agentive as opposed to reactive, that to find ourselves back in a kind of reactive mode is disturbing in and of itself. But As I call it, it's the work and we do the work.

Ian Anderson: I just want to say thank you. I have really appreciated your support. Really going to the second part of this that we'll follow up on this and talk more. My personal thesis, right, is there is a process of adoption. Is this kidnapping? I do want to talk about that with you and tie that into a global structure. This very thing that you yourself have essentially dedicated your entire life to.

Daniel Drennan El-Awar: And it's been a pleasure talking with you and having the ability to express a lot of stuff that has been going through my mind these past however many days it's been and two months now. And the ability to find resonance or perhaps find actionable or activist ways forward is always what I'm looking for in terms of this. And the adoption discussion, always happy to have that discussion. So I'll look forward to that as well.