EP 21 Can We Make a Difference and Reduce Human Suffering?: In Conversation with Samir Elhawary.

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Samir Elhawary is an Egyptian-British national and expert on conflict, humanitarian action, and war-to-peace transitions, with a particular focus on the Middle East and Latin America region. Currently, he is the Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator and Head of UN-OCHA in Caracas, Venezuela. He says, “Don’t be indifferent to human suffering. When you see human suffering try to find out more about what is happening and think about what you can do even if it’s something small that can contribute to reducing human suffering.”

EP 20 A Brief Glimpse Into the Transformative Power of Literature with Bruce Holsinger

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“A poem can change you; A powerful short story can literally change your brain chemistry. At the individual level, the teaching of compassion, of love of community, these are the ways that I think literature probably moves us most effectively, but they're very hard to discern, I think. And you never know what that kind of reading experience is going to result in, what sort of emotional capacity it'll create in readers. Fiction is its own kind of displacement. It takes you out of yourself and temporarily puts you in a different world. If there's any positive relationship there, it's a good way of leaving yourself, leaving your home for a little while, leaving your comfort zone, and that's what displacement is.”

EP 19 Anna Macdonald on the Power of Fiction in Shaping our Understanding of Humanitarian issues.

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In this episode, Anna Macdonald, a Communications and Campaigns consultant and currently Human Rights Practitioner in Residence at Columbia Law School says, “In humanitarian work, there's a tendency to think that because it's a serious subject, we have to start with data, statistics, facts, and figures. These are important to provide the evidence, however, they're rarely the thing that gets you hooked. No one tends to feel passionate because they've heard a compelling piece of data. It's normally someone’s story that you’ve heard, that's moved you in some way that gets you interested.”

EP 18 Francois Batalingaya

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In this episode, I speak to François Batalingaya United Nations Resident Coordinator in Comoros. He says, let’s use the story of these women, Chika and the unnamed Hausa Woman, Halima’s mother, in A Private Experience, and say to ourselves, the other person out there isn’t an enemy, not at all, and you don't know when you may end up in a situation where you'll need each other. Trust the person, and if you can assist, please do assist.

EP 17 Askold Melnyczuk

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In this Episode, I speak to Askold Melnyczuk, an American writer whose publications include novels, essays, poems, memoir, and translations. Among his works are the novels, What Is Told, and Ambassador of the Dead, House of Widows and Excerpt from Smedley’s Secret Guide to World Literature.

In his essay, Why My Favorite Characters to Write Are Often Unsympathetic and Unforgivable, he says, “I’ve felt my understanding enlarged by fiction whose charge isn’t to soothe readers by providing exemplary characters as “models for emulation” but rather to quicken them to a heightened awareness of the imagination’s, and by extension life’s, vast range, and so bring us closer to reality. Fiction should use its singular devices to disillusion us, lest we be deceived by placebos and lies. The best fiction tells lies that lie deeper than truth. Indeed, disillusionment is one hugely positive side effect that arises from reading the very best fiction.”

SAHA EP 16 Raksha Vasudevan

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In this episode,Raksha Vasudevan, an Economist, Writer and former Aid Worker whose essays and reporting have appeared inThe New York Times, VICE, Guernica,and I,discussThe Story of a Brief MarriagebyAnuk Arudpragasam.

She says,“The best way for me to answer this question is thinking about it in terms of contribution rather than attribution. I haven’t been able to draw a direct line between reading a novel about a humanitarian crisis in a country and direct action beyond making a donation, perhaps, which is still significant, of course, but when you think about it in terms of contribution and an ecosystem of factors that can motivate action, certainly stories have the power to do that and they have done that in my life. Just like the media has a role in telling us what’s going on in the world and potentially motivating action, fiction can do that by bringing us into the lived experiences of people and not just in western societies having a personal or existential crisis, but people living through serious external events.”

EP 15 Alison Turner

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In this episode, I spoke with Alison Turner about her essay, The Autological Archive: Appraisal, Institutional Motives, and Essentializing Identity in Refugee and Asylum Seekers Narratives, In and Out of Fiction where she argues that fiction can expose parts of archival/application processes that impact who is and who is not granted asylum in the United States.

She says, “So, the autologic function that I’m pointing out here is that as bureaucracy builds, as people apply for asylum and refugee status in the United States, those who are accepted for asylum create an archive of accepted people to resettle that then informs who is accepted later. It’s responding to this fact that less than one per cent of the refugees who apply for asylum in the United States are invited to resettle. I’m asking what about those other 99 per cent, and how does the way the stories of the one percent are told on paper predict the kinds of stories that will be selected in the future to be invited to resettle.”