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Featured Podcast: Being Palestinian, a Life of Permanent Temporality - with Bahaa Abudaya.
emeka okereke
Dec 28, 2021
In this podcast conversation, I caught up with a longtime friend and fellow artist Bahaa Abudaya to discuss the most recent eruption of violence between Israel and Palestine which took place in May 2021.
Bahaa left Gaza when he was two years old. Since then, he has roamed the earth. Yet he claims: no matter where I go, I always consider myself a Palestinian even though I do not know, from lived experience, what Palestine is as a place. He goes on to explain that this deeply inward, yet unforced identification with Palestine is constitutive of his disposition as one who is in a state of permanent temporality.
“I am never clear where I should be. I have developed a kind of personality through this kind of exile”.
Here, we are presented with the paradox often a fixture of border-bodies: on one hand, a solace accompanies the feeling of not being beholden to a place. On the other hand, there is something about transience that denies one a sense of continuity. Rightfully so, Bahaa concludes that his life is floating somewhere in between these unresolvable polarities.
My conversation with Bahaa was necessitated by the need for a better appraisal of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. But I also wanted to look at it from the standpoint of displaced, discarded bodies forced to move or become casualties of border politics in the modern notion of nation formation.
EP14: Being Palestinian, a Life of Permanent Temporality – with Bahaa Abudaya – Nkata
Duration: 55 mins
Also available on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Deezer, Overcast and more.
Guest: Bahaa Abudaya
Host: Emeka Okereke
Production: @atelierokereke
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