This is a conversation with Banah Ghadbian. She’s a Syrian activist  whose dissertation “Ululating from the Underground: Syrian Women’s  Protests, Performances, and Pedagogies under Siege” was the subject of our conversation. As usual, we ended up talking about a lot of other things as well.

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Topics Discussed:

• Banah’s story growing up in a Syrian revolutionary family and being targeted by the regime as a result
• The video that Banah released on YouTube in 2011, which the Syrian regime played on state tv
• Her dissertation: Ululating from the Underground: Syrian Women’s Protests, Performances and Pedagogies under Siege (video summary)
• “How  do Syrian women and youth heal from violence? How can our communities  be embodied when displaced from our lands and spirits?”
• What is often missing from a lot of discourse regarding Syria?
• The chronicles of Enab Baladi + An idea called Daraya
• How does Banah think about the Syrian story and how it’s often misrepresented online?
• What the Syrian revolution already achieved
• Multiplicities and the entrenched ‘manliness’ of war analyses (reference to episode with Aida Hozic)
• Undoing the diaspora/local binary
• Pedagogies of liberation vs refugee/NGO industrial complex
• Being friends with Hala Barakat, who was murdered in September of 2017 alongside her mother Orouba
• Scarcity idea coming from an inherently capitalist logic
• The Syrian revolution and anti-blackness; intersectionality
• The misleading debates around ‘integration’, Alan Kurdi
• Talking about sectarianism
• Being in the dominant group at home, and in the minority in the diaspora

Recommended Books

• Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline Paperback – November 18, 2014 by Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen by Nawara Mahfoud
• Zaatardiva by Suheir Hammad
• Homegirls and Handgrenades by Sonia Sanchez

Music by Tarabeat.