Cerdan Stories: Recent Episodes
Rona Buchalter
Cerdan Stories features talented writers from around the world who have been forced to restart their lives. What is it like to be in a place where you may or may not know people or speak the language? How do you work as a professional or artist?
Cerdan Stories tells the stories our guests want to tell, often circling around ideas of home and identity, what is lost and what is gained.
Writer Fatin Abbas was born in Sudan and moved to the US with her family when she was 8 years old. She earned a BA in English literature from the University of Cambridge, a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College, CUNY. Her latest book, Ghost Season, was recently published by W.W. Norton and is available for purchase from an independent bookstore near you. You can find more about Fatin and her professional work on her website fatinabbas.com.
In this episode, we discuss Fatin's memories of her childhood in Sudan, her growing up years in New York, and her ongoing complex relationship with Sudan.
In the interview, Fatin very clearly explains the war happening now in Khartoum and suggested several organizations that are concretely and effectively helping on the ground in Khartoum. If you’re moved to donate, these organizations would be good choices, from someone who knows.
Sudanese-American Physicians' Association
HomeTax Sudan
Darfur Women Action Group
In each episode of Cerdan Stories, we ask our guests to suggest a song that is meaningful for them. Fatin suggested Zimbabwe, by Bob Marley & The Wailers.
Finally, while I really love the work we’ve been doing on this podcast, Cerdan Stories will be going on hiatus for personal reasons as of this episode. If you’re interested in staying updated, please follow us on Instagram, Facebook, or sign up for our newsletter on our website. I very much hope to be back with you before long!
And some final words from Fatin, pretty well summing up what we've learned from our guests over these past 13 episodes.
“I am American, but I'm also a citizen of elsewhere. And that's Sudan. When I'm in Sudan, I'm Sudanese, but I'm also a citizen of elsewhere…This idea of belonging is very complicated for me… What does it mean to belong to a place or a culture or a language?” – Fatin Abbas, on Cerdan Stories, 12/5/23
In this episode, we talk with Banuta Rubess, whose family is from Latvia and who was born in Toronto.
She is a theater artist and writer, and a theater instructor, who has been researching and writing about her father’s experience during WW2 in Latvia, feeling squeezed between the Nazis on one side and the Soviets on the other, perceiving that neither side were friends of Latvia.
You can learn more about Banuta, her history, and her writing and theater art on her website. And, you can see her play The Trojan Women here.
The song we play at the end is I Love It Here, I Live Here by Luge, with her daughter Kaiva on vocals.
If you want to help in Ukraine, the aid organization that Banuta mentions in this piece is Stopify. They provide practical on-the-ground assistance like medical supplies, walkie-talkies, and so on via small but regular monthly donations.
We are so excited to be back with Season 2 of Cerdan Stories!
In this first episode, we talk with Luisa Ortiz-Perez, a journalist and activist from Mexico City now living in California. Luisa cares deeply about the traumas experienced by journalists, especially women journalists from Latin America, and works in different ways to heal that pain. She co-founded the non-profit Vita-Activa and was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University last year, where she wrote a play about journalists called A Human Condition. Hear more from Luisa in this episode.
The featured song on this episode is Cancion Sin Miedo by Vivir Quintana. You can listen to the full song on YouTube. Thank you to Vivir Quintana for writing this moving song and to Luisa for sharing it with us.
I want to thank Montana Skies for their song Gringo Flamenco, which played at the top of this podcast and which we got from Free Music Archives.
I also want to thank my new producer and editor Leyla Doss, originally from Egypt and now living in NY, without whom this podcast wouldn’t sound nearly as excellent. And to also say thank you to Katie Hanford, a Penn graduate student, who is helping with our social media.
If you like Cerdan Stories, please subscribe. It helps make sure you catch the latest episodes when they are released and really helps us out as well.
In this episode of Cerdan Stories, we meet immigration attorney Philippe Weisz, Director of Legal Services at HIAS-Pennsylvania and talk about how his personal family history connects to the work he does every day helping new immigrants receive legal status in the US.
Thank you to Philippe for sharing your commitment to and knowledge of our complex immigration system with us, as well as sharing your personal family story and the French children's song Une Fleur au Chapeau, which listeners can find in its entirety here.
Thank you to Montana Skies for the song Gringo Flamenco, which we got from Free Music Archive and which we play at the top of each episode.
If you or someone you know needs legal help for immigration issues in the United States, Philippe says that the best place to go is the US Immigration Court Pro Bono Legal Service Providers web page, which can be found here.
This is our last episode of season 1. We are already hard at work on putting together a great second season, so please be sure to like us on your podcast platform and on social media and be sure to join us again when we return. See you then!
In this episode of Cerdan Stories, we hear again from Anouar RAHMANI, a young reader, writer and human rights defender. In last episode, we talked about his love of language and writing. Today we talk about how his commitment to rights, his own and those of others, have made it impossible for him to stay in Algeria.
When asked for a song that is important to him, Anouar chose an old Algerian song called "Ya Rayah" about people who leave their country coming back, originally written by Dahman El Harrachi in the 70s and more recently redone by Rachid Taha. We played an excerpt during the episode but you can find the song its entirety here.
Thank you Anouar for sharing your thoughts, intelligence, and compassion with us.
Thank you to Montana Skies for their song Gringo Flamenco, which we play at the beginning of the episode and which we got from Free Music Archives.
Thank you to Michaela Prell, for her invaluable editing and support in creating this episode.
Cerdan Stories is hosted by me, Rona Buchalter, a former director of refugee resettlement in the US and a lover of people's stories.
And thank YOU for listening and sharing Cerdan Stories. We hope you come back in two weeks for our next episode.
Comments? Suggestions? Email me at cerdan@cerdan.org.
In this episode, we meet Anouar Rahmani, avid reader, writer and human rights defender, from Tipaza, Algeria, now living in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, where he is an Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residence at the City of Asylum and Carnegie Mellon University. In this episode, we talk about Anouar's use of language, his writing, and how he thinks about people's responsibility to their society. In the next episode, we talk about his experience as an activist and human rights defender that caused his flight from his country.
Through four novels and many articles, Rahmani advocates for individual freedoms, environmental rights, and the rights of minorities, women, and the LGBT+ community. He holds a License in Public Law and a Master’s in State and Institutional Law from the University of Morsli Abdallah. In 2015, he was the first person to publicly demand same-sex marriage in Algeria and, during the 2019 Algerian Revolution, he composed a new model for the Algerian constitution.
He has received support from PEN International during instances of judicial harassment he faced in Algeria, was shortlisted for the Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards in 2021, and was selected by the German Bundestag’s Protection Program.
In this episode, Rahmani reads from a new novel, in process, called "Flying with a Sombrero," translated (on the fly) by Anouar Rahmani himself, just before our interview. Here is that text in full:
When he was fly fishing, I pitied those poor fish; they were firm on the ground to try to breathe, but they were drowning in another way; they surged from the sea to drown in the air; Elizabeth, what do the fish call our world? The sea wiped out our faces in it so that the fish cannot see us clearly; we look like an adjacent, scattered, and composed block of colors, perhaps we are wonderful in their eyes, but we always kill them without considering their circumstances, dreams, and aspirations, or desires, ideas, and faith, that Poor fish, the hooks stormed their faces and penetrated their mouths and entered them with one stitch. The fish, those creatures that follow the current, were suspended from their noses by the world of brutal gods, it must be really painful, and it must be a despicable act of us as gods to keep them away from their loved ones in that brutal way, And to make them stick to us forever through the hook, it must be sacred in the fish world to be fooled continuously like this, right?
Thank you Anouar for sharing your thoughts, intelligence, and compassion with us.
Thank you to Montana Skies for their song Gringo Flamenco, which we play at the beginning of the episode and which we got from Free Music Archives.
Thank you to Michaela Prell, for her invaluable editing and support in creating this episode.
Cerdan Stories is hosted by me, Rona Buchalter, a former director of refugee resettlement in the US and a lover of people's stories.
And thank YOU for listening and sharing Cerdan Stories. We hope you come back in two weeks for our next episode.
Comments? Suggestions? Email me at cerdan@cerdan.org.
In this episode, we meet Khaled Mattawa, poet and translator, from Benghazi, Libya, now in Dearborn, Michigan. He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN Award for Literary Translation, and Griffin Poetry Prize, among others, teaches, and edits the Michigan Quarterly Review. Khaled is a kind of philosopher of living in exile, between here and there and back again.
For a just-published (and very moving) article of his time on migrant boats in this summer, see The River: Four weeks on a migrant rescue ship in the Mediterranean Sea, in the New York Review of Books.
In addition to our conversation, Khaled also shares a terrific piece of music called Al Aysh by Masar, a fusion of magnificent oud and piano that, understandably, makes him feel "understood."
Thank you to Gringo Flamenco for the song which plays at the beginning of each episode and which we got from Free Music Archives. And thank you to Michaela Prell for her editing, without which this episode would not have happened.
Comments? Suggestions? Email me at cerdan@cerdan.org.
In this epsiode of Cerdan Stories, we meet Anna Badkhen, a prolific and compassionate writer of the experience of people around the globe. Herself from St. Petersburg, Russia, she left when she was 28 years old and is now living in Philadelphia, PA (USA). That said, she does not consider herself an exile and in this episode has some interesting things to say about the ideas of exile, migration, and compassion.
In this episode, we hear the beautiful piece by the talented Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, "The Homeless Wanderer". Follow the link to hear the whole piece.
Thank you to Anna for sharing her ideas with us on Cerdan Stories, and thank you to you for listening. We hope you come back for our next episode. In the meantime, please email me at cerdan@cerdan.org with ideas, feedback, and suggestions for us!
In this episode, Cerdan Stories talks with Shafi Karimi and Sofiea Sakhi, two young journalists from Afghanistan now living in Paris. In this episode, we learn about their careers as journalists, the direct death threat that caused them to flee Afghanistan, and how they are trying to rebuild it all in France while still helping Afghanistan.
Here is the YouTube link to the complete Sarzamine Man, a Afghan song about loss of homeland first recorded by Dawood Sarkoosh in 1998, that we play an excerpt of in this episode. And here is a translation of the Sarzamine Man lyrics from Dari into English.
(Note that this episode starts with a little over 4 minutes of reflection from me about Cerdan Stories.)
If you have thoughts about this episode, or about Cerdan Stories in general, I want to hear them! Email me at cerdan@cerdan.org.
In this episode, Cerdan Stories talks with Rosalyn D'Mello, Indian author, feminist, activist, now living in South Tyrol, Italy. Rosalyn talks about her personal narrative (a love story, actually) that brought her to Italy, and her political understanding of the situation of women who migrate.
In this episode of Cerdan Stories, we talk with Achiro Patricia Olwoch, a filmmaker and playwright now focused on LGBTQ themes. She lived in the city of Kampala until she fled to New York for safety last year, where she is currently an artist at risk, assisted by Artists at Risk Connection (ARC).
Olwoch is prolific writer, working across genres. Her short films include The Surrogate, The Mineral Basket, and Maraya Ni. She is currently working on a feature documentary, My Prison Diary, due for release in 2023 and she has three feature scripts in development. She is also the creator and writer of the TV series Coffee Shop and is the head writer at Yat Madit. She also has in the works a memoir about her life as a lesbian in Uganda and her eventual escape.
In her interview, we learn a bit about Achiro's love of her homeland village of Gulu in the north, her interest in language, and a song that moves her. We also learn about her writing and her thrill for being able to now write about what she wants without constraint. Achiro's description of Uganda for LGBTQ is honest but also fairly graphic, so sensitive listeners may want to skip that section. You can learn more about Achiro on her website achiropolwoch.com.
When asked for a song that moved her, Achiro shared the moving "It's OK" but Nightbirde. I would like to thank Nightbirde for composing this beautiful piece of music while you still could.
Thank you to Montana Skies for their song Gringo Flamenco, which played at the beginning of this episode and which we got from Free Music Archives.
Thank you to Michaela Prell for her truly invaluable assistance in producing and editing this piece, which could not have happened without her.
Cerdan Stories is hosted by me, Rona Buchalter. I was previously director of Refugee Resettlement at HIAS-Pennsylvania and have a rich prior career in global education and the importance of people's stories.
Finally, I would like to thank YOU for listening to this episode of Cerdan Stories. I hope you join us again in two weeks for the next episode.
Born in Bali, Indonesia, where she lived until her family moved to Vancouver when she was 10 years old, Cynthia has lived her life as a mom, a poet, a teacher and a community organizer. Cynthia has just released her 4th collection of poetry, called a Tinderbox in Three Acts, published by BOA Editions, which tackles the genocide in her homeland head on, artfully and skillfully guiding us through its impact in her community and in her life.
In this interview, Cynthia relates her approach to poetry to her personal and family history, a life characterized by silence about their collective past. She explains how revision has been a particularly powerful tool that has helped her manage complexity in her life.
I have known Cynthia for many years and have been thinking about her for this podcast for a long time – for her fierce intelligence, her tough take-no-prisoners moral fiber, and the ways that she integrates it into someone who is sensitive and loving. You can learn more about Cynthia and about her work as a poet and community member on her website.
When asked for a song which is meaningful for her, Cynthia shared this beautiful song written by her son Paul OKA from one of her previous poems, Discernment. A warm thank you to Paul for this work, and for allowing us to share it on Cerdan Stories.
Thank you also to Montana Skies for their song Gringo Flamenco, which played at the beginning of this episode and which we got from Free Music Archives.
Thank you to Michaela Prell for her truly invaluable assistance in producing and editing this piece, which could not have happened without her.
Cerdan Stories is hosted by me, Rona Buchalter. I was previously director of Refugee Resettlement at HIAS-Pennsylvania and have a rich prior career in global education. Most importantly for Cerdan Stories, I have a passion for learning people's stories.
Finally, I would like to thank YOU for listening to this episode of Cerdan Stories. I hope you join us again in two weeks for the next episode.
Born in Baghdad, where she lived until she left as a young adult in 1995, Mikhail has lived her life primarily as a poet and a professor in Detroit.
Dunya MIKHAIL is an Iraqi American poet and writer. Facing censorship and interrogation, she left Iraq in 1995, first going to Jordan and then to America. With enormous insightand sensitivity, Mikhail shares candid thoughts about growing up in Baghdad, living in Detroit, and the impact of relocation on her career as a poet and now a novelist.
When asked for a song which is meaningful for her and her experience, Mikhail shared the haunting and beautiful "Happened at Al-Amiriya" by Naseer Shamma, a UNESCO Artist for Peace.
Thank you to Dunya Mikhail for sharing her experiences and insights in this conversation. You can learn more about her and her wonderful work on her website.
Thank you to Michaela Prell for her extraordinary help producing and editing this episode.
Thank you to Montana Skies for the Gringo Flamenco song which starts and ends this episode, and which we accessed on Free Music Archives.
And finally, a huge thank you to you for joining us for this conversation. You can follow this podcast or come back in two weeks for the next episode.
The Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi wrote the book Persepolis to document her flight from Tehran. The Afghan novelist Khaled Hosseini wrote the book the Kite Runner to tell the story of the fall of Kabul through the eyes of a young boy. Perhaps the greatest Catalan writer of all time, Mercè Rodoreda, fled Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and spent the rest of her life in exile in France and Switzerland.
This is a story that goes on and on, over time and around the globe.
Ovid, one of three canonical poets of the Roman Empire, was exiled by Emperor Augustus to the Black Sea for the rest of his life. Salka Viertel fled the Nazis and ended up with a career writing for Greta Garbo and Ida Lupino in Hollywood.
These are voices of a planet in disarray. Though different, they share the experience of being writers who fled their home countries and then sought ways to continue telling stories to the rest of the world.
This is in fact what Salman Rushdie wanted to talk about the day he was stabbed on stage : the experience of being a writer in forced exile.
The Cerdan Stories podcast will introduce you to exiled writers and talk with them about their craft, their language, and the particular ways they adapt, or don’t, to new and very unfamiliar places. We strive to tell the stories our guests want to tell, often circling around ideas of home and identity, what is lost and what is gained.
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