How to love a Homeland Reading Circle

Welcome to this reading circle + brunch at Anarres Bokkafé! We will serve a sweet-salty brunch dish that is a speciality of Aleppo, while we are reading thought-provoking literature, discussing and learning from each other.

Our reading circle format is simple: we share the reading material with you beforehand. In the circle, we ask our guests to read excerpts or summarize an article before we open up for discussion.

In this reading circle we will start with queer Palestinian novelist and film lover, Raji Bathish and his translator Suneela Mubayi for a short reading from Raji’s work. Raji is at the forefront of experimental writing in Palestine and the Arab world, and he will share with us excerpts from his novels that will shake our fundamental paradigms of thinking about Palestine.

Maha Maamoun is one of the founders of the niche publisher Kayfa ta, of Russian philosopher Oxana Timofeeva’s pamphlet, How to Love a Homeland. In this philosophic exercise in critical thinking, Timofeeva explores the difficulty of reducing one’s sense of homeland to one’s country alone, the philosophical interconnectedness of movement and rootedness, our plant and animal souls, and how we need to reimagine our desired, fictional if need be, homelands.

Reading material

• Slavic Bodies by Raji Bathish, translated by Suneela Mubayi
• Fifty Shekels by Raji Bathish
• Excerpt from How to love a homeland? by Oxana Timofeeva, re-published at Mada Masr (2022)

We love the intimacy of our reading circles, and the discussion depths we get into together. For this year, we have two hours to enjoy our Syrian breakfast and thought-provoking literature. Join us and be in the community to discuss and learn from each other!