[The transcript of this interview has been lightly edited for clarity and to fill in the brief moments where audio cuts out, included with timestamps. To read the article “‘El Haraga’ Read through Maghrebi Literary Production,” to which this interview is referring, click this link.]

[0:0] Kylie Broderick (KB): Hi, I’m Kylie Broderick, managing editor of Jadaliyya e-zine. With me is Omar Shanti, who won the Young Writer’s Prize sponsored by the MedReset Project, which is primarily funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Programme. Omar spoke about his winning paper, entitled "’El Haraga’" Read Through Maghrebi Literary Production,” at MedReset’s conference in March 2019. I’m speaking with him today to talk about MedReset, the lessons of his own research, and the implications for further exploration into the topic of Maghrebi migration into Europe and the European Union. Welcome, Omar!

[0:32] Omar Shanti (OS): Hello, Kylie.

[0:34] KB: To start off, could you describe own background, your paper, and what drew you to this topic?

[0:39] OS: Sure. I was born to Palestinian parents, and was raised between London and the Middle East. I came to the US for university, where I attended Northwestern University and did a dual degree program, getting a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and MENA and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. During my undergraduate course work, I had the good fortune to take a course entitled “Porous Borders” with Professor Emrah Yildiz. In the course, he challenged us to think about migration and bordering in radically new ways, and one of the first modalities of migration that sprung to mind was the Maghrebi haraga. The reason being, growing up, I had experienced a lot of Maghrebi music because it proliferated the Arab world, such as the likes of Khaled and Faudel, all the way down to Rachid Taha. Each of these songs is imbued heavily with political significance, which as I grew older and began to analyze, became my point of entry into the Maghreb. And as one reads post-colonial studies such as the likes of Fanon to Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, even Jean Genet, the Maghreb is pretty omnipresent - in fact very much of the field is in fact built off of the Maghreb. My paper, in particular, draws upon the haraga read through literary production, so it puts together theory, literature, and global events in communication with one another to glimpse at the Maghreb’s own evolving cultural self-understanding of the phenomenon. At a time when migration is drastically important in the sense of migrants risking their lives on this perilous journey, as well as [in the sense of] populist isolationist movements taking the figure of the migrant and distorting them towards political ends, I think this kind of cultural analysis attains a certain importance.

[2:51] KB: Could you tell me how you came across the Young Writer’s Prize (YWP) and perhaps how it contributed productively to your work and research?

[3:00] OS: I have been a long subscriber of Jadaliyya and the work of the Arab Studies Institute, and perhaps scrolling through Twitter, I believe, I saw the call for papers for the YWP. Being that it was focused on the Mediterranean, I thought my own current work that I was doing at the time, being this paper, would fit nicely with that. And so I submitted my paper. Eventually, I learned that my paper was shortlisted, and then that I had won the award. Once it had won , I was given feedback on the essay and the chance to implement some remarks. In that brief two-week period, I was able to take the essay to another level. [I was able to make the arguments] within it richer, expand on the literary analysis, and in a sense, I was able to answer  the questions that I hadn’t had the avenue or medium to do before. So it definitely encouraged me to be more strenuous in my research and come up with an artifact that was far richer.

[4:17] KB: Could you detail what process and methods you went through to accomplish this research?

[4:25] OS: Sure. My first decision was to analyze fiction, and I did this for a few reasons. Firstly, fiction, as a work of art, provides the author with certain freedoms that other empirical studies or surveys can’t quite offer. I like to think of this dynamic as “author as prime mover,” in the sense that, on some level, the author stages the venue, the conversation. They select the medium in fiction, the world that resides within it -- meaning the setting, each of the characters -- as well as the stories and the symbols they want this world to contain. That’s pretty absent from other forms of empirical studies, and dealing with a cultural phenomenon like this, I believe that dynamic is rather essential. Moreover, in some respects, literary criticisms can be more easily digested by larger audiences as opposed to those of song, visual art, or so on. Just the notion of a narrative for some can be easier to digest. And then, having decided to do fiction, the three works I chose to analyze were Youssouf Amine Elalamy’s Sea Drinkers, Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Boualem Sansal’s Harraga. All are recent in that they were all published within the last twenty years, but are each unique in a certain regard. The first is a novella, the second is written by a female author, and the third is written by an Algerian and based in Algeria. I wanted to take a more inclusive sample of recent Maghrebi fiction and so I sought to include different forms of genres as well as different demographic backgrounds, hence the selection.

[6:16] KB: Are you hoping to continue this research? Maybe by incorporating oral histories or anthropological elements that explore the realities of how this fiction reflects on these communities of haraaga?

[6:32] OS: Absolutely. But I think I would need to introduce that almost as a separate follow-up to do this. One other genre or form of expression that I commonly look at is Algerian Rai music, which is imbued with so much [significance]. I open the essay with a quote from the late Dahmane Harrachi’s song Ya Rayah, which is a song about the wretchedness of exile, about al-ghurba, the wretchedness of being away from home, essentially. There’s a very long tradition of the same themes -- or themes relevant to migration, rather -- in Algerian music, including the precursors to Rai, such as Shaabi and some other genres. That would be my immediate step, and I do indeed hope to continue this research.

[7:42] KB: So delving more into this current iteration of research, could you perhaps give us a brief history of the haraga migration since the 1970s, which is what you mention in your paper is kind of where it reached its zeitgeist?

[7:56] OS: Absolutely. I’d like to also consider the important context for the haraga, which is the configurations of global capital in the post-colonial world, which has arguably until recently maintained the same unidirectional dynamic of dependency from colony to metropole, albeit in economic rather than legal articulation. In the case of the haraga specifically,  this dependency has had a particularly easy-to-follow elaboration. From the early 20th century, France, as the main colonizer in the Maghreb, employed its colonial subject in its domestic industry. The demand for labor grew heavily in the aftermath of both World Wars, and Maghrebi labor was crucial in reconstructing Europe during that time period. Soon thereafter, Maghrebi migration proliferated to other Western European countries and with this increased penetration of the Maghrebi migrants within the European market, there came further dependency on remittances. And in fact, the Maghrebi governments would promote this policy as a way to alleviate the demands on social services, ranging from  education, to infrastructure, to hospitals, and so on and so forth. So all of this is the context in which in 1974, the French government began to cut off migration. In many accounts, this is linked to the oil crisis of the previous year. In that moment, the Maghrebi population was faced with a domestic economy that didn’t have the ability to provide for them, as well as a government that couldn’t represent them or rather, perhaps, chose not to represent them. Just across the sea, a European economy, or set of economies, that didn’t want them. So, many took to smuggling into Europe either via Spain from Tangier or via Italy from Tunis. Then, post-1986, with Spain’s succession into the EU, it itself became a destination, which is where some of the contemporarily most popular accounts of haraga come from -- being Moroccan or Maghrebi migration into Spain to work in either Barcelona or Madrid. That really came into the fold post-1986, and since then, the perils of the journey have claimed many lives, and the wretchedness that awaits on the other side has led to immense feelings of estrangement and has only furthered the human costs of this migratory journey. The statistics, including one that I mentioned in my paper, is that from, I believe, 2008 until 2018, the figure of those that have lost their lives on this journey is over 135,000 migrants. So, an incredibly perilous journey with immense cultural, economic, political, as well as existential consequences.

[11:34] KB: So I guess this engenders the question of how or whether it is unique -- the Maghrebi migration situation -- in comparison with other modalities of migration in the region, meaning the Middle East and North Africa. Or if it has parallels across the world with migration crises?

[11:57] OS: In the case of the Middle East and North Africa, I would argue that it is unique, as the Maghrebi migratory phenomenon with haraga entailed a broad and diverse segment of the population exiting their countries by sea and crossing into Europe. That’s not mirrored necessarily anywhere else, although migration between bordering nations does happen, there isn’t the drastic divide between the two states which one is migrating from that’s frequented across many other routes. Indeed, the Maghrebi own evolving understanding of the haraga is unique in the sense that it’s been likened to a bathtub that has sprung a leak, or a mother that cannot take care of her son, or all sorts of different metaphors capturing the inability of the Maghreb to maintain, and its ability conversely only to repulse the people within it. In the recent migration crisis, most have been fleeing either war or immediate danger at home, rather than a state of relative tranquility. [In the recent global migration crisis, most migrants have been fleeing either war or immediate danger at home. This contrasts with the state of relative tranquility people escape from in the Maghreb.] Now, connecting it to the global patterns of migration, there is a parallel between the Maghreb, particularly Tunisia and Morocco, as destinations of departure and destinations of crossing from the Third World into the First World, with the US’ southwest border, where Mexico has also emerged as a similar state -- a point of crossing. One of the interesting aspects that both share is that they’re both destinations in and of themselves for migration from other nations. So the northern coasts of Mexico become a destination for folks from all other countries, similar to how Morocco becomes a destination for all other countries -- predominantly sub-Saharan countries, as well as some Middle Eastern --  and as such, this is indeed represented in the fiction with new forms of languages spoken in the works, as well as characters from non-Maghrebi backgrounds. The difference, however, lies in the fact that in one case, [migrants] need to cross an ocean as opposed to a direct land border with the US. And in the US case with the southwest border, the immigrants must cross a very severe desert just as in the Maghrebi case, where migrants must cross an ocean. So, there certainly are some similarities and differences: both must brave incredible natural terrain, as well as a gap between the First and, essentially, the Third World.

[15:23] KB: One of your central themes is what you call "emigration, immigration, and clandestinity." Can you explain what this means in the context of haraga migration? Can you also touch on your conceptualization of mahroog and the inhirag, and the networks of actors that influence migration?

[15:43] OS: The concept of clandestine migration as term masks the many intricate processes that go into it. In my paper, I wanted to expand my argument and unpack that term into three distinct, separate sub-processes, which I called “emigration, immigration, and clandestinity.” Emigration, as a departure from the here, a repulsion from Morocco, only requires an initial location to be repulsed from, and is built on a negation. Immigration, on the other hand, requires a there, a point to arrive to, and is built on positive articulation -- you must identify a there to arrive at a location. In the case specifically of the haraga, emigration refers to the process of leaving, of departing. That entails extricating yourself from your social network and essentially severing your ties to the nation, albeit in the physical realm. Immigration, however, is the process of arranging the logistical journey to arrive on the shores of Spain. That entails a mental process of analyzing the risk, the social process of raising all of the funds required to go on the journey, and a psychological negotiation of the legality of the journey. Then clandestinity, once you arrive on the shore, is essentially reflective on the clandestine existential state that awaits you: an illegal existence that follows you in all of your interactions. Indeed, the border is not crossed once you enter through the shores of Spain, but the border is proliferated through society, and the process of crossing the border is never over so long as the migrant is clandestine. Indeed, the border is embodied in the forms of neighbors, employment, police, and all other social actors which can leverage your own illegality to adverse ends. That creates an exploitative dynamic which leads to a wretched existence as a clandestine migrant. Then, the notion of mahroog and inhirag are meant to bypass the linguistic limitation imposed by the grammar of the term “migration.” The English term “to migrate” posits a subject in the migrant, and a direct object in the migration, without the individual who was migrated from. The Arabic grammar of the term mahroog -- of the term haraga --, however, requires this. You have a subject who is the harrag, who burns the mahroog, and this produces an inhirag. The notion there being that, by switching to an Arabic grammar and bypassing conceptual limitations imposed by the term migrate, we can articulate the migrant’s perennial link to their origin, as well as those who reside within it, and also theorize the process of those who remained in losing this member. One way that I like to explain this notion is almost like a spiderweb, where humans exist in intricate networks, which are either social or economic or political, and where one’s relocation necessarily produces a dislocation for all other nodes. Just as pulling one ebb of a spiderweb will shift all of the other ones or tear the strands. This process of interconnectedness and interlinked-ness is hidden behind the term migration and so I want to unpack it with the notion of mahroog and their inhirag, which is their process of being left.

[20:10] KB: Could you explain, or maybe theorize, if or why each actor in this equation (the individual undertaking the migration, European states, and Maghrebi states) are motivated to retain the status quo on this issue, despite, as you’ve mentioned, the immense human loss?

[20:28] OS: Certainly. The concept of migration, and specifically posited as “putting a stop to illegal migration”, has been a major point of diplomacy currently between the EU and Maghreb, as well as other states that considered “sending countries.” As it has become a major point of diplomacy and indeed a major bargaining chip for these “sending states,” there’s an incentive to maintain it, to act as though you are attempting to curtail it, while also encouraging the EU or the “receiving country” to keep sending funds and aid and so on. It’s like a chicken that lays golden eggs in a sense, if it weren’t for the immense human costs. In a sense, that really indicates the brutality and the unrepresentative nature of many of the regimes of the Maghreb, which for the most part have been repressive, authoritarian, and have quashed civil society. In the case of the European Union, we’ve seen that, within many of the countries, there are multiple populist isolationist movements that rally the masses behind depictions of the figure of the migrant -- migrants that are in the country either to spread Islamic civilization or to take jobs from the “good, well-meaning citizens,” or to “steal our government resources.” These depictions of the migration are used by certain elements of the society, which we consider to be the far right but are quite more proliferated, to establish their own national identity and to pit themselves as superior to the inferior migrant. As such, on some level, it’s a psychological element as well: posing by opposition. One can only be posed by opposing. In opposing oneself against the migrant, one can prop up one’s nation, as we see in these rightist isolationist movements. In the case of individual Maghrebi migrants, I wouldn’t suggest that the incentive there in necessarily to retain the status quo. Many migrate solely because of the individual circumstances in their own lives that have pushed them to the point that they cannot remain any longer. As a result, I would not suggest that they have the incentive to necessarily maintain the status quo.

[23:20] KB: So, one really important concept that you touch on is Ruben Andersson's articulation of the “migration of sovereignty” that the EU's border-policing has enabled. What are the implications of the haraga on the borders of Europe?

[23:35] OS: What we see in the case of Europe, especially in the case of Spain, has been an increased presence of border policing throughout the Mediterranean region. As such, Europe has essentially encroached further away from its border southward and southward toward the shores of the Maghreb to curtail migration’. This is the migration of sovereignty the Reuben Andersson articulates, and additionally, with this increased reach of policing and bordering comes a humanitarian discourse, which pits all arrested migration as serving a humanitarian purpose. For instance, migrants are depicted as being saved. In fact, Ruben Andersson has an idea in this piece that any boat was seen as a potential life hazard approaching European shores, and so under the guise of humanitarian work, the EU was able to police with total impunity along the Southern Mediterranean shore. One other notion that’s rather interesting here is in forcing the Maghrebis to cross the Mediterranean, the EU is in a sense recruiting nature as a form of border policing in itself. The Mediterranean, for the roughness of its terrain as well as for the coldness of the water, is itself an obstacle that migrants must brave if they want to make the journey. “Recruiting nature” in that sense absolves Europe of its responsibility in the case of a migrant ship capsizing because of problems overseas. Because of that, the Europeans also have been able to enforce this discourse of the humanitarian mission as, essentially, “saving” these migrants and policing with more moral impunity as well.

[26:01] KB: I think your description of the EU pushing its border and its sovereignty has a lot of resonance with, as you said, the southwestern border of the United States, with the recent reports that border agents have been shooting tear gas into Mexico. Really interesting parallels.

[26:22] OS: Absolutely.

[26:24] KB: So, as you mentioned in your YWP speech, “The opacity of the destination and the lack of its positive assertion reveal that the حراقة are depicted primarily as being repulsed from within. As such, theirs is a journey outward from the Maghreb, and not inwards to Europe." I have two interrelated questions following this quote. So one: what are the transformations that one must make in their own lives to be able to conceive of or actualize undertaking the journey? And then also: what myths exist about the EU and Europe that make it a more attractive destination than the places they're emigrating from, considering that they have all kinds of impediments once they arrive, which I’m sure they’re aware of -- having to live clandestine lives and all other sorts of barriers. I’m assuming that [migrants] have full knowledge prior to [their journey] that would say that they would have to live clandestine lives, which carry their own burdens, but yet, the immigration also has its own lure.

[27:10] OS: Certainly. The negotiation of leaving the country and the transformations that that entails typically happen across multiple dimensions, and two sources of flight that I have identified as commonalities between the books are as follows. The first is male emigration in response to unemployment and the multidimensional forms of consequences that this male unemployment brings with it in the Maghrebi context. And the second, which I’ll touch on after, is females fleeing gender-based violence. In the first case of males fleeing unemployment, contrary to the reductive depictions we see of “economic migrants,” Maghrebis are fleeing for psychological, social, familial, and even existential reasons. Some migrants are fleeing because, without work, you are trapped in a stillness of life that takes away one’s own subjectivity, essentially it reduces them to an object incapable of progress or movement -- trapped in an ennui and a stillness of life. That has severe psychological effects, so in each of the three works, we see severe psychological trauma of people who are reduced to shells of themselves, due to the stillness of life imposed by unemployment. Secondly, the familial and the social restrictions on movement caused by unemployment. We meet a character who is unable to attain any meaningful position within his family structure, and is pushed out to the symbolic margins due to his unemployment. As such, unemployment -- the absence or the expulsion from the labor market -- breeds an expulsion from mobility, which breeds an expulsion from progress, and that leads to an expulsion from humanity, in a sense. In the case of the family structure, you are pushed to the margins. In the  social structure, it is difficult to have any form of mobility, and so you take to feeling shame and negative feelings that isolate you from your peers and make you exit your social networks. So in many senses, unemployment itself breeds all sorts of different flights: a flight from a social space, from a familial space, and even from a psychological space -- from subjectivity to an objectivity, in the sense that you become an object [of these forces]. I mentioned the psychological traumas, and I quote the authors in my work, but [it creates] some sincere psychological trauma. The second case of commonalities is females fleeing gender-based violence, which happens on a few different fronts: the front of the family, the front of a marriage -- the spouse--, as well as the front of community, the front of the government, and lastly the front of religion. What this really gets at is that the Maghrebi fiction authors analyze the haraga as a means to amplify some of the social criticisms that they have long repressed; one of them being particularly the treatment of the female and the gender-based violence within their societies, coming from the figures of the mother, their spouse, and so on and so forth. But in all of these cases, the decision to leave -- to get up and extricate yourself -- is made separately from the decision to arrive at Spain. The most well-known case of this is the great Mohammed Bouazizi, whose own self-burning is what launched the Arab Spring, essentially. He is a harag. He is one who must certainly be considered a migrant outward from the Maghreb, only his destination was never articulated as Europe. His destination was articulated as outward at any cost; the most appealing destination to him was the quickest to arrive to, which was crossing the boundaries of life. I believe that is the perfect depiction of the outward repulsion that my concept of emigration hopes to capture. As far as the second question about the myths of the EU and Europe a more attractive destination than others, given its presence across the sea, given its mythical status, and just given the constant reminder that it’s there, characters begin to experience almost obsessive passion to Europe as opposed to, say, neighboring countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Europe provides a “promiseland” above the horizon, where the problems that you have at home are not there. So, in my paper, I explain that one migrates not to traverse physical or cartographic boundaries. As such they don’t only cross the ocean in order to arrive on the banks of Spain, but rather they migrate to attain dignity, to attain the ability to assert oneself, humanity -- virtually existence, to put it another way. Whether that comes on the shores of Spain, north in Barcelona, east in France, through to Switzerland, through to the Netherlands, that’s not the prime question for the migrants. Instead, the migrants look to traverse contours of multiple dimensions of familial status, social status, existential and emotional and pathological status, and so on and so forth. As such, their journey is never to Europe, but through Europe, away from the Maghreb. That’s an important context to understand, which is why when I say that the destination is primarily depicted as being repulsed from the Maghreb, as opposed to inwards to Europe. That piece of information is missing from a lot of the accounts in European mainstream media that depict the migrants as being hellbent to arrive in Europe specifically. Their journey isn’t to Europe, and Europe as such isn’t as important as what it contains within it: hopes for equality of life, hopes for movement, and hopes for general progress and mobility.

[34:55] KB: So you kind of already answered this question with the previous one, but I was wondering how the concept of haraga occupies a particular cultural, political, or psychological space in the Maghreb?

[35:09] OS: So for this, I’d like to unpack the meaning of the term haraga itself, which is a repository of many, many important cultural hints. The term “haraga” itself comes from the Arabic root meaning “to burn,” which is the ح رق letters, and indeed the act of burning itself is applicable on many levels. Migrants burn their identification papers so that they may conceal their national identity from authorities while crossing the sea. Migrants suffer a burning desire to migrate; this is the emigration that I was mentioning, where it’s a destructive force that just tears away and destroys structures, destroys webs, extricating the migrant from their situation and allowing them to move more freely. On a similar note, the burning of social and personal connections with the nation’s physical dimensions. And lastly, it also encompasses a historical parallelism that the books like to mention rather playfully, with  Tariq ibn Ziad’s burning of his respect, and of his crew’s -- in their respective boats -- in 711 (A.D) when the moors arrive on the shores of Spain to begin what was to be Andalusia. So, as I articulate in my paper, this captures a tactic, a pathology, an estrangement, and a historical continuity, and each of these meanings is evoked in the works or within multiple different forms of art, and even day-to-day conversations.

[37:02] KB: Finally, who are considered to be the ultimate benefactors of haraga migration?

[37:11] OS: One may first assume that it’s the migrants themselves -- at least, that’s the way we are shown it in European media -- whereby migrants illegally cross the ocean with utter disregard for the laws that await them, and so on and so forth. In reality, the migrants suffer lives of incredible malaise and clandestinity that breeds very severe anxieties that are omnipresent in their existence and form an existential state for them. Similarly, it’s not as shown in the fiction any of the family that live back home who receive remittances, who I call the mahroog. The haraga entails a long distance from those they departed from the haarag, and that distance is never necessarily captured in the meager salary of the clandestine, illegal worker in Europe; nor the infrequent visits; nor can that distance be crossed with forms of telecommunications nowadays, however sophisticated they may be. For those who remain at home, as shown in the fiction, the inhirag is always a long, painful process, always underestimated. I believe that the reason that this theme really persists is because of an alignment of the interests of the state level, and the state itself -- of course, it being comprised of multiple, individual, human actors, rather than the state being a monolithic whole -- maintains this. So, I believe that the people who most benefit from the haraga are those who exploit the illegal migration of Maghrebis on the shores of Europe and throughout Europe, those who do it towards economic, political, cultural, or whatever forms or needs that they should choose. In fact, we even see in the fiction that there are those who exploited towards sexual needs. Additionally, the governments of the Maghreb, who have used this as a political bargaining chip, rather than implementing forms of change which will curtail this migration [have benefitted]. It would stop repulsing, stop repelling this population from its shores.

[40:15] KB: This again reminds me of the capital benefits of having migration in the US as well, which as everyone on the planet probably knows, is a hot debate in the US. But the jobs that migrants take are the hardest jobs, physically speaking. They’re paid [in some US contexts, (such as in the construction sector)] well enough, but are considered to be a lower class of people with all of the stigmatization that that involves. It’s an interesting parallel across the world, what migrants have to go through economically-speaking, socially-speaking, and politically-speaking, when in fact they are taking the jobs that no one else in a society would necessarily want or even be physically able to do [in late-capitalist states].

[40:55] OS: Certainly, and all the benefit of this articulation, of [characterizing] this emigration as lacking a positive assertion, and not being built on cartographic lines, along contours of dignity, finance, social, and familial lines, and so on, shows that the migrants are willing to proliferate throughout Europe, to fill in jobs almost as water in holes on the surface. They go to the areas that need them the most. That kind of depiction contrasts very strongly with the dominant depiction we’re fed of these people coming in necessarily to take “our jobs.”

[40:34] KB: Right. Yeah, it’s really interesting. To close it up, you spoke earlier in the discussion on your aspirations for this research and for other subsequent research that this could build on. I wanted to ask, what did this MedReset opportunity, presented through the EU and Arab Studies Institute, mean to you?

[42:00] OS: This opportunity provided me with an idea to further develop my argument, as far as this piece goes, to gain a lot of exposure, and meet many very clever people who I’ve formed meaningful connections with, as well as to gain an insider view on some of the conversations that are happening within the EU, which are incredibly relevant to a topic such as this one in bridging gaps between two different dialogues -- one happening on the African shore between the Maghreb among the Maghrebis, and one happening on the European shore among the Europeans. I think most importantly, it provided me with an opportunity to meet people that inspired me, and that inspiration, as well as the individual connections that I made, are what are going to keep me within this space working longer, and striving to more and more ambitious and larger projects. The experience has been invaluable, and specifically ASI, which gave me the opportunity as well as the feedback, the time and space required to implement some remarks into my essay, helped me arrive at the essay as it is today, as it helped me flesh out these ideas. So, I’m incredibly grateful for the MedReset program, all of the parties involved -- ranging from ASI, to Instituto Affari Internazionali -- and this has been an absolutely phenomenal experience.

[43:56] KB: Thanks so much for speaking with me today, Omar. Your work has been really well-received on Jadaliyya and beyond, and if anyone is curious about reading it, they can head over to Jadaliyya, and we’ll put a link below. Omar, do you have any final thoughts before we go?

[44:14] OS: No. Thank you very much for this time -- it’s been a real pleasure speaking with you, Kylie.

[44:19] KB: Thanks so much!

[Outro music is by Dahmane El Harrachi, Ya Rayah.]