Cerdan Stories

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 [email protected].