Episode: 58 — "I Belong Only to Myself" · Full Episode #58
Date: Season 6
Language: Arabic and English
Asma Khalifa (أسماء خليفة) is a Libyan Amazigh activist, researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg. She is from Zuwara, the Amazigh-majority coastal city west of Tripoli. She co-founded the Amazigh Women's Movement and was awarded the Luxembourg Peace Prize in 2016 for her work on women's rights and minority rights in post-2011 Libya. At the time of recording she was based between Hamburg and Zuwara, completing doctoral research on civic identity, indigenous rights and post-conflict society.
She is also a beekeeper.
Asma's father was abusive. At seventeen she went to the police and reported him. Going to the police as a teenage girl, against a father, in a society where the family unit is treated as private and inviolable, was an unusual act. Her mother filed for divorce shortly afterwards. The sequence — the report, the divorce, the rearrangement of the household — was the formative event of her teenage years. She did not present it as a coming-of-age but as the moment a structural problem became unignorable enough to act on.
The episode title is drawn from her formulation. The phrase is not a declaration of solitude — she remains rooted in family, community, and the Amazigh political project. It is a statement of ownership: the body, the name, the future, and the right to refuse are hers. The phrase carries particular weight in a context where the social and legal default treats women as members of a household first and individuals second.
Asma was part of the Atulul movement, a Zuwaran initiative to document the city's intangible cultural heritage. The team interviewed elderly residents — the oldest of whom was 110 — and recorded oral knowledge that was disappearing with the generation that held it. One finding stood out in the episode: the team identified eighteen distinct variations of couscous in Zuwara alone. The variations were not interchangeable. They corresponded to occasions, family lineages, seasonal availability and ritual function. The work is significant for two reasons. First, the granularity of culinary practice in a single city demonstrates the depth of inherited knowledge that the term "Amazigh culture" tends to flatten. Second, the documentation is a form of insurance: when the oldest interviewee dies, the variations she carried are not lost.
She co-founded the Amazigh Women's Movement to address an absence: organised political space for Amazigh women, in a moment when post-2011 Libyan politics was opening rapidly but unevenly. The movement worked on issues at the intersection of two structural exclusions — gender and indigenous identity — that had not been addressed by either feminist organisations focused on Arab Libyan women or Amazigh organisations focused primarily on language rights.
Asma spoke openly about undergoing MDMA-assisted therapy. She placed it within a wider conversation about the limits of conventional talk therapy for trauma rooted in childhood violence. She did not advocate the practice as a general prescription. She described it as a tool that worked for her, accessed through structured clinical settings, in the context of a longer therapeutic process. The disclosure is unusual in Arabic-language podcast space, where pharmacological approaches to trauma — particularly those involving controlled substances — are rarely discussed publicly.
Beekeeping appears in the episode as a counterweight to the activist's life. Bees do not respond to political pressure, do not require explanation, and operate on a cycle independent of the news. Asma described the practice in terms close to discipline: the hive demands attention, but it is attention of a different quality from the kind required by advocacy or doctoral research.
"I belong only to myself." (EP 58)