Episode: 154 — "The Only Way to Deal with Fear and Trauma" · Full Episode #154
Season: 10 finale — the final episode of Damiri
Language: Libyan Arabic
Recorded in: London
Ghassan Atiga (غسان عتيقة) is a Libyan banker and writer. He has worked in corporate finance for more than twenty years, across institutions and across geographies, and he writes in parallel — long-form essays and a book project on the history of the Tripoli motor-racing circuit, the Mellaha track, in the period 1925–1940. He was born in Romania during a period of his family's movement and raised across Iraq, Jordan, Libya, and exile. His relationship to place is consequently unusual: not the diaspora reflex of homesickness, but a more analytical posture in which place is read as a kind of moral text.
Atiga is the closing guest of Damiri. The episode that bears his conversation is the final episode of the show. The cold-open audio that ran across the second half of Season 10 — the voice that introduced episode after episode — was his. The finale's effect, in retrospect, is of a guest who had been quietly present throughout the season being brought, at the end, into full view.
Atiga was twelve when his father was imprisoned in Abu Salim, the Tripoli prison that has, over the long arc of the Gaddafi era, come to stand for the regime's most concentrated cruelty. The arrest is the central biographical fact of the episode. Atiga described the household after it — the missing person, the absence of information, the years in which the family did not know whether the father was alive or dead.
See: They Killed Baba
The Abu Salim massacre of June 1996 — the killing of an estimated 1,270 prisoners in a single operation — settled, for many Libyan families, the question of what had happened to their disappeared. For the Atiga family, the assumption after 1996 was that the father was among the dead. The family lived inside that assumption for the years that followed.
In a moment that the episode does not romanticise, his father was released in 1997. Atiga's father had not been killed in the 1996 massacre. He had survived. The release was sudden, without context, without explanation. The family was returned a man they had assumed they had lost. The episode treats the release with the precise tone of a person who has lived inside its consequences — neither triumphant nor sentimental. The release is described, instead, as the beginning of a different kind of work: the reintegration of a person into a family that had spent years rearranging itself around his absence.
See: The 1997 Release
His mother's family is from Derna. When the catastrophic flood struck Derna on 11 September 2023 — the Wadi Derna dams collapsed in the night, and the city's lower half was carried into the sea — Atiga lost relatives. The flood killed an estimated 11,000 people and displaced tens of thousands more. The episode does not perform the loss. The recounting is precise, contained, and devastating. The conversation also addresses Derna's particular position inside the Libyan imagination — a city that has carried, across the modern period, an outsized share of the country's losses, and an outsized share of its moral life.
See: The Derna Flood
Atiga returned several times in the episode to a thesis he called "the genius of place" — the argument that certain Libyan cities, specifically Tripoli and Derna, carry a moral charge that is not reducible to their populations or their economic weight. They are, in his framing, the country's centre of conscience. The thesis is not nostalgic. It is offered as an analytical claim about how a country whose national institutions have failed continues to produce moral life — through cities that, in his terms, function as load-bearing structures for the country's interior architecture.
See: The Genius of Place
He is writing a book on the Tripoli motor-racing circuit at Mellaha, 1925–1940. The Mellaha track ran across the Libyan coast in the colonial period and was, in its short window of operation, one of the most spectacular racing venues in the Mediterranean. Atiga's interest in the project is not antiquarian. The book sits inside his larger argument about Libyan memory — that the country has lost most of its own history not through external destruction but through internal indifference, and that recovering it is a precondition for any serious political future.
The episode's largest intellectual contribution is a thesis Atiga has been developing for years: that Libyans, as a national group, do not document — and because they do not document, they repeat. The pattern is described as collective memory loss. Each generation re-encounters the same political failures, the same economic mistakes, the same moral compromises, and re-discovers them as if they were new. The cure, in his framing, is documentation in every form: archives, books, oral histories, podcasts, family records, photographs that survive their original moment. Damiri itself, in the closing minutes of the episode, sits inside this argument as evidence of what the work looks like when it is being done.
Late in the conversation, Atiga turned the question. He suggested, directly, that Tariq write a book about Damiri — about the project, the practice, the listening discipline, and the body of work the show has produced across six years. The suggestion sits at the closing moment of the show with a particular weight. It is one practitioner of memory-work suggesting to another that the work is not finished when the recording stops.
The episode's stated subject — "the only way to deal with fear and trauma in the present" — was approached by Atiga as a matter of disciplined contact rather than avoidance. The frame is consistent with his account of his own life: the years of his father's disappearance, the 1997 return, the Derna losses, the long sustained work of reading and writing in parallel with a corporate finance career. Fear, in his account, is processed by being looked at, named, documented, and re-encountered until its shape becomes legible. Trauma, similarly, does not move by being ignored. It moves by being attended to.
"We do not document. And because we do not document, we repeat." (EP 154, paraphrased)
"Tripoli and Derna — the genius of place is there. Whatever else fails in Libya, those two cities have carried the country's conscience." (EP 154, paraphrased)
"Write a book about Damiri." — to Tariq, late in the conversation (EP 154)