| Episode | 5 |
| Season | 1 |
| Category | People |
| Listen | Full Episode #5 ↗ |
Episode: 5 — "How Do You Tell Your Story?" · Full Episode #5
Date: 2019
Language: Mixed Arabic and English (Arabic dominant)
Ghazi Gheblawi (غازي القبلاوي) was born in Tripoli. He studied medicine and worked as a doctor before turning to writing and publishing. He published his first fiction while still in Libya and has since produced two collections of short stories in Arabic and published literary work in English in UK publications.
At the time of recording he was senior editor at Darf Publishers, an independent London publishing house, and a trustee of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature. He created and hosted the Emtidad (امتداد) cultural podcast — described as possibly the first Arabic-language podcast. He was a judge of the Caine Prize for African Writing.
Ghazi lives in the tension between Arabic and English as literary languages. He discussed Hisham Matar's deliberate choice to write in English — a strategic decision to reach Anglophone audiences and critical circles. Gheblawi sees this as legitimate but noted the tradeoff: distance from Arabic readers. Gheblawi himself writes in both languages.
He told the story of Ahmed al-Bukhari (الكاتب أحمد البخاري), a Libyan writer who wrote freely and spoke his mind. After 2011, militias targeted al-Bukhari. He was forced to leave Libya and cannot return — he fears for his life. Gheblawi framed this as the real cost of freedom of speech for Libyan intellectuals after the revolution.
Growing up in Libya between ages 11 and 13, Gheblawi described how international radio — especially BBC Arabic — opened a world that books and state media could not. Radio was his escape from the limited information environment Gaddafi maintained.
See: Radio as Liberation
He argued that a model of masculinity built on dominance — "the patriarch, the father, the lord of the family" — is destructive. Living in London for five years made him reconsider things he had never questioned. He noted that Twitter-era discourse makes people feel they can dismantle a century of patriarchal thinking with a post, which he found naïve.
His philosophy: 90% of writing is hard work, 10% is talent. For fiction especially, you must write every day to maintain the thread of the story. Consistency over inspiration.
Episode: 70 — "An Open Conversation" · Full Episode #70
Date: Season 7
Setting: Outdoors, on a London park bench
Language: Arabic
Ghazi returned to Damiri approximately two years after EP 5. The conversation was recorded outdoors on a London park bench rather than in a studio — a deliberate departure from the show's earlier production setup.
The central exchange of the episode concerns a framework Tariq laid out for the first time on air: that a single major event becomes, for an entire generation, the calibration point through which subsequent reality is interpreted. For Libyans, that event is 2011. For Palestinians, it is 1948 (the Nakba). The event is not always the most consequential thing that happens to a person individually, but it operates as the lens through which they read the news, locate themselves in time, and make sense of what is happening to others.
Ghazi confirmed the framework. He extended it in one important direction: the event does not require physical presence. A person can be outside the geography of the event — abroad, in another country, asleep — and still be shaped by it as definitively as those who were inside it. The shaping happens at the level of generational identity, not at the level of personal witness.
See: The Defining Event Theory · The Defining Event
The conversation moved into cultural diplomacy — the role of literature, music, podcasting and translation in producing relationships between Libya and the rest of the world that the Libyan state has been unable or unwilling to produce through its formal channels. Ghazi's work at Darf Publishers and as a literary editor places him directly inside this argument: the publication of Libyan writers in English is, in his framing, not a marketing exercise but a diplomatic one.
Ghazi recommended Hassan Akkad's story as worth pursuing for the show. Akkad — Syrian filmmaker, NHS cleaner, activist — was subsequently interviewed and now has his own page on Damiripedia.
Tariq used the conversation to admit, on air, that during Seasons 3 and 4 he had chased metrics and lost the compass. The admission is significant in the context of the show: a host conceding to a returning guest that the show's earlier seasons had drifted from the editorial line that produced Season 1. The admission is not framed as collapse but as recalibration — the recognition that audience growth, when pursued as a primary objective, can hollow the work.
Episode: 149 — "The 100-Year Relationship Between Italy and Libya" · Full Episode #149
Season: 10
Language: Libyan Arabic
Ghazi returned for a third conversation in Season 10. EP 149 is structurally different from EP 5 and EP 70 — neither a personal portrait nor a framework episode, but a sustained historical conversation on the hundred-year arc of Italy's relationship with Libya, from the 1911 invasion through the present.
The conversation's anchoring critical move is on the Italian self-narrative known as Italiani brava gente — "Italians, good people" — the post-war framing in which Italian colonial violence was treated as somehow lighter, more civilised, less guilty than the violence of the other European empires. Ghazi rejected the framing. The historical record on Italy's behaviour in Libya — the camps, the deportations, the mass executions, the deliberate starvation of populations in Cyrenaica — does not survive the comparison the myth wants to make. The myth is a national consolation, not a description.
See: Italiani Brava Gente
Ghazi traced one of the historical undercurrents of Italian colonial behaviour in Libya back to the Battle of Adwa in 1896 — the defeat of the Italian army by Ethiopia, which was carried in Italian political memory as a wound that needed to be repaid. The wound, in his reading, contributed to the ideological substrate that produced Italian fascism a generation later. Libya, when the time came, would be the site on which the wound was paid back. The framing is not original to him — Italian historians have made the same argument — but he uses it to refuse the framing that Italian colonial violence in Libya was a one-off rather than a piece of a longer political logic.
The conversation moved through Italo Balbo, the fascist governor of Libya, whose long shadow over Tripoli is visible in the city's colonial architecture and in the still-circulating Italian-Libyan administrative inheritance. Ghazi's reading of Balbo is neither rehabilitating nor demonising. The figure is treated as historically specific — a fascist functionary whose competence within the regime explains a great deal about why Libya was administered the way it was during the period.
Ghazi addressed the 1980 film Omar Mukhtar (also titled Lion of the Desert) — the Akkad-directed, Gaddafi-financed production starring Anthony Quinn — and the long Italian ban on its public screening. The film, which depicted Italian colonial violence in Libya unflinchingly, was effectively prohibited from Italian distribution for decades. The ban itself is part of the Italiani brava gente infrastructure — the censorship of representation as a precondition for the maintenance of the national self-image.
The episode introduces a contemporary figure: Alessandra Ferrini, an Italian artist who, working in London, discovered the Mukhtar story from outside the Italian frame and has produced a body of art around it. Ghazi cited Ferrini as evidence that the work of dismantling the Italiani brava gente myth is now being done — partly by Italians who left Italy, partly by Libyans who write in English, partly by a new generation of researchers operating across the linguistic line.
"90% of the work of writing is hard work, work, work, and 10% talent. Especially with books — you have to write every day." (EP 5)
"You can be outside the event geographically, and still be shaped by it." (EP 70, paraphrased)
"Italiani brava gente is a consolation. It is not a description." (EP 149, paraphrased)