Episode: 142 — "Learn to Take Responsibility for Yourself" · Full Episode #142
Season: 10
Language: Libyan Arabic
Joma Bouklib (جمعة بوكليب) is a Libyan writer and journalist who has been based in London for more than fifty years. He studied political science and has spent his working life inside Arabic-language journalism, writing three weekly columns at the time of recording and producing a body of essays and books across decades. He is one of the senior figures of the Libyan diaspora writing community in the United Kingdom, and one of the very few who has held a continuous publishing rhythm across the full arc of post-1969 Libyan history.
Bouklib has lived in London since the early 1970s. He arrived as a student, stayed through the entirety of the Gaddafi era, and continued through the revolution and after. The continuity is significant. Most Libyan diaspora writers of his generation either returned, scattered, or fell silent at some point during the long stretch of the dictatorship. Bouklib kept writing, kept publishing, and kept reading.
A specific period of his life sits at the centre of the conversation. He lived in Brighton and worked in London. Six times a week he made the round trip — Brighton to Victoria, Victoria back to Brighton — carrying a transistor radio. He listened the entire way. BBC, Arabic-language services, news, drama, current affairs. He described his brain in that period as "a sponge." The metaphor is precise. The commute became a continuous education at a moment when no Libyan inside Libya had access to the same range of information, and very few Libyans in London were as deliberately structured about ingesting it.
See: The Transistor Radio
Bouklib's working day is built around reading. He treats it not as a leisure activity but as the unavoidable raw material of column writing. A columnist who stops reading, in his framing, becomes a columnist who repeats himself, and the readers feel the repetition before the writer does. The discipline is in the volume — across languages, across genres, across decades — not in any single act of attention.
A line he has carried for decades comes from John Major, who, on the day John Smith died, described Smith as "an opponent, not an enemy." Bouklib treats the formulation as a small piece of democratic infrastructure — a phrase that contains the difference between adversarial politics inside a stable system and the kind of politics that produces purges, exile, and assassination. He has cited it repeatedly across his columns as a model of what Libya's political vocabulary has lacked.
His most distilled definition of democracy in the conversation: a mechanism for resolving conflicts over resources without violence. The framing strips the term of its decorative meanings — freedom, expression, identity — and keeps only its functional one. People will always disagree about who gets what. The question is whether they kill each other while disagreeing, or organise the disagreement into a process. Libya, in his reading, has spent most of its modern history failing to organise it.
He situated his own work inside a longer Libyan tradition of diaspora writing — exile literature, opposition press, the magazines and pamphlets that circulated through London, Cairo, and Beirut across the second half of the twentieth century. He resists the romantic framing of exile. The position is more pragmatic: from outside, you can publish; from inside, for most of that period, you could not. The diaspora writer is a person who happened to be on the side of the line that allowed sentences to leave the page.
"An opponent, not an enemy." — John Major, on John Smith, cited as a piece of missing Libyan vocabulary (EP 142)
"Democracy is how you fight over resources without killing each other." (EP 142, paraphrased)