Episode: 23 — "Start Again" · Full Episode #23
Date: 26 May 2020 (Season 3)
Language: Libyan Arabic
Recorded in: Remote (UK / London)
Sanaa Al-Mansouri (سناء المنصوري) is a Libyan Amazigh woman who became the first Libyan broadcaster to present television news in the Amazigh language, on Libya Al-Ahrar in 2011. She trained as a sculptor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Tripoli. She is a mother of four and, at the time of recording, was working as a therapist in the United Kingdom.
Al-Mansouri was in her first year at university when her marriage was arranged. Her grandfather opposed it and came in person to try to stop it. Her mother supported it, overriding him. Immediately after meeting her husband at the Fatiha (the engagement recitation), Al-Mansouri moved to London with him.
For sixteen years, Al-Mansouri lived without a passport and without access to a bank account. She had been awarded a scholarship to Portsmouth as an art student; her husband destroyed her portfolio drawings. She describes the period in forensic, not emotional, terms.
See: Fleeing Barefoot, Women in Libya
Her final major sculpture, produced years before the marriage ended, depicted a standing man looking indifferently upward, with a small child clinging to his leg and trying to climb up. She did not know, at the time of making it, why she had chosen the image. Years later she understood it to be a portrait of her son Ahmed and his father.
Her husband forbade their son Ahmed from participating in music practice at school on the grounds that music was haram. When Al-Mansouri requested that Ahmed be excused, the headteacher refused, knocked a rhythm on her desk, and told her that rhythm comes from the brain. Al-Mansouri describes the moment as a turning point: the first time she recognised that the prohibitions she had lived under were not true.
After sixteen years she told her son "I'm coming back, I promise" and ran from the house barefoot.
In 2011, Al-Mansouri submitted her CV with "Tamazight" written at the top of the languages section. The next day she received a call. After an interview in London she was flown to Doha. On her first day at the studio, the scheduled presenter walked out. She was told she was on air in one hour — a live war call-in show. She and her colleagues invented modern Libyan Amazigh broadcast vocabulary for "brigade," "frontline," and "weapons" on the fly, on air.
See: The Tamazight CV, Amazigh Identity
As a child she was programmed to switch from Amazigh to Arabic the moment a guest entered the room, without explanation — a silent rule transmitted as shame (oyeeb). She treats the instinct as the core injury of Libyan Amazigh identity.
"Rhythm comes from the brain. She knocked it on the desk. That was the day I knew." (EP 23)
"I told him, I'm coming back, I promise. And I ran out without my shoes." (EP 23)