Chris Hedges Report: Stories From the Center of the World

Jordan Elgrably discusses new fiction about the Middle East by 25 authors whose tales offer a nuanced and substantive portrayal of the region.

By Chris Hedges
The Chris Hedges Report

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The years of war and terror imposed upon the Middle East have left its people, as Jordan Elgrably tells host Chris Hedges, “tired of saying that [they’re] human too.” In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Elgrably discusses the stories that remind English-speaking Western readers of the humanity behind those from this often misunderstood and misrepresented region.

In Stories From the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction, 25 authors weave together unique tales that offer a nuanced and substantive portrayal of the region. Hedges and Elgrably explore a handful of the stories, delving into themes such as the struggles of working class immigrants, the challenges of adjusting to life in the Middle East after years in American society and more.

A consistent theme of many of the tales that Hedges and Elgrably explore is the rejection of society, and a people longing for connection that imperial power and greed denies them. As Hedges says, “[The] first section of stories are about exile, the pain of exile, the way that these outside forces intrude to distort, deform, destroy lives.”

In one chilling passage, the author states: “I made an unavoidable mistake. I had a terrible dream, screamed and was discovered here. Even your nightmares can betray you. In the future — and I also use this word with a laugh — I will sleep with tape over my mouth.”

These stories thrust the reader into the perspectives of Middle Eastern people, whether they’re immigrants or refugees, and through their thoughts, actions and complexities, unravel the misconceptions so often exploited by politicians about them. “There’s an explanation for why people would leave. They don’t hate their countries. They would love to be able to stay,” Elgrably says.

Through the characters’ interactions with culture and society, the stories tackle themes such as class dynamics, and the often untold trauma of a population cursed by foreign intervention and war. As Hedges and Elgrably discuss, the narratives reveal the humanity at the root of these underrepresented issues.

The multitude of stories provides people an accessible introduction into the world of Middle Eastern writing. “You can take this as a stepping stone to discovering other writers from that part of the world,” Elgrably says.

Host: Chris Hedges

Producer: Max Jones

Intro: Diego Ramos and Max Jones

Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript: Diego Ramos

Chris Hedges: “The center of the world, where recorded civilization got its start over 7,000 years ago, can be found in southwestern Asia, in ancient Mesopotamia,” writes Jordan Elgrably. 

“It can be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, in the Torah and the Talmud, in The Odyssey and the Iliad of Homer; in Zoroastrianism, which predated the Qu’ran by 2,000 years; in A Thousand and One Nights and in the literature of 20th-century poets and writers, among them Khalil Gibran and Naguib Mahfouz, Amin Maalouf, Edward Said, Hisham Matar, Assia Djebar and Kateb Yacine.”

These ancient civilizations were carved up by France and Britain the wake of World War I. They became Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Libya, the Sudan, Kuwait, Palestine, later Israel, and Egypt. The region has been cursed since the First World War by relentless foreign intervention, including military occupation as well as the overthrow of democratically elected leaders, such as Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 by the C.I.A. and British intelligence. Its most venal despots, in exchange for access to oil and the crushing of nationalist aspirations, are propped up by Western powers and given the instruments to oppress their own populations.

Lebanese poet and translator Huda Fakhreddine calls the Middle East a trap – “a made up thing, a construct of history and treacherous geography, the Middle East as an American trope, a stage for identity politics.”

Yet, the rich culture of this ancient land remains intact, although often targeted by dictators and ignored by outsiders.

Jordan Elgrably has published 25 of the best short stories from The Markaz Review in his book Stories from the Center of the World. Here are voices that those who wield the armies and fleets that dominate the region need to hear, not only to understand the people they oppress, but themselves.

Joining me to discuss his book is Jordan Elgrably a Franco-American writer and translator of Moroccan heritage whose stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and reviews, including The Paris Review. He is also the editor-in-chief and founder of The Markaz Review.

Jordan, let’s just begin by the context of the book and the review which I’ve looked at, it’s great. Just talk about how this came into being.

Jordan Elgrably: Thank you for having me on Chris, it’s an honor. The roots of this go back to the late ’90s, when a group of us — at the time, I was in Los Angeles — and a group of us of Middle Eastern, North African heritage, decided that we wanted to form a cultural center for the greater Middle East, as the C.I.A. likes to call it, and we did. And that cultural center was called the Levantine Cultural Center. It ran for 15 years or so, and then we changed the name to “The Markaz” which means “the center” in Arabic as well as in Persian, Hebrew, Urdu and Turkish. 

Then with the pandemic, it closed as a brick and mortar cultural center, and at that point I was no longer in L.A. I decided that it was time to go back to my early roots as a journalist. And we launched The Markaz Review in the summer of 2020 right in the middle of the pandemic. And our very first issue was devoted to Beirut. And, we had it all set up, and then this enormous bomb went off on Aug. 4, 2020. And it reminded me of when we started the Levantine Cultural Center, which was in June of 2001, just before 9/11. The context of 9/11, Aug. 4, 2020, and Oct. 7 of last year are very similar. These are situations in which people who are of Arab heritage or of Muslim background find themselves suddenly the center of attention, and not in a good way. 

And so The Markaz Review, it’s sort of an online compendium of the voices of what one of my colleagues called Edward Said’s children, the younger generations of writers and artists, filmmakers, even architects and others who are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, who are multilingual, who write in English or write in Arabic. We translate from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, French and so forth. So it’s a multilingual, multicultural, diverse publication, and these short stories are not only Arab, but they’re also Persian, Kurdish and from other cultures. And they are some of the best pieces of fiction that we’ve published over the last few years, but the context is still so relevant today. Today is Oct. 7, right? It’s the one year anniversary of the attack by Hamas and the subsequent attack by Israel on Gaza. And now, a year later, the war hasn’t stopped, and it looks like it’s going to continue. 

And most of the Arab writers that I know are feeling very betrayed by their devotion to Western culture and writing in English. Betrayed because they feel that the dehumanization of Palestinians and now Lebanese is beyond the pale. It’s unacceptable. It’s, as our senior editor, Lina Mounzer, wrote in her editorial on Friday, it’s almost like there are no words. And so stories like these are, I mean we’re tired of saying that we’re human too, but the stories humanize people from the region, from the center of the world.

Chris Hedges: Well, they do more than that. They give context. They deal with those terrible struggles. 

Your first section of stories are about exile, the pain of exile, the way that these outside forces intrude to distort, deform, destroy lives. There’s that story in the book about going to London and cleaning the houses the ultra rich never occupy, but own as investments in Belgrave Square or wherever it is in London. 

And having been a foreign correspondent for 20 years, I learned that you couldn’t understand whatever culture you were in — and of course, I was seven years in the Middle East — unless you listen to the voices of writers, playwrights, artists, poets. And one of the tricks I used as a foreign correspondent when I especially was sent to a country where I didn’t know much about is I would immediately go to the theaters, sometimes with a translator, to see new plays by young playwrights, because they were always writing about those subterranean but vital issues that were not seen on the surface. And I think that’s what this book does so incredibly well and powerfully. And we’re I just want to pick a few stories to go through. I’m going to begin with the first one in the book.

Jordan Elgrably: That’s “Asha and Haaji”

Chris Hedges: Yeah, which is brilliant. I want to read the opening of it.

“Call me Ezra. Call me Michael or Thomas. Call me Abu, Dedan, Ahmed. Call me Er, Asha, Trash or Shit. Call me whatever or no one or nothing. You already have more than enough names for me in this place, my identity, even my nature, changes from day to day. It is an effort for me to remember who I am. Like a child rehearsing his alphabet, when I wake up I have to reacquaint myself with my history. That is because I am not recognized. I have no reflection here. Except in her eyes.”

He’s talking about the woman he’s fallen in love with.

“When she sees me, I come to life, if life is the accurate word, which it probably isn’t.”

And that’s, of course, a constant theme among writers in exile or anyone living in exile, it’s the loss of identity, because your identity is negated by this new culture that you’ve been forced into. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Jordan Elgrably: Yeah, thanks for reading that. That’s Hanif Kureishi, who has another story we can maybe address later. But expat writers romanticize, have romanticized exile, but it actually is a very painful thing. Quite often, people do not want to leave their country. Syrians loved Syria, did not want to leave Syria. Palestinians also loved their country, the town that they’re from and don’t want to have to leave. And same with the Lebanese. 

I did a series of interviews with Lebanese people a few months ago, they saw the writing on the wall with Gaza, and they were beginning to feel the heat, and they hadn’t left yet, and this is before the last two weeks. 

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It’s a very difficult thing to be uprooted from your culture, lose your job, your property, have to start over in a new language. And in this case, Asha and Haaji are both from two different countries. We don’t really know which ones they’re from, but they’re part of the underclass, they’re almost the pariahs in London society.

And there’s a scene in that story where they get attacked, or the narrator gets attacked by some skinheads. And he’s kind of living by the skin of his teeth. And I really, I love that story. I wanted it as soon as Hanif Kureishi sent it to us. It’s one of the better pieces. It’s a very imaginative piece. But there are other stories of immigrants. As I said, I think people in the West will probably over romanticize being in exile. 

But from South Americans from Chile and Argentina who had to leave because of the Dirty War, to Iranians who had to leave either because of the Shah and the SAVAK, the secret police, or because of the oppression of the Islamic Revolution, I think we need to learn what it’s like to be uprooted. Because as Americans, I’m American and French, but I have the privilege of having two passports and two countries I can live in and go back and forth. And a lot of people do not have that freedom. 

And as we know right now, [Donald] Trump and [JD] Vance and others in Europe are, once again, using the immigrant boogeyman, to divide people, to get elected, to make money out, whatever they’re doing. And it’s such a, what’s the word? Hooey? It’s just such nonsense. Immigrants tend to be very hard working people, and they want to rebuild community. They want to find community. They’re not bringing drugs and crime.

Chris Hedges: There’s a little passage at the bottom of that page I want to read. So he ends up hiding in the tiny room of his lover.

“We took turns to sleep on the plank of a bed until,” he writes, “I made an unavoidable mistake. I had a terrible dream, screamed and was discovered here. Even your nightmares can betray you. In the future — and I also use this word with a laugh — I will sleep with tape over my mouth.”

I thought that unavoidable mistake and a nightmare was that even his, which, of course, it’s not a mistake. He can’t control it. They’re all through these stories [inaudible], because, of course, many of the writers come from civil wars, failed states, which were largely orchestrated by outside intervention. But there is, I mean, throughout much of the book, this undercurrent of trauma, this undercurrent of violence that people have endured, but which, of course, in the exile community, nobody is aware of at all, even knows what happened. And just before you comment to that, I have to read this because it’s such a great line:

“No terrorist ever found inspiration in Kafka. And I’m far too lazy to start killing people. I don’t give a damn for invasions or wars; I expect nothing less of humanity. But all this, what has happened, is an inconvenience too far.”

Jordan Elgrably: That’s really a key section of the story. Yeah, writers are not terrorists, and very few Muslims or Arabs are actually terrorists. And then, you have to say that if Palestinians are being occupied, and they’re resisting their occupation, according to international law, they have the right to resist their occupation. So are you going to call everyone who resists a terrorist? That’s what Israel does. That’s what they want the West to do with their propaganda, their Hasbara, and frankly, we’re really fed up with that. I think people have to see through that.

Chris Hedges: They end up working cleaning, as I mentioned, these houses that are unoccupied by the uber rich. And it’s the futility of the work that, of course, when you’re poor, you often have to do.

“Things that were not dirty, that had never been used, had to be maintained. That was our job: cleaning the clean. Working all day every day, we cared for deserted swimming pools, plump new beds, steam rooms, saunas. Acres of wooden floors and yards of blinds, walls, garages, and gardens that had to be attended to. The repainting was continuous. People get less attention but they are worth less.”

So again, another feature, of course, in particularly of exile, but not exclusively, is the huge class divide between those who have so much money that they maintain empty houses. And those who essentially are the caretakers of those houses, not even having a place to sleep.

Jordan Elgrably: Right and the other phenomena of this underclass is that they often work in the city, where they can’t afford to live, and they have to travel by public transportation, sometimes for an hour or two hours, to get into the city. So they’re living out on the outskirts. This is true especially in the Bay Area. It’s true, I’m sure, in the New York City area. In other words, the workers who are working at the Starbucks, who are working in the hotels, cleaning the rooms, they can’t afford to live anywhere within an hour of where they work. And this is going on all over the place. I think this story really gets to into the heart of that.

Chris Hedges: It also gets into the way the immigrants are demonized for the breakdown of the social order. And of course, as you said, he’s badly attacked. He writes:

“Nihilism doesn’t dress well. You wouldn’t want to discuss poetry with them. They have shaved heads. They wear leather and have tattoos. They have clubs and knuckle-dusters. One look at us is all it takes for them to know civilization is at stake. We raggeds with our awful belongings and need are a threat to their security and stability. I have no doubt: it is dangerous for us here in Europe. I am paranoid, I know that. I hear interrogations and arguments in my head. I expect people to have a low view of me. We are already humiliated. Not that there isn’t much for us to be paranoid about. If we are on the street, just walking, they stare and often they turn their backs. They spit. They want us to know we are peculiar to them, unwanted. They talk about choice and individuality, but it amazes me how conformist and homogeneous everyone is.”

It is that quality of being an outsider and reviled.

Jordan Elgrably: Yeah, Hanif Kureishi very much cast these characters, Asha and Haaji, as outcasts. And as we saw quite recently in the U.K., the right wing riots were attacking immigrants, people they consider kinds of outcasts. It’s all contemporary, everything that’s happening in that story, and a number of those stories remains, perennial.

Chris Hedges: I want to talk [about] “The Suffering Mother of the Whole World.” So this is a story about a woman who lives in the United States, has been educated in the United States, coming back to Egypt and realizing that she may have be of Egyptian origin or Egyptian descent, but she no longer fits within that society, that kind of Netherworld, because, of course, in the United States, she’s still often seen as Egyptian, as foreign.

I saw this when I was in Paris covering the banlieues, these poor, huge housing projects on the outskirts of Paris, like La Cité des 4,000 and others, you had Algerians who may have been born in Algeria, but they left maybe when they were 3, 4, 5 [years old], whatever, and they weren’t considered by the French to be French — you know French culture better than I do — but when they would go back to Algeria, they wouldn’t be considered Algerian by the Algerians.

Jordan Elgrably: Not Algerian enough and not French enough.

Chris Hedges: Not Algerian or not French enough, maybe that’s a better way to put it. And that struggle for identity was often targeted by conservative clerics and radical Islam, that was a kind of profile. But talk about this story. It’s a very poignant and a very sad story because, in a way, because of her Americanization, she can’t fit in anymore. Her family, of course, she’s a woman, and they want her to come back and get married and everything else.

Jordan Elgrably: Yeah, “The Suffering Mother of the Whole World,” by Amany Eldin. She is Egyptian, the writer, the narrator of the story is Egyptian, and did come from Egypt, but left rather early to get an education in the United States and built a life there. But one thing she hasn’t built is a family for herself. She’s still unmarried, still doesn’t have any children, still of marrying age but she goes back for a family visit. And her family is used to being relatively bourgeois and they still have this apartment that’s gathering dust and life is sort of moving on for them. 

But she just can’t, she’s become too Americanized. She’s become too accustomed to the comforts, the air conditioning and the shopping malls and the cars and all the things that… Of course, they have all of this in Cairo as well, but they also have in Cairo a lot more dust, a lot more noise, a lot more people. And she’s beginning to realize that this is going to be her last trip, maybe, it might be her last trip. And her family is trying to get her to stay and and reinvest in the family heritage, and she’s not having it, she’s just, she’s done. I don’t know. It’s not a feeling I ever had. 

This morning, a sort of a funny thing happened to me. I was out shopping at the local market, and this Moroccan guy was having a cigarette next to my motorbike, which happens to be a Triumph. And he said, oh, I want to get one of these bikes when I can afford it. And I want to take a trip to Morocco, and you should take your motorcycle to Morocco and I said, you know I’m Moroccan too. And he said, Oh, really? He couldn’t [believe it], because I’m so light because my mother’s American. I said, Yeah, I’m a Moroccan citizen, actually. But for him, there was no way that he would consider me the same. Maybe it was a class issue in his mind, I don’t know. I think he was a working class guy who wanted to afford this thing. 

And so there’s a divide there that is reflected also in her story. She comes from a family that has something of a background. Obviously, they could afford to send her to go to Ivy League schools on the East Coast, I think Boston or something. And so I don’t know what happens to cultures when they lose… I think about brain drain. I think about the fact that for Palestinians and Lebanese, there are more Palestinians living outside of Palestine, and many more Lebanese living outside of Lebanon, right? 

And then we, the generations whose parents left, as my father did, trying to maintain this connection. And we’re not really… like I’m not really Moroccan in his eyes, because I didn’t grow up there. And people who, like her, who are Egyptian, but they’ve become so inured to another way of life, it’s almost, it’s a little bit tragic in a way. And I’m thinking now about the thousands of Palestinians from Gaza who have left, who basically escaped death, have gotten out, and they go to Cairo, and then they get permission to go somewhere or other. 

I just interviewed a Palestinian a couple of days ago whose family got out and they managed to get permission to go to Barcelona because one of their daughters got Spanish citizenship a few years ago. So basically, the family was saved at the last minute. Tremendous to see what’s happening with all of this immigration that, in a way, we are responsible for, because it’s our bombs that are being used to destroy Gaza and now Lebanon and then people have nowhere to go. I mean, there’s over half a million Lebanese who are living on the street right now for the last few days.

Chris Hedges: Well, I covered the wars in Central America for five years, so we wrecked Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and then we wonder why everybody’s fleeing north.

Jordan Elgrably: I wonder if politicians ever talk about the origins of this, of the discontent, or the, as you just explained, there’s an explanation for why people would leave. They don’t hate their countries. They would love to be able to stay, right?

Chris Hedges: Yeah. I want to read this passage from that story:

“Nadia’s restless mind rebelled at seeing Egypt through her father’s eyes. She had resolved to feel the country’s pulse this summer, not look at it in terms of new Cairene hotels or imports in the shops. If she had any responsibility to Egypt, it was that, to determine its mood. She expected to sense that mood, the almost tangible frustration level from the city streets — surely not from the countryside, which was another world after all, another age. It wasn’t true, Nadia deliberated silently, that the Egyptian peasants had always accepted everything and endured. There had been rebellions, armed insurrections. It seemed to Nadia that the countryside was always receding behind a shimmering hot veil that blurred one’s vision and clogged one’s hearing.”

So you not only have the cultural divide between the Egyptian woman who’s gone to America and come back, but you also have the class divide, which she’s aware of. Especially [since] they have a family farm, and she goes out to that farm, which is now decayed and falling apart.

I lived in Cairo, and the wealthy — I lived in Zamalek, which is the very kind of wealthy area in Cairo, on the island, it’s beautiful — but the the division between the Egyptian oligarchy and the rest of Egyptian society is huge. There’s a huge chasm between the oligarchs in these societies and the rest of the country. And then there’s the clash of traditional society. Of course, the whole time she’s in Cairo, she and her father and her grandmother are trying to marry her off to stay in Egypt. And in the story, Nadia saw that the deterioration of the city, mirrored in her family. How could she justify this loss of faith in our Egyptian heritage, which at once seemed so glorious, this dread she felt as witness of decline? So there’s also that sense of decay, decline, especially in countries like Egypt.

Jordan Elgrably: Right. Okay, but to be fair, I should say that I also see decay and decline in Los Angeles.

Chris Hedges: Well, yes.

Jordan Elgrably: Every time I go back, I see more and more tents. I see tents, homeless encampments on San Vicente Boulevard, on the edge of Beverly Hills. I see so much decay and decline as well. And I don’t want to just pick on California, but that’s a state that I know the best. But the difference between the classes, that’s something that’s shared between Egypt and the U.S., for sure.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, it’s a little more pronounced in Egypt, perhaps, in that you don’t have much of a middle class, but our middle class is being eviscerated. So we are rapidly replicating the oligarchic model with figures like, obscenely rich figures like [Jeff] Bezos and, yes, very much so. But I certainly was very cognizant of it in Cairo.

I want to talk about “The Agency.” This is a really great story. So she runs this kind of dating, it’s not a dating agency, it’s like a marriage brokerage agency. And these — she’s written out of Amman — these Jordanians will come back after having lived many years in the United States. And she knows that what they’re looking for are virgins, women who have not had sex. And she categorizes them in terms of different types:

“Pure Virgins who had lived with their parents all their life, had gone to an all girls school and had almost zero interaction with the opposite sex, with the exception of their fathers and brothers. They had never held a man’s hand or were ever found alone behind closed doors with someone from the opposite sex. Then there were those who had experimented with men: a kiss here, a kiss there. Maybe a slight touching of body parts. Noor referred to them as Quasi Virgins. Finally, there were those who had kissed, touched and more, who experimented with various sexual acts but refrained from the final act of submission. Anything but the intercourse. On Noor’s scale, those were Technical Virgins. Noor never dealt with those who were, in fact, non-virgins. Those were a rare minority, the pariahs on whom Noor didn’t want to take a chance. Years of experience in this business had taught her to determine the level of virginity that her clients were seeking without asking them directly or even requiring them to fill out an application form.”

But what’s interesting is that her agency caters, at least from the story, not so much to people in Jordan so much as these men who live abroad and come back.

Jordan Elgrably: Well, that seems to be the case with the main client, if you will, who’s there. And if you read the story at the end, you see there’s a kind of, well, I don’t know if you saw it coming, but I didn’t the first time.

Chris Hedges: I didn’t see it coming.

Jordan Elgrably: There’s, there’s a twist, so that’s, that’s an incentive for you guys to go get the book. The guy, I forget his name, the client is a very wealthy Jordanian living in Washington, D.C., and he’s determined that he wants a woman who’s no more than 25 years old, who’s blonde, who is educated, but he doesn’t want her to work, he wants her to stay home, and he wants her to speak French as well.

Chris Hedges: So he can teach their kids.

Jordan Elgrably: And the narrator of the story is just like inwardly scoffing and shaking her head because it’s typical. She’s almost a feminist in disguise, this character.

Chris Hedges: She writes about this character, who is typical of her clients:

“She wondered if he had been married before and if he was trying the traditional route after failing the first time. She had a lot of those clients always looking for a second chance. A redemption. To correct their previous failed marital decisions by finding a homeland bride. Many of them picked the first one to legalize their status, get their Green Card, and maybe, just maybe, give this marriage to an American a chance. The majority failed and came running to her to find the one, the traditional one, the good one, the one the West had not tarnished.”

Jordan Elgrably: I can relate to the story a little bit more now, because, in fact, my father was one of those immigrants who needed to get a green card. And I think when he saw my mother, he decided he was going to seduce her and become legal because he was not a legal immigrant when he first arrived in the U.S. from France and Morocco. Although he didn’t have to go to a dating agency, he was a bit slyer than that.

Chris Hedges: The last story I want to talk about is by Salar Abdoh, whose novel I read, The Long Walk of the Martyr. It’s a great short story. I’m trying to remember his novel, it had the name Mesopotamian in it.

Jordan Elgrably: Out of Mesopotamia.

Chris Hedges: Out of Mesopotamia, yeah, very good novel. So he’s from Iran and he talks about the veterans of the wars in Syria and Iraq, where many Iranians went to fight on behalf of the Shia. In fact, as a lot of people don’t know, they were tacit allies of the American forces because they were fighting against the Sunnis. And they come back to Tehran, and there’s no place for them. Many of them went to become a shahid, or a martyr, but they weren’t martyred. And there’s a moment in the story where somebody… he actually arranges for a friend to go back and be martyred. “We were womenless men. We suffered for it. We had no money and the war had been a way out of our gloom.”

And now they’ve returned. And the question is, “Now what?” And there was the deification of martyrdom, of course, after the eight year war with Iraq, which was horrendous, and I don’t know the full number of Iranians who died but certainly in the hundreds of thousands, and so these martyrs are held up.

And you saw the rise of the Islamic State and the Sunni death squads, many, many Iranians crossed the border, not only to fight on behalf of the Shia — 60 percent of Iraq is Shia — but also in a kind of quest for martyrdom. And what he’s writing about in this story are those men who didn’t achieve martyrdom. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Jordan Elgrably: Yeah. Salar Abdoh, as you said, he’s an Iranian writer. He’s based in New York, where he’s a literature professor, has an interesting story himself. But he’s actually become a bit of a war correspondent willy nilly because he doesn’t want to stay in New York and be an armchair traveler and write these stories.

He’s actually been out, embedded with Iranian fighters in Iraq and Syria over the last few years who are fighting Daesh, the ISIS gang. And he’s particularly interested in what happens to the men who who come back and try to reintegrate. And we’ve seen plenty of stories about American veterans, and we know about their trying to deal with Agent Orange, or to deal with PTSD from IEDs in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But we don’t think about, I think we never think about Iranian soldiers, or Iranian men, Iraqi men, as American readers. It’s rare to even find stories like that.

So his novel Out of Mesopotamia and this story, I think, is a bit of an offshoot of that, both try to really explore the lives of these guys. And he goes to Tehran and knows them and interviews them. So he’s not making anything up here. This is all straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. And I think they’re really human and sad. Some of them are wounded, maybe they’re missing a limb. Maybe they don’t have a wife. He’s always looking to find their story.

Chris Hedges: I think even Greece, right?

Jordan Elgrably: Greece is also included. By the way, it’s published by City Lights Books. And I have to say they’ve been big innovators for years, in terms of finding literature and translation for world literature to include into some of their American… They were started by, of course, [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti, and they published [Jack] Kerouac and others from the Beat Generation. But the vision has continued under the newer publisher, Elaine Katzenberger. And a couple years ago, they published this Gazan poet, Mosab Abu Toha, and his book has just, I don’t want to say blown up, but it’s done really well. And now his new book is out by Knopf, and he’s publishing in The New Yorker. So they have their finger on the pulse. They are finding really excellent stuff. Not that I’m saying that this book is excellent, but…

Chris Hedges: It is and it’s beautiful and poignant and extremely important to kind of begin to get into the experience of those not only who we’ve pushed aside, ignored, rendered invisible, but often demonized.

Jordan Elgrably: Yeah, I think this book is a little bit like a gateway drug. It’s kind of like kissing. You read a few of these stories, you get to know who these authors are, because you’ve never heard of Salar Abdoh or Natasha Tynes, or maybe you know Hanif Kureishi, maybe you don’t. But there’s some major names and some new names and some kind of in between. So I think you’re right, you can take this as a stepping stone to discovering other writers from that part of the world.

Chris Hedges: Great. I want to thank Max [Jones], Sofia [Menemenlis], Diego [Ramos] and Thomas [Hedges], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”

This article is from Scheerpost. 

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This interview is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.

Views expressed in this interview may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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