{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Lines of Fire: Poetry of the Afro-Asian Writers Movement","description":"What if the poetry that inspired revolutions, that gave voice to the colonized and the exiled, that was watched by the CIA and funded by the Kremlin, had been almost entirely forgotten? This podcast is a journey into that hidden history. In the wake of the historic Bandung Conference, a revolutionary literary movement was born. Poets from across Africa and Asia\u2014from Palestine to South Africa, from Vietnam to Algeria\u2014came together with a shared purpose: to forge a cultural weapon against colonialism, racism, and imperialism. They created two journals, Lotus and The Call, and filled them with poetry that was defiant, angry, and full of hope. These were poets who wrote from prison cells and in exile, who knew that a poem could be as powerful as a gun. But their movement was torn apart by the Cold War, caught between the competing ambitions of the Soviet Union and China, and relentlessly surveilled by Western intelligence. Their work was scattered, their legacy fragmented. Until now. Lines of Fire is a landmark new collection that brings this forgotten poetry back to life. It is a book of voices that refused to be silenced: from Mahmoud Darwish\u2019s aching laments for Palestine to Faiz Ahmad Faiz\u2019s defiant anthems against dictatorship, from the revolutionary songs of Vietnam to the anti-apartheid cries of South Africa. In this episode, we sit down with Tariq Mehmood, the editor of Lines of Fire. For years, he has been on a quest to unearth this treasure trove of resistance literature. He takes us behind the scenes of the movement, explaining the bitter split between its two factions, the role of intelligence agencies in the cultural Cold War, and the incredible challenge of collecting poems originally written in dozens of languages. But more importantly, we talk about why this poetry matters today. As the world watches a genocide unfold in Gaza, as the fight for freedom continues from Sudan to Kashmir, Tariq explains why these poems from the 1960s and 70s feel more urgent than ever. They remind us that the struggle for liberation is not new, and that poetry, as he writes in the book, is \u201cnot just an outlet for anger, grief, or love. It is resistance. It is resilience. It is the refusal to be erased.\u201d Join us for a powerful conversation about the poetry that set the world on fire and why it is essential reading for anyone fighting for a better one. Tune in to hear the story behind Lines of Fire\u2014a story of solidarity, struggle, and the enduring power of the written word. ","author_name":"DARAJA PRESS PODCASTS","author_url":"https:\/\/sites.libsyn.com\/538512","html":"