Episode #7: What if the border itself began to talk?: Yanara Friedland
Julie and Yanara talk about Yanara's childhood in a Jewish-American and German family in Germany, the question of Jewish identity in a secular household, walking as writing practice, the value and problem of silence in the face of rupture, fractured and buried archives, Midrash as methodology, and Walter Benjamin's messianism. We ask: are borders always a violence? Why do we cry when walls come down? And who or what witnesses the monster we are when we do not sleep?
This interview was recorded over zoom with sketchy internet.
Texts and authors discussed:
Yanara Friedland is a writer born in Berlin. She is the author of Uncountry: A Mythology (2016) and Groundswell (2021). Both books have appeared in German translation with Matthes und Seitz Berlin. Her current writing on sleeplessness investigates the relationship between political violence and nocturnal imagination, the aftermath of traumatic events as wakeful presence permeating language. She teaches at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies. Photo credit: Christiane Schmidt
In 2018 Julie and Yanara collaborated in writing “Installation #8”. The poem was written by Julie for her book Real Life: An Installation and was responded to, or re-created, by Yanara here.
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