With Abu Leila, we talked about migrant solidarity work, the role of English in our lives, the play we worked on together in undergrad, and the hard-hitting care of a crowd, alongside an exciting small preview of their novel-in-progress. Abu Leila’s work inspires me so much. Thank you for speaking with me, Abu Leila, and for being my friend!
If you're getting this as a newsletter, read the properly formatted post here: https://jiaqikang.mataroa.blog/blog/questions-for-my-friends-4-abu-leila
The idea for this project is that I’m interviewing my friends and people I feel close to, who inspire me. There’s obviously a difference between this ‘on the record’ discussion, which will be published online for anyone to read, and the normal ‘off the record’ conversations we’d have as friends. I’m interested in the ways I might get to know you more through this slightly more ‘formal’ format and the choices you make in representing yourself. I’m also interested in oral history as a form, and in ways to preserve and archive intimacies and relationships in time and space.
Please come up with how you want to be called: name, initial, or pseudonym. I’ll be “Jiaqi Kang.”
The questions below are the 6 main questions I’ll ask you, but your answers will probably prompt some follow-up questions. Your answers can be as long or short as you want. The interview will be conducted orally, then transcribed using Loom and edited for length and clarity. You’ll get to take a final look at it before it goes up, and of course I can take it down anytime you like in the future (although it’s on my blog+newsletter which means that it will also exist in people’s email inboxes).
1. Please introduce yourself and your background, in any way you’d like.
2. How did you become politically engaged?
3. How did you and I meet?
4. What does the word ‘care’ mean for you?
5. What are some things you’re currently looking to learn, or learn about?
6. Is there anything else you’d like to say, or to ask me?
Thank you <3
With thanks to CM for helping me plug the audio files into Loom!
This interview was conducted virtually in April 2025 and has been edited for length and clarity.
Jiaqi Kang: Would you like to introduce yourself and your background in any way you'd like?
Abu Leila: This is the best question. Who am I? What is my background? I guess I'm a community organizer. I'm a writer. I'm somebody who comes from a migrant, violent displacement background. I'm a friend, a lover, a family member. Someone who really likes learning lots of stuff. I'm queer.
JK: How did you become politically engaged?
AL: I love this question. I think I have actually a really clear moment of becoming properly politically engaged. I've always had vaguely left politics. My mother's family was in the Lebanese Communist Party and I was banned from watching Anastasia as a child, because it was royalist propaganda. So I think I had some of that growing up. And obviously the feminist and queer internet was always an influence. But it was always just an opinion I had. Just like, “Oh, I think these things,” and more of an identity, rather than an active part of my life.
It really only became [an active part of my life] when I got involved with migrant solidarity stuff on the border between Italy and France, when I was in my early 20s. It was during the peak of the refugee crisis in Europe, and loads of people [were] coming specifically from Syria and Sudan [etc]. I just went because I heard some talk about it, and I was like, “I speak Arabic so I guess I'll go because I might be helpful.” And it was my first time… Like, I knew that borders were kind of violent, and that racism was bad, but it was my first time really, really encountering the violence of the border—all of its absurdity and violence—in person. Just seeing border police turn back, like, a 12-year-old child, which is against the law, but [they would] just be like, “You can't come in,” and then the child having to walk back on foot for kilometers without anyone around. Just seeing that, and seeing the way it was happening, and how the police were acting, and how border guards were acting… It completely changed my relationship to the state and all the systems that control our world. It was the first time that I was like, “Shit, this is actually really fucked up. And it's only by a casualty of time that I was born just a little bit earlier, and when my parents left the war, it was easier to come to Europe.” [Because of that,] that wasn't me, [but] it could have been. It’s such a random thing.
I was there with an anarchist-y collective. And again, I didn't really have a politic at that point, but I was just around loads of people who would be like, “Fuck the police,” and I'd be like, “Why?” Or they’d be like “Oh, work is bad.” And I'd be like, “Why don't you like to work?” I was a baby. But just being around these opinions, I was like, “I just have never met anyone who thought like that before and explained so much to me.” Being around them while facing all of these things, it was really deeply transformative for me.
I really remember a specific night. Before this, I [had been] like, “In my life, I want to research ancient languages and be a writer.” And then it was the night where there was this horrible storm. It was in the Alps, where the weather does get really bad. People were not allowed to go outside, because [there was a] weather-warning—too dangerous. But obviously, the refugees were trying to cross the border; [they] had nowhere to be but outside. I remember the migrant solidarity people, we went under the bridge, and I met this young woman who had a newborn baby, maybe, like, a few months old. They were there in the storm, and we were like, “We can bring this tent,” which is the best we can do. She didn't want it, because she was worried that, somehow, by taking something from us, we might want to record some information about her. She was really scared about it. She was like, “No,” and she just sort of stayed out. I just remember at that point being like, “Well, I can't live in a world that allows this, unless the whole point of [my] being alive is to stop this.” That completely changed what I wanted to do with my life and how I viewed my purpose.
JK: That's a really beautiful story. Thank you so much for sharing that. Something that is quite interesting to me, that we haven't really talked about personally, is the fact that we have this shared background of growing up in continental Europe as people of colour, and then ending up in the UK for undergrad and staying here and speaking English. I wonder whether you wanted to talk about not being from an English-speaking country, but then engaging with English… Whether English had any impact on your own identity and your politics.
AL: That's a really interesting question. It definitely did. I learned English when I lived very briefly in Kuwait when I was a child. [Then] I went back to living in Italy, and Italians generally don't speak English. and that's not something that people learn very well. In Italy, it was a special thing. “Oh, I know English and I can see all the things you can’t see.” I would read a lot of… especially gender stuff, like feminist and queer internet things that, maybe that at that point in time, were not a thing in the mainstream in Italian. The way you had the feminist blogosphere in the English-speaking world, that didn't exist in the Italian-speaking world at that time. Lots of things have now also kind of been copy-pasted over.
Coming to England for the first time, I think it was the first time that I heard young people of colour and young second-generation people really talk about race as an important part of their identity, their struggle, and their politics. I don't know if this was similar to you, but in Italy, we were the first generation—there were no second-generation, third-generation immigrants that [I’d] ever met. It was in the middle of the countryside and it was just me and my friends. We were the first brown people that had arrived there and we didn't have a language or a way [in which] we were speaking about our identity. We were just immigrants. That's the way that people view us, and the way we talked about ourselves as well: immigrants. We were Italian, but Italians didn’t consider us to be Italian. I've always viewed [the word ‘immigrant’] as a part of my identity—a lot of my friends were other immigrants, and we were like, “We're obviously weird people that other people don't like that much.” But I'd never really connected it to anything more than that. It was something weird and uncomfortable for me, but I don't know if I [had] the language or the concepts to make it into something that I could make sense of as an identity.
It was actually on Tumblr that I saw a screenshot of somebody giving some kind of speech about what it means to be an immigrant writer. And I remember being like, “Oh my god. This is a specific position that means something rather than just like… I don’t know, something that is kind of weird and you should try to ignore.” Even in the way that I thought about it, or the way that I wrote about it, it was my first time that I was like, “You can actually write about things like this.” And I think there's obviously loads and loads of issues with the type of race politics I encountered coming to university in the UK, which is very ‘liberal identity politics’ type of stuff. But it was just the first time I encountered anything like that at all. It was very strange and transformative for me.
Sorry, I don't have the answer to your question. I feel like I just went on a long, long speech.
JK: Well, first of all, I love the long speech, and secondly, that did actually answer my question. I don't want to project or put my own experiences onto anyone else, but actually, I think we had really similar experiences in that way. For me, it was also going on the internet as a teenager, specifically Tumblr, and reading discourses about race, about sexuality and queerness, and about gender… That was the first time that I encountered a real vocabulary to talk about this in a political way, even though I grew up in a really ethnically and racially diverse city, Geneva, and I went to an international school. It was still [in] a really surface-level way that people talked about, for example, race, in my social environment around me. It was a very tokenistic thing, like, “Wow, everyone comes from such different places.” It just wasn't enough for me. I still felt, like you said, this weirdness about being an immigrant—but sometimes, I didn't even get to be an immigrant, I was literally always just a visitor, even though I had grown up [there].
Actually, it is problematic, in some ways, looking back at it… The way in which the English-language internet, which ultimately is quite Anglophone-centric, and maybe even US-centric at some points, especially on Tumblr… I learned so much, just consuming all those posts. It kind of taught me to ‘feel’ Asian American sometimes, because it felt as though the U.S. was this place where discourses about race seemed really advanced. People had a lot of really interesting things to say. Obviously, [the U.S.] was also a place where racial violence was often really mediatized. Experiencing [the protests in] Ferguson through Tumblr discourse [is very strange]… I was learning so much, but it was really strange to feel this sense of dislocation: “Wow, now I've learned all this language, and in some way, I can apply it to my daily life, but in other ways, it's really different from the way that I live.”
AL: Yeah, 100 percent.
JK: As you say, nowadays, on the internet, in other languages—in Europe, for example—there is [a bit more] discussion about these things… I love the word that you use, ‘copy-pasted,’ because I sometimes feel that as well. In French, [I see] all the loan words that French contemporary social justice language takes from English.
I left Switzerland when I was 18 and I've lived in the UK ever since. I've lost this physical connection to any sense of community back home.
AL: Same.
JK: [Nowadays] I follow all these accounts on Instagram, of queer anarchist activists in Geneva who are putting on cool things, from club nights to film series, and doing a lot of squats and DIY stuff, and I'm like, “That's so cool, but that's not my world.” There's a sense of both similarity and distance at the same time.
AL: I love that we both had this experience. I've actually never spoken to anyone else about this. In a way, it also kind of makes me sad, which is maybe really stupid… But now that I'm more aware of the limitations of the framework that we got from the [English-speaking Tumblr] atmosphere’s understanding of race and gender and whatever, I'm like, “Oh, actually, this is not that good of an understanding.” Part of me is like, “I wish we could have just figured this out for ourselves in a different space, and we could have come to some kind of different conclusion instead of just trying to make American race politics fit into our context, such a very different context.” But I guess the world is just connected in this way. I don't even know if that's possible, but part of me wishes that that had happened for me.
JK: That's a really interesting thing, because I guess it must have been happening, but just not in a way that we noticed, or maybe not fast enough for some of our satisfactions or something. Thank you so much for that.
You don't have to answer this, but what brought you to the UK?
AL: I just really wanted to get away from where I was living; I think I was just quite unhappy. I grew up in a small town in the centre-south of Italy, which was very fashy, and I never felt comfortable in it. Just even, like, walking on the street—there was always a lot of street violence against me and my friends, just for being a lot of queer migrant people. There are a lot of fascists in the Italian sense, like Mussolini nostalgics whose grandparents had been in the fascist party and had fought against the partisans, and they were proud of that. In my mind, getting away from that was having a life that was different. Now I am a bit nostalgic, and I'm like, “I wish I could go back.” But anyway, at that point, I was like, “I need to get somewhere else.”
My first port of call, literally just based on distance, I was like, “I'm gonna go to Iceland, and I'm gonna learn Icelandic, and then I'm gonna become a translator of Icelandic literature,” which now [sounds like] a delusional plan. I don't know why I had this life plan, but I actually did go to Iceland. Something went wrong with my documents, like my high school graduation certificate wasn't there on time and they were like, “You're gonna have to wait a year to go to uni,” and I was like, “Whatever, I don't wanna wait.” So I was just like, “What else am I interested in?” And I was like, “Oh, I'm interested in learning Sumerian.” Again, I don't know why my brain was like this. I wish somebody had told me to become more useful for society. But I was like, “I want to learn ancient Babylonian and Sumerian.” So I looked it up, and I found that the UK was a place you could go to [for that]. That's how I ended up here.
JK: That is so interesting and so funny. For me, it's much more a sort of class thing: because I went to an English-speaking private school, everyone was just applying [to English-speaking unis]. English [had become] my main language, in which I read the most, and wrote, [and used] for school. I talked to my friends [in that] language as well. Really importantly, [English was] the language in which I was configuring my own identity.
I feel like English gave me permission to stop being cis, in a way, because when I started thinking about it more, I was like, “Wow, ‘they’ is so easy and so accessible.” And I just slipped into it, or I put it on. I was like, “I'm loving this.” For me right now, thinking about the way that I want to be gendered in French, for example, is just such a headache because I don't use French enough in my daily life [anymore]. It's something that I haven't [yet] gone to try and figure out.
[The primacy English has in my life] really frustrates me. For me, going to somewhere like the UK or the US was kind of a given by the time I was 17-18, because English was the language in which I was who I am.
AL: That's really interesting. My experience was very different. [English was] not a language that was used around me at all. It was kind of an escapist language, [a language] of getting out of my context. I actually did have a friend—my best friend who [is also] queer—we would speak in English to each other, sometimes, when we were a little bit drunk. It was like, “Oh, we’re in New York, and we're so free, and we could be walking down the street being very important queer people, and everyone would be like, ‘Wow, yes, queer and lovely,’ instead of being like, ‘I'm gonna fuck you up.’” Which I find really interesting.
I remember I was in Beirut once, with some queer people in a house share. Lots of people there would speak English, and I was like, “Why are you all speaking English?” And some people were like, “Oh I just can't… I don't know how to be queer in Arabic.” I feel like my experience is not exactly that, because there were just not enough people around me who knew how to speak English. But I could see elements of that. [English] was always the language of some kind of other, more liberated world—which now I think is crazy, because I'm like, “The English people are actually really not that,” but I think it represented that to me as a queer immigrant in Italy.
JK: I love that friendship that you have with your friend. For a lot of people, English was fancy; English was a costume that you put [on and take] off. You would maybe choose to adopt it, even though at the same time, through imperialism, it was also being forced onto people. But if you chose to take it on, it could be like a costume or like a mask.
AL: Definitely.
JK: How did you and I meet?
AL: We met working on a play, didn't we? It was a play that I had written with my friend Simran. It was actually about my relationship with my mother, and my relationship to migration and war trauma, the humour. And you were an incredible assistant director on that play. I’m still like “Wow, Jiaqi is just so competent.” I still think of you as one of the most competent people alive, because of that play. It was just really nice to work on it together, and then… I know we haven't seen each other that much after that, because we graduated in different years, and then there was COVID and all of that… But I always felt like our radicalization to politics was kind of going on in parallel. I was always just like, “Ah, we are coming to the same conclusions, out there in this world.”
JK: Again, this is something we haven't actually talked about off the record—but it's so crazy looking back at the way that I was, in that time when we met. I definitely felt like, “Oh my god, you and Simran were so cool,” and there were so many things about you two that I had never really gotten to experience directly, including being non-binary. At the time, it wasn't something that I had seriously even thought about…
I feel like I was such a kid, and I was thinking about things so hard. I remember I had so many hangups that I was trying to work through purely through the power of overthinking. Meeting you guys and doing that play was such an important moment for me, in so many ways. Both just in terms of getting to work on [a piece of] theater—which is [not something I would otherwise do]. I remember just being like, “This is a super cool project; I am one of the rare people in the arts that is somewhat organized, so I'm gonna try to just give that to you guys as a resource to use.” [But also] just hanging out with you guys and meeting so many people who talked about things in a way that I yearned to discuss, but hadn't really found an outlet for.
I was also gonna say: at the time, I hadn't really been writing my own things. I was an editor, but I wasn't a writer. I remember the two of you said, “You should write a play.” I was like, “Haha, that's so silly. I would never write a play.” But then I did go back and start thinking about: “What would I write if I wrote a play?”
AL: Oh my god!
JK: I was like, “If I wrote a play and it was also about my mom, what would that be?” I didn't end up doing that because it was so daunting, but that was actually how I started writing things, and that gave me the [desire] to write way more. I think that you guys gave me this gift of, like, being slightly older, super cool people that took me seriously and suggested things to me that I wanted to be given permission to do. Sometimes I look back and I'm like, “That was such a cool time.” I feel like so many important things happened during that time.
AL: That's actually so lovely. Oh my god. I'm so happy to hear that. Also because I'm personally so nosy: what would your play about your mom [have been]?
JK: I don't know why I latched on to this, but there is this urban legend in the history of Geneva about this woman called Mère Royaume. The story is that, in 1602 when Geneva was a Calvinist city-state, the [French] Duke of Savoy staged this midnight invasion, trying to conquer Geneva overnight with a bunch of mercenaries. But the city of Geneva woke up and the citizens fought them back. It’s this really gruesome story, but they tell it to children: one of the urban legends is, there was this woman cooking vegetable soup at night. When she heard the commotion, she opened the window and tossed the entire cauldron out of the window and killed an enemy soldier with the boiling hot soup, and also by crushing him with the cauldron.
This is something that is commemorated every year in Geneva. People will make and sell chocolate cauldrons filled with marzipan vegetables. The oldest person and the youngest person in the room will join hands and say, “Ainsi périssent les ennemis de la République—Thus perish the enemies of the Republic.” Then [they] break the cauldron, and we all feast on this cauldron.
AL: Wow. It makes Geneva sound so much cooler than I've ever imagined.
JK: It's like the only interesting thing that's ever happened [in Geneva]. There's so much more going on there with the Protestant politics… But anyway, I was thinking about this woman. I had this strong idea at the time, where I was like, “Maybe I could write a scene about her making the soup, and her daughter is her assistant, and what happens in the kitchen.” It was this pretty simple idea. It was during a time when I was thinking so much about womanhood; I was feeling so burdened and shackled by womanhood. I wanted to figure out what was going on with that.
I did end up writing a story about this woman, and it got rejected everywhere. It was just bad.
AL: I really want to read that story. Don't give up on this story. I need this cauldron woman.
JK: Thank you. I think I’ll still write it someday, but what I was trying to do with it… It was very diaristic. Craft-wise, it was probably not great, but it was so important to me, because it was the first story I ever wrote—I guess, in this stage of my life, as ‘a writer.’
AL: I really love this concept.
JK: I distinctly remember it was because you and Simran were like, “You should write a play,” and I was like, “Oh, I guess it would be set in a kitchen…”
AL: This makes me so happy. And I hope to read that one day.
JK: COVID happened really soon after that [period of time], I think.
AL: Yeah, immediately after.
JK: [The play] was a really great time.
What does the word care mean for you?
AL: This is a very difficult question. I always feel like [when] people think about care, it's soft. A “light a candle and do nice things” kind of thing. But when I think about care, it feels like a really hard word. I feel like the times that I've really felt care have always been things that have been really difficult and sometimes quite intense—often in acts of political resistance.
In my recent few weeks, the time where I felt the most sense of care was doing a really intense eviction resistance. Like 100 people showed up at 6 a.m. and managed to hold off quite violent police and bailiffs from kicking these people from our community out of their home. It was really intense, but it was time when I was seeing all these people—some of them were at the first ever protest—who were just like, “No, we're just not gonna let this happen.” And they just stayed, and held the hard line against cops and bailiffs, and succeeded. It's obviously a very dramatic example, but I'm like, “This is what care feels like.” It feels like something really badass; holding on and standing against, despite everything, [despite] the way that our world is structured.
Even in the more individual sense: when you’re looking after someone, like looking after a friend or a family member who's unwell… It has, to me, the same element of feeling like this is an act of going against something and hardening myself, in a way, against the forces that are trying to destroy the links that we have between each other. If that makes sense.
JK: No, it does. And actually, what's really funny is my friend was at that eviction resistance that you just mentioned.
[The care question] is an important question for me because [it] comes out of trying to think about the sustainability of movements and the sustainability of connections formed through this kind of struggle. I agree that, often in really intense moments, I feel so much love for the people around me and for this fight [that] it's overwhelming. Sometimes, in the wake of that—in moments that are maybe more quiet or that are more about waiting—people need to reach out to each other more actively. Sometimes [in the quieter moments] it can be hard to feel that [strong sense of love and care].
In your writing, you have thought and written about ideas of community care and community accountability. I wonder whether you want to speak to that aspect, [in terms of] writing about it.
AL: That is a very interesting question. Maybe this is about who I am also as a person as an individual: I feel the most sense of love and empowerment and peace when I feel held in a group of people, and I feel much more open to experiencing love in that way than necessarily in a more individualized way—which probably says more about my psychology than anything else. I just melt at that. Even if I watch a TV show and it’s about a group of friends, that's the thing that's going to make me cry, because I'm like, “Oh my god, this is beautiful.”
The novel that I've been working on is about a group of people that come together to hold a rapist accountable, which is actually based on a real story, unsurprisingly for anyone's first novel. The transformation of an individual and isolating experience, where you're like, “Oh, this really sucks that this happened to me, but I don't really know what to make of it. It's kind of just weird and it feels not great. I don’t know…” How that [feeling] transforms just by [a group of people] holding it together, even if it doesn't really help fix the situation, even if everything keeps sucking. But it just means something else, and that feels so much better.
That is kind of what drives me to politics in general. I'm just always like, “I'm not sure that we always are going to win our battle, but I think just by coming together and being together, and framing it as a battle at all, it just completely snaps you out of that sense of, “Oh, my life is just a bit like this and [it] sucks and you just have to get over it,” which I find really depressing and life-sucking.
JK: I really resonate with that. That's something that I've been thinking about a lot, that idea of, “Even if we're not necessarily going to win (how do you define that?), the fact that we came together is so important.” Or: “It would be bad if no one did anything to resist this. I want to have been there, trying to do something about this. Even if we failed, or even if we didn't necessarily succeed in the way that we set out to. Because the other option is to not have done it, which is terrible.”
I love the way that you put it… Those moments where you are with other people, especially people that you might not actually know that well, and are living this together. Thank you for that. I feel like I've been talking way more than I should in this interview.
What are some things that you're currently looking to learn or learn about?
AL: At the moment, I really want to read Gargi Bhattacharyya’s new book about racial capitalism, because I'm really confused about racism. I feel like the more I live in the world, the more things that I thought I understood when I was 19 and read about it on the internet… I'm like, “I don't understand anything.” I don't understand anything about gender, I don't understand anything about race, I don't understand anything about class. Everything is so fucking confusing. The more you think about it, the more it's complicated, it doesn't make sense. I really want to understand more specifically about how race works in the contemporary world, and how that's different from other understandings of race [such as] what colonialists thought in the 18th century. How racial capitalism specifically works. How do we explain people like Rishi Sunak and company—various agents of empire that are Black and Brown people, that are out here being the strongest advocates of white supremacy in the world? And what this means for our understanding of race. That’s the first thing I wanna learn.
I also really want to learn more 20th century history. I want to really know my 20th century history, especially about Third World countries and struggles.
I want to learn Bengali, the language, because I live in a very Bengali-speaking area, and it's really troublesome for me that I don’t speak it.
JK: I feel like we came of age in this era where quote unquote ‘lived experience’ is kind of the be all end all. Lived experience is really important. But I'm trying to figure out how to make sure that that's not the be all end all of racial discourse.
AL: Yeah, 100%.
JK: Is there anything else that you'd like to say or to ask me?
AL: No, I just really enjoyed this. I’ve been making dinner while we're talking. It's so nice.
JK: What have you been making?
AL: I'm making bulgur with some courgettes and chickpeas.
JK: That sounds really delicious. I had ravioli from Sainsbury’s.
AL: That is also actually really delicious. I like the Sainsbury’s ravioli.