Sep 29, 2019
Belén
Fernández is the guest. Her new book,
Exile:
Rejecting America and Finding the
World, is available from OR Books. It is the
official September pick of
The Nervous
Breakdown Book Club.
After growing up in Washington, D.C. and Texas, and then attending
Columbia University in New York, Belén Fernández ended up in a
state of self-imposed exile from the United States. From
trekking—through Europe, the Middle East, Morocco, and Latin
America—to packing avocados in southern Spain, to close encounters
with a variety of unpredictable men, to witnessing the violent
aftermath of the 2009 coup in Honduras, the international travel
allowed her by an American passport has, ironically, given her a
direct view of the devastating consequences of U.S. machinations
worldwide. For some years Fernández survived thanks to the
generosity of strangers who picked her up hitchhiking, fed her, and
offered accommodations; then she discovered people would pay her
for her powerful, unfiltered journalism, enabling—as of the present
moment—continued survival.
In just a few short years of publishing her observations on world
politics and writing from places as varied as Lebanon, Italy,
Uzbekistan, Syria, Mexico, Turkey, Honduras, and Iran, Belén
Fernández has established herself as a one of the most trenchant
observers of America’s interventions around the world, following in
the footsteps of great foreign correspondents such as Martha
Gellhorn and Susan Sontag.
She is a contributing editor at Jacobin and graduated from
Columbia with a BA in political science. She frequently writes for
Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and Jacobin, and is
also the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at
Work.
In today's monologue, I address the podcast's new theme song
and last week's record-breaking listenership.