Ordinary misery

"الشقاء العادي—Ordinary Misery" is the phrase the Lebanese writer and translator Bassam Hajjar used as the title for Peter Handke's novel "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams"—an ordinary misery that resembles us on one hand, and Bassam in his voluntary isolation on the other. In this session, participants sought to read texts that reclaim the distorted face of human vulnerability, after it has been relegated to the peripheries of various contemporary contexts.