Book Group Session – Laila Al-Attar The Other Exile: The Story of Fernão Lopes, St Helena and a Paradise Lost by Abdul Rahman Azzam
Monday, 20th September
Book Group Session – Laila Al-Attar
The Other Exile: The Story of Fernão Lopes, St Helena and a Paradise Lost
by Abdul Rahman Azzam
Laila will be facilitating the discussion of this biography which maps 16th century character Fernão Lopez’s life and offers a fascinating account of the rise of an empire and the struggle of an individual which ends in over two decades of self-exile on the island of St Helena. The book raises interesting polemics around colonial projections, political consciousness, the dynamics between the group and the individual, and what gets remembered and what gets repressed. It also poses questions about the capacity for reparation when inter-subjective reparation is abandoned: is self-exile the ego’s attempt to put oneself together by shutting out the other or is it a withdrawal into a psychic retreat?
Laila is a psychodynamic counsellor/psychotherapist. She did her MSc in Psychodynamic Counselling and Psychotherapy at Birkbeck and is currently working in an IAPT service as well as having a private practice. Prior to psychotherapy, Laila was working as a translator, subtitler for over 20 years. She has an interest in foreign languages and cultural perspectives and tries to use her new training to deepen her understanding of diversity, religion and cultural dimensions.
