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Hello, my name is Razia Iqbal. Welcome to Notes on a Native son, a podcast about the writer James Baldwin.

This year, 2024, marks the 100th birth anniversary of a man unique in American letters.

He was many things to many people, novelist, essayist, activist, seer, icon. For Baldwin, though, such lists were meaningless.

Who and what James Baldwin was and what his legacy is can't be listed,

but it can and perhaps should be found in his work.

He refused any attempt to box him in.

This podcast tries to get close to the idea of getting to know Jimmy Baldwin through his work and for those

who love his words to return to them. We have called it Notes on a Native Son after one of

Baldwin's most famous autobiographical essays, Notes of a Native Son. That essay powerfully clarifies

what he is and what America is on his terms.

In each episode of Notes on a Native Son, we invite a well-known figure to choose a special or significant James Baldwin passage.

The conversation that ensues tells us as much about Baldwin's story as it does about the person who loves Jimmy,

as he was known to all who loved him.

Our guest on this episode of Notes on a Native Son is the Libyan writer Hisham Mata.

He was born in New York to Libyan parents spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo

and has lived much of his adult life in London.

Hisham trained to be an architect and I can only imagine he would have been brilliant at it

as his eye and sensibility are so finely tuned and honed.

That he chose to use words instead of bricks and mortar is no less sublime.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for his profound and painful memoir, The Return,

which chronicles his return to Libya after the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi,

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