I am a few centuries old, perhaps older than my ancestral village itself. We both span the ages between the unlamented medieval and the exacting postmodern. We have both grown. But the village stayed behind with the land and will only grow younger. I have left the land and will only grow older.
from The Book of Generations
Mansour Ajami was born during World War II in Saghbine, a poverty-stricken Lebanese village that had remained virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages. His autobiography is The Book of Generations: A Reunion with Memory.
Mansour is...
...a scholar, Ph.D in Arabic literature and Islamics from Columbia University, with many academic publications and collections of poetry in Arabic and in English.
...an author, of, most recently, The Book of Generations: A Reunion with Memory, cultural editor of Al-Haraka Al-Shi'riyya (A Review of Modern Arabic Poetry).
...and a poet, singer, songwriter and oud player, who has performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, and at major universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Arab World.