Poems that strike a blow for freedom

In the German election campaign, there is, once again, a lot of talk about refugees and migration. Note: “about”, not “with”. At a time when it is factually indisputable that Germany will need significantly more, rather than less, immigration if it is to remain economically stable in the future, immigrants are being discussed by several parties primarily as a cost factor – as if immigration has not always been a huge plus for Germany overall.

In other words, realities are ignored in the hope of scoring political points by using populism, resentment and racism. At a time when almost a fifth of Germans are again voting for the far-right, other parties see little sense in taking a decisive stand against it.

Instead, they are pursuing a policy of isolation that is on the one hand, grist to the mill of the far-right, and on the other, demonstrates how little they care about constructively shaping the future of the country. Not to mention the much-vaunted "Western values". The often completely empty term "integration" is understood by large sections of society as a one-way street in which people from other countries are expected to make permanent adjustments, the idea that they too may need to contribute something to the process never occurring to them. 

Mohammad Zahra, who was born in Syria in 1988, sums it up like this: Berlin, he writes, "transformed my discomfort at being a stranger here into an urgent need to be different, into a kind of resistance and a part of my identity. [The city] has caused the term ‘integration’ to mean ‘giving in’, which I find repugnant. How could it be otherwise, since the political parties see integration as a kind of training for barbarians? So my otherness has become a kind of revolt."

Zahra is one of the 29 Arabic, Persian, Kurdish and Ukrainian voices that the Berlin Poetry Project, in cooperation with PEN Berlin, has collected for the multilingual anthology, “Sei neben mir und sieh, was mir geschehen ist” (Be beside me and see what happened to me). The formally diverse poems, along with a handful of prose texts, are the result of workshops that the organisers conducted together with writers, mediators and translators.

The participants come from Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan and Ukraine. Most are young, in their twenties. Some have already published literary works, but many are processing their experiences and impressions in literary form for the first time here. Most came to Germany as refugees between 2015 and 2022.

The book is divided into four sections, sorted according to the four source languages. Each section is accompanied by a short essay and an interview with the workshop leader. The majority of the texts are included in both the original and in German translation.

It quickly becomes clear that those who had no previous writing experience found it particularly difficult to put into words and onto paper what was going on inside them. And not because they lacked the talent to do so, but because their life situation is often extremely difficult: dealing with traumatic memories, starting with being completely uprooted at a very young age, opens up wounds.

“Even without a passport, you are a human being”

The end result is a set of poems that seem for some like a moment of liberation, for others, an accusation, and for others still, like an urgent need to communicate and to dismantle the aforementioned resentments.

“Germany, you are not what you pretend to be, / When the diversity and tolerance you invoke / Are smothered by hatred and intolerance,” goes a poem by Rojin Namer, who was born in Damascus in 2002 and moved to Berlin with her brother in 2015. She has since won several German literary prizes.

But there are also voices that make no accusations, instead describing the arduous escape route across the Mediterranean in overcrowded boats with too little food and water, or via the Balkan route, constantly exposed to the arbitrary decisions of border guards, before arriving in the German capital, a place similarly characterized by insecurity and arbitrariness, but which, nevertheless brings with it the relief of being safe and having a place to sleep.

Others, in turn, look to the past, often to their own childhood. There is a sense of longing for family, or for relatives and friends who did not survive the wars in their home countries, a longing for the alleys in which the authors played as children or for a hastily abandoned neighbourhood. Then too, there is the question of whether the neighbourhood still exists, when much of Syria and parts of Iraq have been bombed, and Russia is steamrolling over everything Ukrainian in the occupied territories, without regard for history and institutions: a permanent humiliation from afar, which is precisely what the warmongers want. 

"If I close my eyes, I sink into the memories of my childhood. / When I turn my head, I see my neighbour's doll covered in blood," writes Jamal Abasi, born in Herat in 2001, who came to Germany at the age of twelve.

And Yasser Niksada writes: “Even without a passport, you are a human being.” Perhaps one of the biggest problems of our time is that there are people to whom something so obvious still has to be explained.

This volume is vital because it doesn't just talk about, but talks with the refugees, letting them speak for themselves and giving them a voice which is much more diverse, complex and fact-based than the shallow populist drum beating from parts of German civil society, and from large sections of a political landscape that is rapidly making itself untenable with its constant devaluation of people – and yet unfortunately still gets elected.

This volume is a counter-model to all that: an invitation to a dialogue across borders.

„Sei neben mir und sieh, was mir geschehen ist“ (“Be next to me and see what happened to me”)
PEN Berlin, The Poetry Project
240 pages, 20 euros
German and partly Arabic, Kurdish / Kurmanji, Persian, Ukrainian

This text is a translation of the German original. Translation: Louise East.