Survive wars – overcome speechlessness

This may be naive: people who have experienced a war simply let them tell how they experienced it. With the only ulterior motive that you can tell. It is just as naive to make a band about it that tells that: on the one hand the war, on the other hand, the speechlessness that leaves a war. Not only because its horrors are unspeakable, but above all because they are so little communicable.

In the anthology “Be next to me and see what happened to me” is not about what literature is and what is not. His almost three dozen authors have merged into a “Poetry Project”. The point is that a “lively exchange” helps to overcome speechlessness “as the foreword says. It is also about the speechlessness that compensates for all suffering.

This book is several: Invitation to change perspective; Please be perceived; But also demand to leave your own comfort zone. And it is also a political attitude that has never asked to be political. But it has no choice but to become political, because humanity is the counter -design to the comprehensive backlash that we are currently experiencing.

Elon Musk recently stated that “the fundamental weakness of western civilization was empathy”. He is not alone: ​​German right -wing extremists like Björn Höcke speak of a “well -tempered cruelty” that is now necessary. The CDU has just won the Bundestag election against every empiricism with a deportation election campaign, human rights are considered to be negotiable until well in the middle of society. But what about those people who rely on the protection of their rights as humans?

“Be next to me and see what happened to me” gathered almost three dozen authors who have experienced wars: war in Ukraine, in Kurdistan, in Syria. There are other war stories than those known from films and series; There are no hero stories. It is the stories of those who survived: who have been waiting for the checkpoints who have been waiting for the tractors. Always knowing that your knowledge and experience are negotiable. “Our cry never missed sleep from the eyes of humanity,” writes Javad Mohammadi, for example.

One could now discuss why this book was an anthology, which, in addition to some essayist texts, primarily gathers poetry. There are reasons for this, for example that poetry plays a larger role in the Arab -language area than in this country. And that here it has to be demonstrated to an audience who believes that it has to be shown that it is not yet enough: that it is not about being seduced, but also have to learn readers to see the people they write behind the raw verses. It’s not funny and it’s not easy either: but it’s true.

The naivety of the verses is not played. These are things that happen. When Iryna Omelyanchuk speaks of how her husband’s brother stays in Ukraine because he wants or wants to fight, and therefore her husband also lives down; So when she speaks of how her family torn it, her network, her whole relationship structure, it is a reality of the war.

Mahdi Hashemi, born in Afghanistan, fled to Iran with the family and then-as a 15-year-old-alone to Germany, tells in a tight sketch how suddenly the loneliness and a grief that no longer wanted to let him go. And he was no longer able to speak to other people, not even with his family in Iran; How he was finally allowed to fly to Tehran after six years to visit his family; How he couldn’t find there either. “Everything familiar, everything that I had longed for was suddenly unusual. After we greeted each other, I sat silently in the corner. I had become a stranger in my own family. My little brother, who was half a meter tall when I went, was now a few centimeters larger than me. Even he felt strange in my presence. “The short text ends without the slightest consolation:” My soul was lost. “

The rawness, which is insisting, which comes from many of the texts gathered in the band, makes them very tender and helpless. There is astonishment from these texts, which has nothing enchanted, but also transports a bewilderness that remains between the lines. With a few exceptions, there are hardly any accusations in the texts; Things are as they are. “I remember how I fell asleep in the snow while fleeing to Europe,” says Abdul Ahmad Pouya, who comes from Afghanistan. There is nothing sensational in this event, it remains a single sentence, the end of the text. It remains unclear whether this I survived.

It is known that these things happen and many others: dying in the Mediterranean is known, the torture prisons in North Africa, that in Saudi Arabia with mortars, has been shot for refugees, all the cruelty, of which new ones are committed every day. However, they are not these cruelty and not the dead people who revolve the public discussions; Although it is clear that these wars are everywhere. “Even in the cities,” writes Anna Melikova, who was born in the Crimea, “in which there were no direct military campaigns, it feels as if Russia is running out holes everywhere with the planier caterpillar, in which it disposes of corpses so that nobody remembers it, and laid tiles that glitter in the sun and bite their eyes. Writing is an attempt to smash these tiles, to resist the forgetting. ”Mohamad Zahra describes it similarly for Syria. “Home is a burial ground,” he writes, and also: “The house walls cry and announce/ every second the death of a dream/ and lifeless are the residents of the parlors.”

Even if anger and politics do not play a role in many texts, there are also texts that turn directly to Germany: Maybe not by accident comes one of them from Rojin namer from Damascus, who has already won some prizes and has been at least a bit far. In the “reflection of a hypocrisy” she turns directly to the new home: “Germany, you are not what you are going to be/ if the weapons are born out of your lap,/ which take the faces of our children innocence/ before the moon touches their lips.” And she also refers to the concept of the soul, which still remains trapped in Germany.

And – rare, but yet – germs hope from the texts, for example with Navid Arafat, to whom the poets are like the birds: “In their chirping freedom,/ their white wings: love,/ their way: the emptiness between earth and heaven!” With all the horror and terror, not to forget to love and celebrate life, also this secret.

Pen Berlin/The Poetry Project (ed.): “Be next to me and see what I happened”. Criminal publisher, 240 p., Br., € 20.