Übergangsrituale. Poesie und Zusammensein

‘My life, which I will not live / weaves my features, and we devour each other’.

with Abdalrahman Alqalaq, Ayşe Kalmaz, Tanasgol Sabbagh, Hasan Şahin

Abdahlrahman Alqalaq's poems and stories sometimes have a bitter tone. They deal with war, flight and life in exile, but do not want to forget the tender moments. They trace the distance between the self and its old homeland, deal with the new one and commemorate friends. This year, Wallstein Verlag published Alqalaq's book Rite of Passage in German, translated from Arabic by Günther Orth, Leila Chammaa and Sandra Hetzl.

The subsequent discussion with the poet Tanasgol Sabbagh and the two Kultur-Ort operators Ayşe Kalmaz and Hasan Şahin takes up the impulses from the reading. Hasan Şahin is the founder of the Taranta Babu cultural centre in Dortmund. Interculturality, integration and multilingualism are topics that were focussed on there at a time when they had not yet penetrated the consciousness of German society. Hasan Şahin was recently awarded the Literaturtaler by the NRW Literature Council. The Literature Council's statement reads: ‘He is a gentle fighter for international understanding through the means of literature and language, Taranta Babu is a Dortmund institution and a beacon that shines far beyond the city’.