Syrian writers continue to innovate in Germany

Aref Hamza-Germany

Germany was one of the destinations that Syrian refugees sought to go to, diluting almost everything, except from a plastic bag tied by those who survived the Mediterranean Sea or the "sea cemetery" as they called it. That bag contained some documents that would prove the identity of the survivors, the shipwrecked and the dead. .

Many writers and intellectuals were among those Syrians who tried to survive the "homeland" and escape into "exile." Survivors of these writers joined refugee centers, where they lived contradictory feelings that would provide them with writing, no matter how long it was stored in memory.

Home and exile
"The day I decided to cross the sea to Europe, I cut everything I had in a small backpack and a memory card on which I kept my writing," recalls Kenan Khaddaj, 29. "I remember the parrot: my patriot bag and a memory card." By drowning, we had to throw bags. I felt my pocket watching the sea swallowing all those countries, and I was reassured when I felt the memory card. "

Syrian Kurdish poet Widad Nabi said she had experienced language difficulties and started again "from scratch, which we had surpassed in stages when we were in our country."

Belonging and writing
Asked about the relationship between belonging to a place and continuing to write? Widad, who issued two poetry collections before coming to Germany and a German group this year, says it took a lot of work to continue writing. "I came to Berlin through smugglers, human traffickers and trucks, on a journey that lasted for about a month and ended in the asylum camps and long queues. Then I never thought, neither by writing nor by reading, I was just thinking about how I passed my day to day with the least desire to commit suicide."

After settling down in the new place, Widad started to draw her raw material from the train stations and airspace. "In this new place, my language has become a language close to the street, to life in all its small details, from cutting the train ticket to the first vagrant asking me for help, to the playlists," she said. Roving in stations and streets, to the smell of urine mixed with sweat for humans sleeping on the sidewalks without paying attention to the gaze of passers-by and insist on their lives and bodies thrown as something superfluous. "

Kanan Khaddaj, who released his first collection of stories, "I am not your damn play" while in Germany, intervenes to explain his position on exile, saying that it is difficult to talk about exile without falling into the trap of contradiction.

Khaddaj adds to the island Net that "the concepts of exile and homeland grow and change in me with the years .. I no longer have that confidence to say this is the homeland and this is the exile .. a lot of things that make the homeland - a personal - no longer exist, and a lot of The things that make the exile home still exist. "

Heinrich Paul and Pen Club
In contrast, many Syrian writers arrived through grants from the German writer Heinrich Böll Foundation (1917-1985), the 1978 Nobel Prize laureate, and the German Pen Club.

"On the evening of the first day, a Syrian writer who preceded me to the house of the German writer told me:" Look, it's paradise, "said 49-year-old poet and critic Mohammed al-Matroud, who issued four books before he went to Germany with a Heinrich scholarship. I felt that I was on the right path and that I was closer to hell than to heaven, because I entered the new life with loud voices within me: the voice of certainty that change is inevitable in my country, and the voice of death in many places, and I did not write for eight months or more.

But the expelled continued writing despite the resounding questions within him, and then wrote "Mainos between the narrative and poetry," commenting on this experience, saying: "I saw that the poem narrows me, and my journey needs areas of chaos, I did not control the sex of my writing, and I called my book: his name is Ahmed and his shadow fire".

"This is like a story about crossing, crossing in other texts, and my personal passage into my personal history," he said. "This was a temporary and false comfort. The challenges are over, either I am at least possible or I end up with a head of a family watching on TV and sowing seeds." sunflower".

Interestingly, most of those who came have published at least a new book in Arabic, including those who shared common anthologies, and others who have a book translated into German have received grants and awards. Some of them remained associated with the activities of the institution or the club of the pen, as well as with other institutions, including those who edited the editorial of the first Arabic newspaper published in Germany, and who became a link between Arab writers and festivals held in Germany, and some of those who established the "state" that organizes evenings for Syrian and Arab writers. Residents of German territory.

Writing shifts
The novelist and translator Rabab Haider arrived at the invitation of the Heinrich Böll Foundation as well. She published her first novel in Syria, "The Land of Pomegranate", and then finished her second novel in Syria but threw it when she arrived in Germany, because the question posed by the novel changed. "I started to write again," she says. "The more you deepen here, the more obvious it is that there is only a little bit different: there is some law here and hopelessness there, while humans are themselves here and there."

It is also interesting that the writers of the new wave are still writing in Arabic, perhaps for the novelty of the experience, and that says Rabab Haidar "When I began to learn German, the more interested in Arabic, and the more involved in the new language I pay more attention to the vocabulary of Arabic .. The word in my mother tongue is deeper, loaded with its meaning, history, use and emotional things from memory like nostalgia!

"The spirit of dew did not leave me panting behind an ethnically or spatially different reader, as I became keen on my reader in my language. .