Goethe-Institut in Exile:The Sea Is There, But We Are Not: Literature from Palestine
MI 25.2, 19H ACUD Studio
As Goethe-Institut in Exile, our focus is on communities in exile and diaspora: their ruptures, languages, and aesthetic forms. Across Germany and Europe, a Palestinian exile community is growing — scattered across cities and countries, yet connected through shared experiences of loss, displacement, and new beginnings. We are here to listen to their stories and the literary strategies through which they are told.
This evening opens a space of resonance for three Palestinian authors who have recently arrived in Europe. Their work emerges from the tension between shrinking living spaces, forced displacement, and profound societal upheaval. Their writing transforms these experiences into language that speaks to the present, treating literature as a practice ofpresence, preservation, and resistance.
Curation of the evening and introductory text by Abdalrahman Alqalaq:
Recently fled from Gaza to Dublin and currently a guest writer at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, the author and translator Alaa Alqaisi explores, in poems and essays, the fractures of memory and language, showing how words probe the unspeakable, a poet who writes “as someone whose hands have sifted through broken glass for signs of life”.
At the same thres hold carries the London-based poet Asmaa Azaizeh a banished earth with in her body: The Meadow of Ibn Amir, and swallows that circle above her father’s olive groves, shielding them from the encroaching asphalt of gentrification.
Travelling from Brussels, the poet Ahmed Saleh tells, in his poems, how on a sunny day in Gaza a bicycle turned into “a stretcher for the dead”, sidewalks into “coffins”, and sea into “a graveyard”, and yet he insists on teaching his readers how, in Gaza, prisons and cells, weapons factories and curses can still be transformed into fields, gardens and songs.
How can one speak today of a “Palestinian literature” when, since 1948, it has emerged from dispossession, genocide, and disappearance, written from many places and yet about a single one? On this evening, the three Palestinian poets and authors read from their work and speak with literary critic Maha El Hissy about a literature whose body is torn apart, its limbs scattered between occupation and diaspora, and which persistently attempt stocon front, traverse, and resist this fragmented geography.
Musical intervention by Cham Saloum.
In cooperation with Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.
Accessibility:
ACUD has step-free access to both upper floors. Please contact us in advance at im-exil@goethe.de, or speak to a member of the Goethe-Institut in Exile team on-site, so that elevator access can be arranged.