Dear Cristina,

I’ve been meaning to write to you before – I know I should have, and I am very glad you agreed to this project in the first place. I hope you still want to do this, even though I haven’t written before.

Apart from being immersed in way too much work since early summer – not an excuse, I know – I learned a while ago that the translator they had (German – Italian) had cancelled. I was looking forward to writing to you in German, it would have felt more comfortable, since it ist my language for poetry and friends and thoughts, so I was disappointed to have to do this in English. I do use English on a daily basis, at work.

Thus English is the language that sees me conversing in a very specific context. English is also the language I read most news in, all these mostly very worrying and sad news… so yes, it was a hurdle to accept that I will have to write to you in English.

English fits, though. I arrived in Los Angeles yesterday, and I’m currently sitting at an old writing table that supposedly saw Franz Werfel die at it, in Lion Feuchtwanger’s house in Pacific Palisades. While I haven‘t read enough by both of them to adequately honour and cherish those facts, I do honour and cherish the luxury to stay in a house like this, overlooking the Pacific 🙂

The house is now called Villa Aurora and hosts a German artist residence and fellowship program. I’d love to say that is was me who’s allowed to stay here for the usual three months, but I am just visiting for two weeks with my boyfriend, Alexander Gumz. (He also is a poet. We both publish in the same house, at kookbooks with Daniela Seel in Berlin. Both of our next books of poetry were supposed to be published at the same time next year…. but whereas he has about 250 poems and just needs to select the ones for the book, I currently have about 50, 40 of which I do not like.)

I always write poetry and almost never used to write prose, but agreed to write prose for two book projects since 2015 (a poetological essay about money and poetics, and a personal approach to Marina Zwetajewa). I think it cost me quite a lot, and while it was very much worth it, because I like both books a lot, it has sort of stunted my poetry. It was hard to get into the different mindset and flow  again. This is also a reason why I was both looking forward to and be somewhat apprehensive when it comes to writing letters to you – I have always loved writing letters, but I do not know yet how this will affect my poetry. Poetry always seemed my go-to-outlet at times where I couldn’t write letters at all.

(Damn, I’m only talking about myself. Maybe that’s the reason I like writing letters so much? That ‚maybe‘ was rhetorical. Probably. Very much so.)

Anyways, I do hope you are still willing to write, and I wanted to propose an idea I have been thinking about all this long summer that was devoted to work. In fact, the American Presidential Election has been a sort of fixation for me for 16 years now. Every four years, I get completely immersed in reading every bit of news and every opinion piece I can get about the elections. Now I am here during this crucial time, right before the election, and that orange moron, as they very aptly call him, seems to be gaining ground on Clinton. The thought of that mop of hair with no brains beneath them becoming the most powerful person on earth… evokes a fear I can only compare to seeing Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, Le Pen in France, Wilders in The Netherlands, the new nationalism in Poland and so many other places.

It disgusts me, they disgust me. But what increasingly worries me on top of this are tendencies also in certain populist movements on the left, which sometimes carry a vote that went to right-wing nationalists before, trumpeting (…) a different-but-similar us-versus-them – them being the European Institutions, for example, which are only being seen as enabling a very harmful capitalist agenda. Opposition to those institutions is understandable and not wrong, see TTIP and CETA and not standing up to Monsanto and the likes, not to mention failing refugees miserably, letting people die by the thousands. But I still think these European Institutions are all we have got to keep us from falling back into a mere nationalist agenda in most European countries. I still do think the European idea can be saved, renewed, that we can strenghten that sense of European community, that we can save ourselves from the American version of capitalism, maybe even do something about climate change via the Paris agreement…. and still, I fear we might not.

And so I’m worried sick when I see insane idiots on the offense and sane people on the defense everywhere – and then some people with very good ideas (aka the left), out of their very valuable opposition to the American hypercapitalism, fall into the populist honey trap more than once.

So I was thinking, I’d love to talk about all this. I’d love to hear your thoughts and your voice. I have lived in Italy for a year in 2003, I travelled to Southern Italy for the first time again this spring, and I very much love to not understand this country at all. It is a mystery to me. I’d value your perspective on Italy, which is very much unique in many ways. And I’d love to understand your Italian perspective on Europe. And I’d like to write to you from here, both about the American election and those worrying similarities, or rather, these emerging analogies in political communication, and about how Europe is perceived here (if at all).

I’ll be here till October 2, and I will go on a road trip the day after tomorrow. We’ll go into the desert and then up to some of the state parks and then back down here, following the coast line. It’ll be 2000 miles and probably rather exhausting, but I am looking forward tot he trip a lot. And I’ll do my best to buy local newspapers in the Californian hinterland, to get a bit of a perspective of people here (the hinterland is very much conservative and not at all liberal like, say, LA or SF, as far as I know).

I hope you can forgive me for not writing any sooner. And I do hope you still want to do this and that you have the time. Please let me know what you think.

All my best wishes to you, to Rome (? are you in Rome at the moment? How did your visit to Somalia go, the first time in such a long time?)

Katharina

Cara Katharina,

ti ringrazio ancora per avermi coinvolta in questo progetto: anch’io come te amo le lettere e, persino ora che sono state soppiantate da più agili modalità di comunicazione, dedico sempre molto tempo ai messaggi che scrivo.

Capisco benissimo la tua delusione nel non potermi scrivere in tedesco, nonostante l’inglese occupi una parte rilevante della tua vita quotidiana. Dipanarsi nei meandri delle lingue è un’esperienza preziosa a cui ci conducono le circostanze della vita, tuttavia riconosco che in fondo è sempre con la lingua di scrittura, il nostro strumento di lavoro, che ci sentiamo più al sicuro.

Quando sono arrivata in Italia agli inizi degli anni Novanta, nonostante il mondo circostante mi apparisse estraneo e a volte minaccioso, mi ricordo come sia stata proprio la lingua che avevo imparato a scuola e da mia madre la base da cui sono partita per ricostruire tutto, pezzo a pezzo. Nella scrittura poi, mescolare a tratti il somalo con l’italiano, tentare l’intreccio di queste mie identità linguistiche, mi ha permesso di ricreare un universo di significati e di legami che temevo aver perduto con la guerra.

Deve essere davvero stimolante per te lavorare in un ambiente così cosmopolita.

Mi piacerebbe molto che mi raccontassi il modo in cui si intersecano i tuoi due mondi lavorativi, la poesia, l’Università e, soprattutto, siccome purtroppo non conosco il tedesco, amerei tantissimo leggere la tua opera: immagino sia tradotta in inglese, giusto?

È bello che tu mi abbia scritto la prima volta di fronte al mare. Non ho mai visto il Pacifico, ma ho trascorso i primi diciotto anni della mia vita a Mogadiscio. L’Oceano Indiano, i residui di vita marina che a seconda della stagione trovavamo sulla spiaggia, hanno lasciato un’impronta indelebile nella mia memoria. Ancora oggi il mare, persino se si tratta del Mediterraneo e non più l’oceano, ha un immenso potere benefico su di me.

Condivido con te l’idea che sia difficilissimo conciliare la scrittura poetica con quella narrativa. Sono due mondi a parte. Quando ho lasciato Mogadiscio, non avevo neanche diciotto anni e il mio primo figlio è nato proprio nei giorni in cui sono scoppiati i disordini. Per moltissimi anni, non sono riuscita non solo a scrivere, ma neppure a parlare di quello che era successo. Non trovavo le parole giuste e provavo persino una certa vergogna, perché ciò che avevo vissuto era troppo lontano dall’esperienza delle mie coetanee e delle persone che mi circondavano. Temevo che i miei racconti sarebbero stati per loro troppo diversi, espliciti, spaventosi. Dopo parecchi anni dal mio arrivo in Italia, sono partita per l’Olanda, per incontrare mio padre e molti amici e parenti che non vedevo da tempo e vivevano nella sua stessa cittadina, Zeist, in provincia di Utrecht (in quegli anni l’Olanda accolse molti rifugiati somali in fuga dalla guerra).

La mia visita non è durata più di una settimana, ma è stato un vero e proprio punto di svolta o forse di partenza. Al ritorno ho cominciato a scrivere come se non mi fossi mai interrotta, quasi unicamente in versi. La lingua essenziale, criptica e asciutta della poesia era ciò che mi risultava più congeniale. Volevo parlare della diaspora, raccontare le migliaia di storie simili alla mia che avevo sentito raccontare negli anni, trovare le parole necessarie. Purtroppo in seguito sono stata spinta dalle circostanze ad abbandonare la poesia, nel corso della scrittura dei due romanzi. Credo tuttora che sia l’espressione che mi viene più naturale, ma non riesco a portare avanti i due tipi d scrittura parallelamente.

Mi racconterai del tuo viaggio itinerante e delle impressioni da te raccolte sulle elezioni americane. Sono sempre stata allergica alla politica, forse per il disgusto che ogni volta mi suscita, l’ipocrisia e la banalità che la caratterizzano, la demagogia e la mia incapacità a credere che le persone si possano davvero far ingannare da certi buffoni mostruosi. Ho seguito il primo dibattito televisivo Clinton/ Trump e sono rimasta basita. So che non si possono ignorare queste cose, so che la disillusione non è la risposta giusta.

Qualche giorno fa ho letto un articolo molto interessante sul “grillismo” (Beppe Grillo è un ex comico oggi leader del Movimento Cinque Stelle che ha vinto in modo clamoroso alle ultime elezioni italiane). È un’analisi del fenomeno da parte di uno psicoterapeuta, il quale sostiene che Grillo si caratterizza per essere animato da quella ossessione per la purezza che ha origine nell’adolescenza e si trova anche a fondamento di tutte le leadership totalitarie. Il leader totalitario e anarchico proclama la sua diversità assoluta dagli impuri, connotati come coloro che fanno parte del sistema, delle istituzioni, dei circuiti mediatici, e nel far ciò istaura un culto demagogico in cui non c’è spazio per il dissenso e la soggettività individuale. La storia è piena di terribili esempi e reminiscenze, perché si cade sempre nella medesima trappola? Questi folli oratori fanno leva sulle più becere e oscure emozioni, soffocano l’empatia, ciò che in quanto esseri umani dovremmo avere di più prezioso.

Sono molto curiosa delle tue impressioni sull’Italia: dove sei stata quest’estate? Prima di trasferirmi a Roma, ho vissuto per tre anni a Verona, la città d’origine di mia madre. Bologna mi è particolarmente cara perché era la città a “metà strada” dove io e il mio fidanzato ci incontravamo, perciò la ricordo ancora avvolta in quell’aurea romantica. In seguito mi sono trasferita a Roma dove abbiamo vissuto insieme per quindici anni, fino a quando ci siamo trasferiti a Bruxelles. L’Italia è molto diversa e complessa e la sua bellezza abbagliante, però negli ultimi anni l’atmosfera è diventata molto opprimente soprattutto per i più giovani. La settimana prossima andrò a Palermo per il Festival delle Letterature Migranti, ti racconterò bene come è andata. Come puoi immaginare la migrazione è al centro di ogni dibattito culturale e politico in Italia, la cosa frustrante è che si continuino a dire le stesse cose da venti anni senza fare grandi passi avanti. È strano ora leggere dell’Italia a distanza, da questa città al centro dell’Europa. Non che il Belgio o Bruxelles siano meno complessi e controversi: la storia degli attentati dell’anno scorso, pur nella tragedia, rasentava il grottesco.

Quest’estate, prima di partire per la Somalia, ho trascorso diversi giorni a Molenbeek. Non avevo mai avuto prima l’occasione di andarci. Bruxelles è divisa in quelli che chiamano communes, più o meno indipendenti l’uno dall’altro. Io vivo nella commune d’Ixelles, vicino a un quartiere molto bello che si chiama Matonge ed è il principale luogo di ritrovo della comunità africana locale. Molenbeek è un’isola a parte, per certi versi molto affascinante. La ragione delle mie visite era soprattutto quella di trovare dei vestiti adatti al mio viaggio. Sai, da più parti nella diaspora mi avevano detto che era tutto diverso da come me lo ricordavo, i paesi arabi sono intervenuti massicciamente nel Corno d’Africa, importando un Islam molto più radicale. C’erano dei codici da seguire quando io ero ragazza in Somalia, ovvero non si poteva certo andare in giro con le minigonne o canottiere troppo sbracciate, ma non era malvisto andare in giro con i capelli scoperti e, in ogni caso, si indossavano abiti ariosi e coloratissimi. A Molenbeek, nonostante i miei “buoni” propositi, non sono riuscita ad acquistare nulla. Troppo nero, troppa austerità: una negazione della bellezza.

Non sono riuscita a dormire quasi per due settimane in vista della partenza, ti puoi immaginare l’emozione. È stato sì un ritorno, ma in modo parziale, perché io non ero mai stata prima nelle regioni del nord, di cui è originario mio padre. Non è un caso che mi abbiano ufficialmente invitato proprio alla Garowe Book Fair, nello stato del Puntland e non altrove. Dopo la guerra civile, ognuno è stato costretto a tornare nelle proprie aree di appartenenza e Mogadiscio, città in cui la popolazione non è omogenea, è ancora pericolosissima

Garowe al contrario è piuttosto sicura. Ci sono posti di blocco soprattutto la sera, per controllare che non entrino persone pericolose, ma c’è molta libertà di movimento. Si trascorre molto tempo all’aperto a sorseggiare succhi di frutta e tè, un’abitudine molto mediterranea! Un amico somalo, rientrato dopo moltissimi anni trascorsi negli Stati Uniti me l’aveva descritta così prima che arrivassi: “immaginati una piccola cittadina reazionaria del Midwest americano”. Io non conosco bene gli Stati Uniti, ma penso di poter immaginare cosa intendesse.

Nonostante la maggior parte delle donne (soprattutto le più giovani) indossasse la purdah, sono riuscita a trovare un compromesso. È stato soprattutto grazie all’incoraggiamento di una cara amica femminista ritornata in Somalia per lavorare come giudice dopo moltissimi anni trascorsi in Europa. Il punto di forza del suo discorso era: “quale messaggio diamo alle giovani che pensano di non avere scelta, se persino noi che siamo intellettuali ed emancipate ci pieghiamo a questo ricatto?” È una questione complessa, ma su cui penso di avere un’opinione piuttosto netta. Capisco il diritto rivendicato in Occidente dalle donne islamiche di indossare il velo senza essere discriminate, cionondimeno non riesco a non considerare il purdah come uno strumento di oppressione. Mi dirai anche tu forse la tua opinione in proposito.

Gli abiti opprimenti però non erano da soli sufficienti a offuscare i colori: tetti, cancelli, pareti, persino i camion e le macchine erano un delirio di luci e di affreschi. E poi, appena fuori dalla città, nella savana, non di rado si vedevano mulinelli d’aria alzarsi verso il cielo: un ragazzo mi ha detto è il vento, vorticando, va scavando e cercando pozzi d’acqua per gli uomini.

Un carissimo saluto a te viaggiatrice, non vedo l’ora di leggere i tuoi racconti

Ubah Cristina

Dear Ubah Cristina,

I have written two long letters to you since I got yours in translation in November, immediately after the US election – and I did not send either of them. It seemed futile to write, I haven’t written anything else, either. Please, let me try to explain.

I was so hopeful when I got back from the US. Out trip was exhausting, but I learned so much. I hadn’t travelled at all for over a decade before I met Alexander, and he made me travel four times last year…. we went to Porto just for a weekend in early spring, we traveled to Napoli in April and then went south through the Cilento and back north to another artist residence near Rome…. and then, after not being able to see him for almost three months, finally, I went to California in September – I was so afraid of the trip I almost balked on Alexander a week before I was supposed to fly over. In October, two weeks after I got back from the States, we spent two weeks in Switzerland with my mother and my son, up on 1500 meters in a more or less abandoned village, half an hour drive down the slopes from the next bigger town. (In case you are wondering how I can afford this much time off my job, I can’t – but I had worked too much during the last couple of years, all the while accumulating too many overtime hours, and I had to take time off. Or so my boss told me, I very happily obliged.)

But, California. The hinterland was, how should I put it, interesting. Big TRUMP signs, full-on blinking-lights Vegas-style, in shabby backyards. The Fresno Bee, one of those newspapers I had wanted to read, reporting in equal measures on the severe drought in California and on how Trump was much better prepared than Clinton to win all of the debates – well, we all saw how that worked out. Abandoned truck stop motels on route 66, artists using the small, run-down one-bedroom motel apartments for their art installations. A 1950’s homestead in the middle of the Mojave desert, sulfur-yellow light during the first rain in 9 months, while we were staying there, and a tortoise came to visit to drink from one of the small pools that had sprung up behind the house. A trailer park close to Death Valley, established by a gout-plagued former actor, who had set up old lion-feet bath tubs in the middle of the desert, pipes filling them up with hot thermal water from his personal termal spring (inherited by his step-father, a sailor). A bath house, the desert wind howling through the roof, and the basin filled with scalding thermal spring water inside. All those stars. Our has-been luxury trailer from the 80s, rocking us to sleep in the desert sand storm. No food store for 60 miles, and us cooking scrambled eggs haphazardly on a gas stove. 45 degrees and the sunset in a Death Valley canyon, driving towards the Sierra by night. Crystal cold, icy lake water, high up on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, hours on trails with no one around. A run-down French restaurant from the 1960s on the mainstreet up to the Yosemite back entrance road, oil paintings by an ex-conceptual artist who had found back to ‘realism’ in his 70s lining up the walls in Russian-style picture-hanging. A lot of Burger dinners, a terrace overlooking the Sierra from the west and a hummingbird feeding lamp full of sugar water. Two old ladies from Poland, one of them about to get married the next day, and their second-hand clothing store in Salinas. So much, so much more.

I got back full of pictures and full of hope, because Clinton’s numbers had picked back up after the debates and for a while, they didn’t talk about her emails so much and her fainting spell was all but forgotten, if one didn’t read the National Enquirer…

I very much do understand your disgust with politics, and I cannot quite explain why it continues to fascinate me so. Maybe it’s because I have always been fascinated with what power does to people, with their power games and pressure. My childhood experiences with groups were, to put it lightly, disheartening, and I have always been thoroughly afraid of mass events, and of the inherent dynamics of a critical mass of people at the same time in one place. I distrust groups and group dynamics, and I have tried all my life to understand how they work, because this never came naturally to me. I learned to deal with groups, to interact within a group of people like one learns a technique, and this has shaped my approach to people. While I like to connect to individual people on an individual basis, groups continue to scare me, so I either opt out of them or I’ll try to dominate the group by being the most-skilled organizer in the room. So this whole game of politics, how people with a sense of what power is and what power can do and how people with a lust for power go about their daily games, is something I watch, warily but with fascination.

But. I got back and met Volker Braun at the LCB, the literary colloquium in Berlin (which is arguably the literature location with the most beautiful view in Berlin, on top of a hill next to the lake where Heinrich Kleist killed himself. And there’s for a red thread in those literature locations: writers dying in beautiful places.) Volker Braun is one of the most interesting German poets of his generation, and he is one of the few poets from eastern Germany that I have read early in my life. (This is especially interesting if you think of the different concepts of group versus individual in the two Germanies – he can attest to that.) He read from his new book of poems, ‘Handbibliothek der Unbehausten’, basically “hand library of the…”, and there’s a German word one cannot translate, because it is not the ‘homeless’, it is utterly intranslatable…. ‘Haus’ is ‘house’ or ‘home’, ‘behaust’ is something you wouldn’t say, but it would mean something along the lines of having a home in a house and also spiritually, and ‘unbehaust’ thus is something much more essential and existential than just being ’homeless’, rather along the lines of spiritual  homelessness, of having no home in the currently common mode of thinking or ideology as well, I guess. Volker Braun discovered this hand library in Madrid, on one of the protest squares, and wrote some of the poems while he was in Spain, while Podemos was protesting. And while I was preparing the talk we were supposed to have about his book – it’s sharp and witty and vicious and sad, all in a good way – I couldn’t help but thinking about an interview with Didier Eribon, one in which he was highly critical of Podemos. I briefly touched upon this in my last letter, and much too superficially, and this is too superficial again, but I do think he has a point when he argues that it is dangerous to define a left-wing agenda while at the same time going back to the term of a ‘nation’ again, using it uncritically. I asked Volker Braun about it, and he said some things which I have heard and read so many times now, after the US election, when pundits and opinion leaders in the press and sociologists were talking about people in the rust belt. Disenfranchisement. A long article a couple of days ago sought to differentiate between ‘disenfranchisement’ and ‘marginalization’, pointing out the differences between the groups these terms are used for – i.e., in the US, the color of people’s skin, and, occasionally, their sexual orientation – and I think this is a very important distinction to make. I am not done thinking about this.

Still. There was this feeling of unease, way before the election, that maybe, just maybe, all of this idea of business as usual and the Trump craziness going nowhere just wouldn’t work out. Some remembered the Brexit. And while much can be said about Clinton and the concept of lesser evils, I was rather angry at some of my friends on the far left when they likened her to Trump as exactly that, a less openly crazy and maybe less evil, but more corrupt version of the same capitalist agenda. That may be so, even though I do not think so. But there is a difference between someone so fundamentally wrong, someone without any real conviction but the one that he is right, no matter how often he contradicts the law and the laws of logic and himself, and someone who is flawed and may have a flawed agenda, but is still a person, and one who has worked for other people in her life. Isn’t there?

I must have read every opinion piece between here and the West Coast, and it’s no use reiterating all the many assumptions and arguments and analyses. Something went horribly wrong, again, and it seems to go wrong more and more often. My fascination with politics developed into an obsession of keeping up with the newest outrage. And yet, I am very much too tired to care anymore for all of the reasons right now, and I know it is wrong to be tired and to not care. It#s a first-world luxury attitude, I do know that.

All of this coincided with a more personal drama, of which I will not write about in the official letters – I put it in parentheses here, because I feel I have to apologize for not writing earlier.

So I felt close to your mode of writing when I read about your silence after Somalia. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for you, having to leave Mogadischu at such a young age and with your son just born. I remember how vulnerable I felt when my son was born in 2010. I was on my own because my son’s father had left, and my own father had just died, I had to take care of so many things  at once. But I only had things to organize and to take care everything was running smoothly, I had so much to fall back on, I was in my home country, and also, I was 30 years old. It’s no comparison. This must have shaped you in so many ways, and it must have been a trauma. I do understand why you would feel like there was nothing you could write, too, at first… it seems like when tragedy intervenes with our lives, it shuts one up in so many ways. After I had organized my way through that horrible year back then, I did start to write again, but I could only write about external traumata. I projected my fears onto bigger events, because somehow those events, in a way, while very much uncontrollable, seemed controllable as material for my writing. I could write about trauma and pressure that I had felt 5 years before, while working in a business company, and I could relate this to the greater feelings of pressure and crisis that were seemed to engulf everyone – via the media, if they were lucky, or directly, if they weren’t as lucky.

And it’s the same now. I write about things in the past, I turn inwards. I try to let the world pass into my poetry as it usually does, but I feel closed off. All the more I admire your capability to write about what happened to you and to find other people’s stories, even though it took time. I am only now able to write about the loss of my father, and still it’s very much something that lurks behind my poems, rather than displays within them.

Probably this is something everyone does to a certain extent, only that not everyone has the privilege to find an expression for their fears through art. And this, I suppose, enhances their suffering for all the ‘disenfranchised’ and the marginalized ones.
And our fears, projected onto events propelled by external forces: what a dangerous way to deal with them.

Yet, I also know that this concept of art, dealing via art with one’s identity and one’s trauma and one’s fears, is regarded as very much old-fashioned in European literature. But this was one among other reasons why I wanted to talk to you. I felt that in your writing, you might have taken all of what belonged to you, to your self and made it into something else. And this is what some poets do, or, should I say, what those poets whose poems I can relate to, do (the same goes for prose – telling stories that you think should be told).

I had a fight with Alexander the day before yesterday, when he was reading, and very much applauding, a small booklet by a poet friend of ours, who had taken a very different approach, something along the lines of found material and cutting-up and mixing and making it all into one long flow of very professional-sounding poetry, something which, when read aloud, astonishes, because it is apt and clever and it seems original rather than derivative, something people might chuckle along with or nod or shake their heads while smiling when they listen to it in a bar. And I did enjoy reading one line, two lines, half a page, but then I suddenly got so angry. It seemed so disingenuous to me, it seemed like everyone with a good-enough brain could have done so, and that someone whom I knew to have voice was hiding behind a method, and other people without that much to say or people who maybe hadn’t found their voices yet might do the same – and it might just sound the same. It just seemed not to matter, all those clever puns and all those brilliant images and those rare combinations, they all seemed irrelevant, or tarnished by the fact that I just couldn’t feel them to really be there, to open up something more than brilliance and superficial beauty.

I would get very much bashed for this if I said anything like this in any forum of contemporary European poetry, and I do understand it may seem an odd concept – but I want to hear voices. Someone might have a whole bunch or a host of them, and someone might have one of them that is very defined, that’s not important to me. But I want voices and not a choir generated by an algorithm.

Maybe I can tell what I mean differently: I love the picture you gave me at the end of your letter, the one borrowed by the boy: wind, a wheel that is searching through the earth for water, for us.

Or, yet another way to express this – have you seen this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRNqhi2ka9k

I really like how they laugh in the end, so genuinely surprised and full of utter glee. As if they agreed via laughter on how exceptional and how unexpected that just was. It’s called a murmuration and it’s something I have only seen with a small flock of birds here in Germany. Usually, flocks of starlings that behave like this and I read that there were millions and millions of starlings in Rome one or two years back, so many that some people were afraid of them. But I’m still waiting for when a really big murmuration might happen to me… more than a year back, we did a project on this, with music and projections in a dark theatre room. I want to tell you more about this, and there is so much more that I’d like to talk about, soon.

(I see the black starlings and suddenly there is the whole issue of black clothing, robes and headscarves for girls that I have scooted around so far, because it is difficult to talk about for me, since I never had to wear it myself. I work with Muslim women, some of whom have stopped wearing scarves and robes altogether after coming to Germany, some of whom have started to get rid of long robes, but are still wearing a headscarf, for various reasons. Then there are the granddaughters of Turkish or Lebanese or Egyptian immigrants who grew up in Germany and whose mothers and grandmothers never wore any headscarves, and those granddaughters now start doing so in their teens. I get that it is a means of exploring or temporarily or permanently defining their growing identity. Still I very much do not like headscarves, especially when combined with long and wide robes, because it feels like an injustice when men are allowed to show their hair and women are not. But I feel like I am not in any position to tell any woman what she should or shouldn’t wear. I just think it’s very wrong when men tell women what to wear, no matter what type of clothing it might be. Topic very much not done, yet.)

How are you, how have you been? Are you in Brussels right now? I’d be very happy to hear from you. Please, if you write, do cc me in the Italian version – I do speak some Italian and it might be enough to understand at least most of what you write while I am waiting eagerly for a translation.

All my best wishes, light and flocks of starlings from Berlin,
Katharina

Dear Ubah,

while not sending and re-writing my letters to you (yes, there were several, but I kept deleting them, no matter all the pressures of time frames), I thought about what your friend and critic said to you – that there are people who can write, but who might not necessarily have something to say. I used to write letters as a girl with my friends, pages upon pages into a book which went back and forth between us on alternating school days. On top of it I filled diaries, lots of them, during those years in school – I suppose that was my way of practicing writing. I did not necessarily have something to say.

I feel that this time it might have been different altogether: I have too much to say, but my writing is failing me. I just didn’t manage to sort all of it out. We have talked about our similar method of translating pain into writing before, and I think I might just not be up for the intensity, but rather stuck somewhere between terror and detachment.

There are reasons for this which are personal, and you know about those, but it goes further. I am still reading incessantly about Trump and all those incremental steps he keeps taking toward authoritarianism – there is actually someone, Amy Siskind, who keeps cataloguing them on medium (https://medium.com/@Amy_Siskind). At the same time, I feel it is intellectually lazy of me to keep following this horror version of a political soap opera with its all too real implications. I’m probably able to name each and every cabinet member of the US administration and some not-too-well-known GOP congressmen and their specific positions on certain issues, but you’d find me embarrassed if anyone inquired to me about the names of the current German cabinet members or the European Commission. Europe and Germany still seem – I don’t know, more reliable? This is bullshit, of course.

I must say that Macron’s election and Le Pen’s and Wilders’ defeat were encouraging. But now, of course, articles keep popping up, especially in the US, juxtaposing these results and the United States under Trump, hailing the return of „Europe’s stability” and „the spring in Angela Merkel’s step” and Macron as the new liberal leader, all the while pointing out May’s weakness and the ramifications of Brexit, etc pp. It all sounds a bit, shall I say, self-righteous?

The Berlin poetry festival just finished last Friday after ten days of events, this year’s motto was „Europe – Fata Morgana”. It started out with a jazz trumpeter doing Maqam variations of Beethoven’s „Freude, schöner Götterfunken”, which actually sounded just about perfect. There were some people around me just laughing out loud with pure joy because of those variations… I did, too.

The festival usually starts out with an event called „Weltklang” (world sound/s), gathering nine poets from all over the world who read their poetry in their mother tongues (I’m using that word on purpose). This time, though, before they read, two poets from the Netherlands and Belgium read from letters they had written to each other about Europe (… writing letters about Europe seems to be all the rage …) and their idea of a „fatherland” (I’m also using that word on purpose). A Brazilian poet, Ricardo Domeneck (he has been living in Berlin for quite some time and publishes in Portuguese, English and German, among other languages), sat behind me, and I could hear him become more and more agitated and exasperated during that reading. A day later, Ricardo and several other poets and I had a reading, and he read a long poem in English which he had written that very morning, called „Discourse on the ghost of my mother tongue”, composed along the lines of the ideas of a „mother tongue” and a „father tongue”. He said he wrote it, in part, as a response to the night before, when he was just flummoxed as to how, as a Belgian or someone from the Netherland or just Europe in general, one could talk about a „fatherland” and one’s idea thereof without even mentioning once colonialism and colonial history. I think he is quite right, even though it is not my call to make. I’ll try to link to that poem, I think he put it up on Facebook publicly: https://www.facebook.com/ricardo.domeneck/posts/10154715795256814

I keep thinking about this and I only realize how much I do not know – how much of history, still, how many histories and versions thereof. Why am I (why are we, why are so many others) so fixated on the US? Why aren’t we as interested in what happens in Venezuela, for example? Or in Yemen (there is a Cholera outbreak and I just heard about it via Medecins sans Frontières, there must have been reports before that and I just didn’t read them)? Or, for that matter, the still ongoing war in Somalia? There will be headline reports from Afghanistan or from Syria, but probably only because there are US troops there.

I do remember some of the wars in the 1990s, especially the Rwandan genocide, and also seeing reports about the UN intervention in Somalia in the early 90s (although my parents made me leave the room sometimes during news hours). But the first war that really registered with me wasn’t either of even the Croatian or Bosnian wars, it was the Kosovo war in 1998 – and that one supposedly registered with me only because Germany got involved to some degree (which of course it had also been during the Bosnian one, but I guess I was too young to realize it – the Kosovo involvement seemed like a huge deal to 18-year-old me, I remember writing some very bad, holier-than-thou, eurocentric poems about it).

Still, 9/11 seemed a much larger event, even though it wasn’t. This may just be my perception because I had arrived in the US weeks earlier for a year abroad, but I do think I remember a much bigger degree of by-the minute breaking-news media coverage, in German media as well as in the US media. I think it was the first time I have actually seen televised split screens, with breaking-news tickers below, in the mainstream media – before, I remember only those channels doing it that covered the stock exchange incessantly. But I may be wrong. And since then, this has spread, and there are so many other events that have received this kind of coverage – I am digressing into a media critique here.

I wanted to write a completely different letter.

It’s wrong to name all of this a distraction, because these are the events shaping or ending people’s lives. And I cannot and do not wish to keep any of it out of my writing or my poetry.

But.

There are other things that we may be able to write about, when the pundits cannot and will not do so. There are stories – linked to those and other events or not at all linked to those or other events – which we may tell. Maybe there are just single images we need to keep writing down.

Like your story about your journey to Canada, about your cousin spreading his arms. Like your telling me about Sydney Nolan’s painting of Ned Kelly (I had no idea, and what a story behind one single image). Like Ricardo’s poem.

I’ll try to add another one of those: We went to Greece in May, it was my first time, and we lived in a stone tower on a hill above the sea, deep in Mani (we were guests of Takis and Voula, he was from Athens but she was from the tiny town where we stayed). This is, in part, a quote. There’s a book from 1980, „Deep into Mani”, by Peter Greenhalgh and Edward Eliopoulos (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1298935.Deep_Into_Mani). I read most of it while we were there and we went on a 2 kilometer, 4-hour hike up a hill overgrown with thorny thickets and through a maze of stone walls between olive groves and cows (I lost three inches of my hair because of the hike, I got entangled in one of the thickets at some point). Greenhalgh and Eliopoulos had written about a Greek temple right next to the very pebble beach which we could see from our tower and about a little market garden at the beginning of the path. I found the garden, it was neglected and overgrown, but there were still wild artichokes growing there, and a mulberry tree heavy with fruit, and some lemon trees and a pear tree, and some pomegranate and fig trees as well. (Please excuse my avid botanical descriptions, but I am a gardener and seeing these kinds of plants and trees just grow wild when they hardly grow here in a greenhouse at all, it breaks and heals my heart at the same time).

The temple, also, was still there, we found it overgrown with brambles, lots of olive trees in between, some lackadaisical barbed-wire structures around parts of it – the whole site was pretty much a death trap for anyone who wouldn’t look too closely, because there were deep, only partly overgrown cavities in the ground. But there were those gleaming white marble pillars alright, in the middle of the maze.

Same thing with the churches: Tiny, greek-orthodox structures with ravaged 12^th century frescoes, and in one of them, a falcon’s nest behind the altar, the whole place covered in bird droppings, reeking of shit. Or, that supposed entrance to Hades at one of the southernmost tips of mainland Europe, an oracle in a tiny temple to boot – and pink scrunchies and soda bottles left as offerings for the oracle, very much in earnest and on purpose.

In Greece I remembered how superstitious I am and how Catholic. I had finished an early version of my new poetry book just before we left, and I had decided to name it „undead swan”. When we were walking along the seaside of the closest bigger town (i.e., 300 residents), passing dilapidated summer homes that looked like they had just been 90% finished five years ago and then left with the electric wiring sticking out, we reached a cemetery. It had iron-wrought doors which had been corroded by the salty air. There were two swans, one in each door, facing each other, looking like they just wanted to take flight. It was more than a little gothic. The same evening, I read Greenhalgh’s and Eliopoulos’ descriptions of the Greek miroloyia (death lamentations), which were still particularly prevalent in Mani in 1980 (incidentally, my birth year). I felt like the deaths in my book had just followed me to this place and manifested in those doors adhoc.

I came home and then last week I passed a Catholic church while walking through a part of Berlin I didn’t know very well. The church is called Liebfrauenkirche (utterly intranslatable – „lieb” is „dear”, „Frauen” are „women”, „Kirche” is church – referring to Holy Mary). I remembered my maternal grandmother taking me to light candles and pray the rosary when I was a child, and I lit six candles, one for everyone I love, and prayed an astonishing number of Ave Marias.

Most of my friends pride themselves on not being religious at all, and there is a lot to take issue with when it comes to churches and religion, to be sure. But I keep thinking about it as undercurrents within rural parts of Germany, or not even undercurrents, but pretty much the main stream in quite a few European countries – think Poland, think, still, Italy, Spain, Portugal. I cannot go back to my childhood faith, there is too much I disagree with in institutionalized religion and within the Catholic church, even though I think the current Pope has – among some very bad – also some good ideas. I just feel that it is something not to be underestimated, maybe oftentimes only a placeholder for something else entirely.

It has to do with belonging and identity, and where religion does not provide that, people will find different reference points – in their nationalities, or in their race. And of course it isn’t that simple, either, those assumed identities overlap and may feed on and off each other, or strengthen impulses for „othering” the other, etc. I think just realized that I can call myself „a European first and foremost” all I want – however much I may think I belong among my friends, among artists or poets or the scientists I work with, among the city people, the so-called “enlightened Europeans” (a.k.a. Eurocentrists with their heads in their arses, Ricardo might say), certainly among the ones that profit from the changes of the last decades the most – this old-fashioned, irrational, superstitious, scared part is still crucial to what I might call my identity. These ideas about guilt and sin and forgiveness and bargains, these sudden flashes of coincidence which I pitifully may interpret as something we used to call fate or even the Fates, and this kitschy roses-and-corrosion-version of death and love – all of this has shaped me. I am a weird person with a Catholic upbringing and inverted lighting strikes of pure dark thought, and quite tellingly, there have been women in my family who doubled as surgery nurses and nuns (but this is another story for another letter). And I do not quite know what to make of it.

So if a poet whose job it is to disentangle her identities is quite unable to do so, how are people with other primary worries supposed to do it?

I won’t read this for corrections or to straighten it out, I think it has been fermenting long enough in my brain. I’ll just read this rambling letter tomorrow – maybe. Probably.

And I am looking forward to seeing you so very much, tomorrow.
Have a safe journey to Berlin, dear Ubah.

Baci,
Katharina