Yes, I’m here.

Following up a busy year attending readings throughout Germany, we invited guests to a housewarming event this October at the new Poetry Office in Berlin-Mitte. To kick things off, Poetry Project founder Susanne Koelbl spoke about the extremely tense political situation around the world and the negative impact this has on young people with a refugee or migrant background. Levke Nissen and Theresa Rüger of the project management team tied these themes to the Poetry Project’s mission, then introduced Nasir Nadeem, PEN author and workshop leader for our Persian workshops. In conversation with Birgit Schmitz from PEN Berlin, he spoke about how his flight from Afghanistan had influenced his own writing before moving on to talk about the workshop participants and how impressed he was by their poetic voices.

To set the mood, he recited from his own work and then gave the stage to our young poets, who read in Arabic, Persian and Ukrainian. (As our Kurdish workshop series could only begin in autumn, we decided to dedicate a second housewarming reading to their texts in November.)

Razia Karimi’s “I am here” – whose title matches the name of our project – tells about the violent farewells and the shattering losses she witnessed: "Yes, I am here, / witnessing the crooked back of a father / who doesn’t know which wall is his home, / yet exposes every crumbling brick to the air, / in the hope of finding his children." The poem is rooted in a sense of powerlessness in the face of experience. Even though articulating these experiences cannot change the past, doing so can begin a process of coming to terms with what has happened: "Yes, I am here, / on the dark boundary of silence, / amidst the whispers of those / who no longer exist."

Our audience was as diverse as the readers themselves: we had guests from Germany, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Ukraine and Russia. The readers were: Ali Alzaeem, Jaklin Shilbaya, Mohamad Zahra, Raghad Isa, Nadiia Kulish, Sarina Mohammadi, Tayebah Joya and Razia Karimi. We would like to thank everyone who made this wonderful evening possible!