You read your poem
In your native language
About your longing
About your life
And I don’t really understand
Nevertheless
I prick up my ears
Fall into the sound
Hear the emotions
Through the lines
And cannot escape the feeling that
I must learn Arabic
To understand poetry
I hear you arguing
In Arabic
About politics, war, hope and hopelessness
About identity
And I understand nothing
Nevertheless
I prick up my ears
And cannot escape the feeling that
No language has words
For the pain
That a war leaves behind
I am told that
Arabic is a language
That has its own day, when it celebrates itself
That has more than 120 million words
That has a wealth of dialects
That is older than German
That has a poem that reads the same from left to right as from right to left
And I think of my potato friends
Who include yallah in their vocabulary
And the next moment
In bourgeois intellectual language
Say, though not straight out,
That Arabs are like this or that
Sexists, terrorists, fundamentalists, dangerous
I understand nothing
And cannot escape the feeling that
Whatever the language
No one masters the language of dialogue
While I write
A text
That tries to express my tender feelings for the Arabic language
I feel annoyed
The words slip from my fingers
Lose their poetry
Because it ends
In politicising what is Arab
I understand nothing
And cannot escape the feeling that
Language is life
