Caroline Assad: ‘We’re Hoping to Achieve a Shift to a Wider Conciousness’
“In Germany, literature is very much a business, and not everyone understands this idea of literature being so capitalist.”
Syrian Writers in Berlin
Layali Alawad: ‘You Can’t Look at a Painting of Mine and Say, “Oh, This is Syrian Art”‘
“I am a woman, so I want to depict women — and it depends on the woman, but in the period of the war in Syria, I felt like women were affected so much more than men, and I wanted to express that.”
Fady Jomar: ‘I Hope I Will Survive When This Interest Ends’
“A lot of the translators also have tight control of everything. That’s the biggest problem — it’s not even about them changing things in translation, it’s that they depend on relationships and friendships with writers they know fit their narratives, and it has nothing to do with whether they’ve written a good text.”
Yamen Hussein: ‘You Will Always Have This Role of the Victim’
“Thomas Mann was a refugee, but we don’t remember him as a “German writer” or a “refugee writer.” The classification is problematic. Unfortunately, when you are under these organizations, there is not much space for criticism of this label. We need to be more unified when making these critiques.”
Yassin al-Haj Saleh: ‘We, As Syrians, Are Allowed to be ‘Witnesses’
“We, as Syrians, are allowed to be “witnesses”: we can give testimony, we can tell our own stories, but it is always at a low level of knowledge, below the level of theorizing or conceptualizing about phenomena. In my work, I try to challenge that.”
Yasmina Jraissati: ‘For Now, It’s the Syrian Wave’
“I think one of the issues we have is that, in the US, the book industry is, well, very industrial. Most editors know exactly what they’re looking for, what would fit with their house’s identity, their target readership, their marketing strategy, their catalog of the following Spring.”
Ramy Al-Asheq: We Need ‘A Place We Can Represent Ourselves’
“Also, there is much more ignorance about Arabic and Arab literature, and Arab countries, than the ignorance of us about the rest of the world. We have dictators, we have a stupid education system, but here there is no excuse for them, because the information is there.”
Khaled Barakeh: ‘I Want Us, the Whole Community, To Own It
“I’ve started calling my practice a ‘practice of necessity’ because these shifts that were forced on me, forced on my identity, apply a shift to my practice and I have to adapt. I’m always responding to the urgent matters around me.”
On the ‘Boom’ of Syrian Literature in Berlin
In the last five years, there has been a surge of interest in Syrian writing in German translation. In this series of interviews, writers, poets, publishers, and artists in Berlin talk about their experience with the publishing industry in Germany and beyond.