HAUS FÜR POESIE

On this evening, three young Palestinian voices, Batool Abu Akleen, Alaa Alqaisi and Abdalrahman Alqalaq, enter into dialogue with one another, with musical interventions on the oud by Bakr Khleifi, and with the audible legacy of one of the most significant poetic voices of Palestine, the great poet Mahmoud Darwish (born 1941 in al-Birwa, died 2008). Excerpts from essays, poems, and prose will be read in Arabic, German, and English. The evening incorporates recordings of Darwish made in 2004 for the platform lyrikline.org, when he was a guest of Poesiefestival Berlin and read at Weltklang – Night of Poetry.

Like Mahmoud Darwish’s reading in 2004, the voices of this evening do not stand alone. Across places and generations, they open a shared space for all which, in messages and news, never seems to have disturbed the so-called civilized world. The line that gives the evening its title is adapted from Darwish’s famous poem State of Siege.

Batool Abu Akleen is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City. In 2020, at the age of only fifteen, she was awarded the Barjeel Poetry Prize; since then, her work has appeared in numerous international publications and translations. In 2024 she was Poet and Translator in Residence at Modern Poetry in Translation. After her evacuation from Gaza in autumn 2025, she began her studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Her bilingual poetry collection 48Kg. (Tenement Press, 2025), published in Arabic and English, brings into close relation the poet’s own body, life under an ongoing state of siege marked by the constant presence of death, and the act of poetic speech itself. Fear, anger, grief, and exhaustion become palpable, as do care and, time and again, the powerful force of imagination in the face of overwhelming horror and loss. Akleen’s poems are marked by immense clarity and a precise hardness; they often employ an almost hyper-objective imagery that stays close to seemingly concrete details, tilting, tipping over into something more at the same time. In her poem This is how I cook my grief, she writes: “I pick fresh hearts from the street / the most defeated ones (…) / In a copper pot / I boil what I’ve stolen (…) / I pour the mixture into my heart / until it blackens.” Her imagery often shifts abruptly into the fantastic or the allegorical without losing any visual concreteness, as for instance when the lyric voice is awaiting death: “I’m waiting like a mother expecting her newborn / I will scream / I will feel his head coming out of my body.”

Alaa Alqaisi, a writer, poet, translator, and literary scholar, also comes from Gaza City. After studying English Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, she is currently continuing her academic work at Trinity College Dublin, where she is pursuing a PhD on W. B. Yeats. Her work has appeared in, among others, ArabLit Quarterly, The Avery Review, and Adi Magazine, and moves at the intersections of poetry, cultural memory, and translation. In one of her texts she writes: “We spoke with mouths filled with dust. We sang, even with broken teeth. We prayed from fractured knees. And though the world may have looked away, let this much be remembered: we named the hunger.” Alongside poetry, Alqaisi has published numerous essays in recent years in which she brings literature, translation, and the unbearable present of Gaza into relation. Essays such as Beneath the Howl of Hunger and The Double Life of a Palestinian Translator combine deeply personal experience with literary analysis and philosophy. Among other things, Alqaisi reflects in detail on how time fragments and language withers under horrific conditions: “Long before hunger lays claim to the body, it loosens the scaffolding of language,” she writes in one of her essays. In other texts, Alqaisi explicitly enters into literary dialogue with figures such as W. B. Yeats, Anne Carson, Edward Said, or Mahmoud Darwish, whose work she addresses directly on multiple occasions.

Abdalrahman Alqalaq, born in 1997 in Damascus, is a Palestinian poet, writer, and performance artist. He studied Theatre and Aesthetic Practice as well as Comparative Cultural Policy in Hildesheim and Rabat. His Arabic-language poetry debut Twenty-Four was published in 2022 by Elles Publishing House in Cairo. In 2024, his first book in German, Übergangsritus (Rite of Passage), was published by Wallstein Verlag and selected for the Litprom Weltempfänger 65 best-of list as well as for the 2025 poetry recommendations of the German Academy for Language and Literature, Haus für Poesie, Lyrikkabinett Munich, and other partners. In 2025, he co-curated the fifth edition of the Arab Theatre Meeting Hanover. Most recently, his play Absentee Law premiered at the Hildesheim Burgtheater. In his poems and prose texts, Alqalaq combines narrative and reflective modes. Exile, the body, and perception form recurring points of reference in his work. At the beginning of one poem he writes: “I know that everyone will spit on my wounds when I name them.” At the same time, Alqalaq insists on the autonomy of poetic speech itself, which joins the great poetic dialogues with death that poets of all times have conducted, and on the inner freedom that may emerge from such a dialogue: “But it is of wings that I want to speak / for long ago I lifted myself out of my body / and now wave in greeting to death, encouraging him.” Abdalrahman Alqalaq is also responsible for the dramaturgy of the evening.

Bakr Khleifi, born in Jerusalem, began his musical education at a very young age. At the age of four he started studying the violin, before turning to the oud at six. He studied with several distinguished oud masters, including Ahmad al‑Khatib, Simon Shaheen, and Samir Joubran. His musical development later expanded to the double bass; the inspiration for this came after attending the West‑Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, initially as a listener. He subsequently joined the orchestra himself as a double bass player. After completing secondary school, Bakr Khleifi continued his studies with his first mentor Ahmad al‑Khatib and earned a bachelor’s degree in World Music with a specialization in oud at the University of Gothenburg. During his studies there, he was closely exposed to a range of other musical traditions, including Persian and North Indian music. Over several years, he was a member of the West‑Eastern Divan Orchestra and performed in major international concert halls such as Carnegie Hall, Teatro La Scala, the Berlin Philharmonie, and the Royal Albert Hall. Bakr Khleifi’s musical work reflects his long journey across different musical disciplines, particularly maqam‑based music and Western classical music. His compositions and performance practice combine melodic progressions and modulations characteristic of the maqam tradition with complex and varied rhythmic structures, often complemented by harmony and dynamic articulation. A central focus of his work lies in the quality of sound and the diverse sonic textures that the oud is capable of producing.

This event is a cooperation of Haus für Poesie and Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.