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| Dancer Sanela Jusofovic at the POESI-O-RAMA Festival, Malmö, Sweden, September 2015 |
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I was honoured to be asked to read from my collection Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet 2014) with Adnan al-Sayegh at the POESI-O-RAMA Festival in Malmo, Sweden on 12 September 2015. Invited by Hassan Hadi, Director of the Modern Art Theatre Group and Björn Ganzer, the Swedish poet (and rock musician) who travelled with us on the Al-Kalima ‘Poetry and Resistance’ Festival in Morocco earlier this year, the festival was dedicated to the memory of the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish Poet Laureate, Tomas Tranströmer.
Friday 11thSeptember: London-Copenhagen-Malmö
We arrived in Copenhagen around 11.30pm (my first visit to Scandinavia) to be met by Björn and Adnan’s brother Ahmed who runs a publishing company in Malmo and has published articles about our work together and several of the poems from Taking Mesopotamia in Arabic on his well-respected Al-Noor website.
Next - the excitement of travelling over the iconic eight-mile long Oresund bridge (Ø̈resundsbron) that connects Copenhagen to Malmö. Not only is it the longest combined train and car-carrying bridge in Europe but also the star of Hans Rosenfeldt’s multi award-winning ‘noir’ detective TV drama The Bridge - I watched both series obsessively on Netflix this summer.
Saturday 12 September: Malmös många språk
Although it is an industrial hub and the third major city in Sweden with 300,000 inhabitants Malmö seems incredibly quiet and unhurried. There is a predominance of young people cycling, jogging, pushing prams and walking hand in hand or in family groups. In fact nearly 50% of the population of Malmö is under 35. If there were any ‘weak and degenerate’ women busy seducing their valets like Strindberg’s Miss Julie, there was no evidence of them on the streets (although they might have been lying low until the evening…)
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| Malmö Public Library (Stadsbiblioteket) |
Another surprising statistic is that 41% of Malmö residents have a foreign background; of these the largest community is Iraqi (nearly 10,000 people). Adnan himself took refuge here for eight years before moving to London in 2004. This multiculturalism is reflected by a section in the vast public library (Stadsbiblioteket) featuring ‘Malmös många språk’ – not ‘Malmö’s manga comics’ as I first thought but ‘Malmö s many languages’ .
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| Malmö Public Library (Stadsbiblioteket) multilingual section |
POESI-O-RAMA
Director Hassan Hadi, from Iraq, worked for several years with Tranströmer and Adnan on theatre pieces combining poetry with dance, movement and mime, and his vision for POESI-O-RAMA was to build on this, creating a cross-cultural, multimedia showcase to express ideas about resistance to oppression and inequality.
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| Director Hassan Hadi |
The show was held at the Mariska Paviljongen, a large building in the Folkets Park with two theatres and an atmospheric bar/ café area. It started with what was one of the last filmed interviews with Tranströmer in Stockholm in 2014 (he died in March 2015) and continued with an international line-up of poets and performers.
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| Tranströmer with wife Monica (far right) Adnan al-Sayegh and Loloat Hadi |
The message of the evening was about the right to freedom of thought and to peace, often expressed with humour - an approach used by Tranströmer himself in his poem ‘Allegro’ (From Tomas Tranströmer, New Collected Poems, translated by Robin Fulton (Bloodaxe Books, 1997/2011) which says -
The music says freedom exists…
I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets
and imitate a person looking on the world calmly.
I hoist the Haydnflag - it signifies:
"We don't give in. But want peace.'
Throughout the evening we were reminded of the current exodus of human beings risking death and destitution in their flight from war, torture, rape and mass murder. The young Bosnian poet Merima Dizadervic and dancer Sanela Jusofovic were eloquent, as were performance poet Mauritz Tistelö and the charismatic Swedish poets, Bob Hansson and Björn Ganzer. Björn, the co-organiser of the festival, also played for Sanela Jusofovic and, later, with his own band, Ganzer. Sufi songs were mesmerisingly played and sung by Alaa Rashid and Izmat Allabaad.
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| Poet Bob Hansson |
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| Sanela Jusofovic and Ganzer |
I read my poem ‘August 2006: Hamid’ from Taking Mesopotamia especially for Hassan who was born and grew up in Basra. Based partly on a newspaper report and partly on a tourist blurb for Basra, it says –
‘… Sinbad’s city is now populated
by children, all the young men dead in the wars.
Hamid, beautiful child, rises at dawn to collect
scrap metal, building a new life from Pepsi cans:
he says - peace is the greatest treasure we could ask for.’
Adnan then read the Arabic translation for the largely Arab audience. As in the past, my engagement with the Arab world through the research and writing of Taking Mesopotamia, the translation of many of the poems into Arabic and my continuing work with Adnan, who is widely known and respected throughout the Arab world, is what led to the invitation for me to attend the festival.
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| Jenny Lewis and Adnan al-Sayegh |
The exceptionally good and exciting news is that Hassan has now acquired substantial funding to make the festival an annual event. It will be held in future at the prestigious Malmö Opera and Music Theatre and Adnan and I have been asked to select 18 international poets for the next POESI-O-RAMA in September 2016 – and to attend the festival again and contribute our own work…so it’s ‘Adjö Malmö , till nästa år’ (‘Goodbye, Malmö, until next year …’)
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