Ever Since I Did Not Die
How does one write about the experiences of war, escape and migration? For one who has not died and has lived on to tell the stories, what form of language can justifiably give voice to the atrocities endured or horrors encountered? Can the ugliness of wars be borne by poetry or the distress experienced, articulated reasonably by prose?
Ramy Al-Asheq, a Syrian-Palestinian poet who writes in Arabic, was born in Yarmouk camp for Palestinian refugees in Damascus. In 2011, during the Syrian revolution, he was imprisoned and persecuted by the Assad regime. After being released from jail, he was recaptured and imprisoned in Jordan again. He escaped the prison and spent two years under a fake name in Jordan during which he won the Heinrich Böll fellowship, which allowed him to move to Germany in 2014. He currently lives in Berlin. He has founded a German-Arabic cultural magazine, called FANN, and is a curator for Literaturhaus Berlin. Ever Since I Didn’t Die was written between 2014 and 2016 and was published in 2016. It has now been translated into English. His most recent poetry collection, My Heart Became a Bomb, was published in 2021.
Refusing to classify this collection as prose or poetry, in the preface of the book, the author says:
“I gather these texts like someone collecting body parts. Here are the pieces of my body, haphazardly brought together in a paper bag. This randomness of body parts is real in its destruction. Bloody at times, violent, honest, imaginary, personal. It looks like me with all my madness and sickness, how the revolution made me grow, what the war broke inside and what exile chipped away.”
The author’s voice aches with pain. In a world where nations are maddened by the desire to seek control and exercise unquestionable power, war ‘reaches across the horizon, loftier and older than peace’, leaving behind lives fractured by violence, displacement or exile, lives shattered and left crippled; their stories do not belong to an individual but map out the collective grief of all those forced to flee their homes.
The complete review appears at Borderless Journal.
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