LONELINESS BY HUSSEIN BIN HAMZA
I won’t forget a river,
over which leans a tree
replete with birds,
talking to it for a thousand years,
and the river passes
and doesn’t understand.
His first volume of poetry »Ein Mann, der in Sonntagskleidung schläft« (tr: A Man Who Sleeps in his Sunday Clothes) first appeared in 1997 and a second edition was published in 2018. His second volume of poetry is entitled »Minderjährige Gedichte« (2019; tr: Underage Poems). His lyrical texts have been translated into several languages, including French, English, and German, and have appeared in several anthologies in Arabic, French, and German. He has also written a number of critical articles on poetry, prose, theater, and art, as well as portraits of more than forty Arab writers. After his escape to Germany, he began to process the difficult situation of many refugees in Germany in prose poems and to describe the experience of fleeing as a constant in a person’s spectrum of sensibilities. His poems appeared on various European poetry websites as well as in the magazine »Banipal«. A book with statements by seventy Arab writers about their respective débuts will be published shortly. Bin Hamza has participated in festivals and poetry readings in Syria, France, Tunisia, Jordan, and Germany. He has lived in Hanover since 2017.
