POESIEGESPRÄCH: FATEMEH EKHTESARI & MARIAM MEETRA – mein Name: drei Punkte

In the organizer's words:

Studio space

The poets Fatemeh Ekhtesari and Mariam Meetra share the experience of exile, the escape from a system that oppresses women in particular: after being sentenced to eleven and a half years in prison and 99 lashes, the poet, author and activist Fatemeh Ekhtesari (born 1986 in Kashmar, Iran) fled her homeland and has been living in Norway since 2017. She has published two bilingual volumes there, زنده نمی مانیم / Vi overlever ikke (TransFe:r 2020, translated by Nina Zandjani) and زن نیست / Hun er ikke kvinne (Aschehoug 2022, translated by Fatemeh Ekhtesari, Mohammad M. Izadi, Johanne Fronth-Nygren). Fatemeh Ekhtesari belongs to the Postmodern Ghasel, the most radical poetic movement in contemporary Iranian literature. In her poems, she updates traditional forms of Persian poetry, such as the ghasele, in the context of Iran's socially and politically violent present.

In her first volume of poetry in Persian and German, Ich habe den Zorn des Windes gesehen (Wallstein Verlag 2023 German translation: Ali Abdollahi, Susanne Baghestani, Sylvia Geist and Kurt Scharf), the poet Mariam Meetra (born 1992 in Baghlan, Afghanistan) describes the turmoil of exile: liberation from the regimentation of Afghan society on the one hand, longing for Kabul and a feeling of being uprooted on the other. The wind is a leitmotif that runs through the poems as a symbol of this ambivalence: "The wind cuts off my roots / And blows them wherever it wants / It plants them in the chest of long winters / In gardens without sunshine".

Fatemeh Ekhtesari and Mariam Meetra in conversation with Azadeh Fathi.

The event will be interpreted into Persian and German.

Project management: Nadine Tenbieg

Supported by:

NORLA Norwegian Literature Abroad. The poesiefestival berlin is a project of the Haus für Poesie in cooperation with silent green Kulturquartier and the Akademie der Künste and is funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.