Under a Wartime Sky

Ramy Al-Ashen is an award winning Palestinian-SyrianGerman poet journalist and cultural figure based in Berlin, Germany.

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The son of two causes-Palestine and Syria”, he is known for his nuanced exploration of exile, identity and displacement. He has published five poetry collections in Arabic, which have been translated into several languages, including German, English and Polish, with his writing appearing in anthologies and magazines worldwide. His works have inspired performances, musical compositions and visual artworks. He spoke to Vineetha Mokkil about the pathology of war and the price of writing about it. Excerpts:

How do you write about war and the human suffering it causes, which is a daunting subject with so many nuances?

Writing is writing. For me, it is an act of resistance, an act of existence and an act of survival. It is a continuous process of excavation, exploration, giving, and critique. My narratives are predominantly poetic, and this type of writing is neither easy to create nor read. I believe choosing this path was not a bad decision, even though it has not been approached without tension.

However, tension, insecurity and suffering in writing, or in dealing with it, are intrinsic to the nature of war and conflict. How can we write a comfortable, easy and safe text about a subject that is neither easy, comfortable, nor safe? No matter how expansive literature and imagination may be, they sometimes stand powerless in the face of the enormity and obscenity of reality. "When your surgical priority for a beautiful 13-year-old girl is to reconstruct her eyelids so that she can have a prosthetic eye, a part of you dies." This statement by Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a plastic surgeon returning from Gaza, exemplifies it. What can literature do in the face of such a sentence?