When I received the invitation to participate in the Casablanca International Poetry Festival, I accepted without hesitation. For some time, I had been longing to travel and experience the poetic soundscapes of Morocco, a country I visited 30 years ago. Still, I had not wanted to revisit for many reasons, mostly because I preferred to keep the beauty of my memories untouched.
Fouad Al-Awoud, a poet, publisher, and organiser of Lyrik Salon, had translated some of my poems into Arabic for the anthology, Das Haus ist Halb Leer. Casablanca presented the perfect place to hear poems in Arabic.
I would go on to discover that the opportunity to read poems in Morocco liberated the silenced voice within me: the empathic pain I had carried in my body, shaped by the violence of the world, by barbarity that tears away people’s dignity and lives. In that journey, I felt a connection with a collective body in the Arabic world
The green has faded into grey
by
Andrea Grieder
The green has faded into grey
They place nooses around necks
As if felling trees
You fall heavily
You do not rise again
No ring grows back
A stump jutting into the world
The green of the leaves has faded into grey
Soundtrack
by
Andrea Grieder
A map made of ruins
Fallen ammunition reached its targets
Days ago
Drone alert over the city
Out on the sea
A surfer rides a wave
Drone alert over the city
The sound of an oud
Tunes in to the death threat
Rising above it, a musician plays
To have a say
In how the finale should sound
As the only poet among the festival participants who spoke neither Arabic nor Darija, I listened for hours to the sounds and melodies of the voices, connecting emotionally and resonantly without understanding the meaning. It was thus a landscape of the senses, where past, present, and future blended into one another.
The trip to Marrakech after the festival brought an unexpected encounter with an octopus that had been created on the floor of a hammam pool—at the lovely Bindoo Spa, Marrakech.
Having released Überlebensstrategien eines Oktopus (How to Survive as an Octopus) earlier this year, the encounter felt like pure magic to me, and I could not resist diving in to meet the octopus in the blue water of Marrakech.
In the encounter with the Octopus, I only hear the poetics of a marine soundscape.