Evening with Faraj Bayrakdar

Thus
prison is time
you mark the first days on walls
the following months on memory
but when the years become
a long train
tired of whistling
despairing of a station
you try something else:
forgetting
– Excerpts from Mirrors of Absence by Faraj Bayrakdar

With his short verses, the award-winning poet and uncompromising dissident Faraj Bayrakdar creates a space to exercise freedom in the face of despair, inhumanity and struggle against tyranny.

Join us for a poetic evening with Faraj Bayrakdar at Melahuset.

Faraj Bayrakdar and Elena Chiti will have a short conversation before we listen to Bayrakdar’s poetry.

Faraj Bayrakdar is a Syrian writer and award-winning poet. He was imprisoned by the Hafez al-Assad regime in 1987 on suspicion of belonging to the Communist Action Party and released 14 years later. Bayrakdar is author of more than six books of poetry and prose, including “Mirrors of Absence” which taps into how the poet survives under tyrannical regimes, the notions of imprisonment and identity, and the concept of freedom.

Elena Chiti is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, cultural historian and literary translator from Arabic into Italian. Chiti translated Bayrakdar’s “Mirrors of Absence” by into Italian.

In collaboration with Melahuset