You perhaps remember: Ronya Othman recently had her invitation withdrawn from the Karachi Literature Festival. Much has been written about this, but little has been explained as to why Ronya Othman in particular was disinvited. The congratulatory speech I gave on the occasion, in late 2022, of Ronya Othmann receiving the Horst Bienek Prize, perhaps better explains this hullabaloo and the controversy surrounding Othmann :

Gallant Lies: the poetry column under the pen of Alexandru Bulucz - loosely based on Johann Christian Günther, the baroque poet on the threshold of the Enlightenment, who echoed mockers with the words that poets are "only gallant liars". Poetry will be reflected on and presented here: in reviews, essays, monthly poems and occasionally also lists of the best.

"You perhaps know: Ronya Othmann is not only a poet, for which she is being honoured today. She is also a novelist, essayist and columnist for the most important national newspapers, whether in print or digitally. Few in the German-speaking world of literature and journalism share this intellectually holistic approach, and she does not shy away from considering her text genres as permeable with one another. Was it the columnist who composed the poem? The poet who reported from abroad in her column? In my eyes, that is not important at all. Crucially, each of Ronya's texts, with their ethical and aesthetic quality, speaks to you in an unmistakable voice. It is a 'Ronya style', a fascinating literary amalgam of the spoken and written word. Attempts to disqualify literature that proceeds in this way are not new. When the Belarusian, Svetlana Alexievich, a trained journalist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, it was also said that she was less a writer than a journalist. I mention this because something similar happened to Ronya when she read her text 'Vierundsiebzig' at the Bachmann Competition in 2019: A character named Ronya visits Kurdish regions four years after the genocide of the Yazidis in 2014 and meets survivors during her research. 

Certain members of the jury tried to disqualify the text, judging it non-literary. They felt there was a lack of distance between the author, Ronya, and the literary character of the same name. However, only those who make no distinction between autobiography and autofiction and who do not want to admit that the social science field research method of participant observation has long been part of the repertoire of autofictional texts, could confuse author with narrator. Or perhaps these jury members secretly considered the text to be too journalistic, too reportage-like, too documental.
The symbol of journalism in Ronya's poems is the recording device. It appears in one of the last texts in the book: the poem "everything you want to say fits in this room".

A bottom set of sugar that
stays in the glass when you've finished drinking.
a left-handed woman with a scar on the
back of her hand like an arrow, as if pointing to
what she is not saying.
you have come to note: the walls,
mortar, bricks and cement, a house
without skin, and windows of plastic sheeting,
gaping open in the wind.
the clink of spoons in glass, the sound
of bare feet on concrete. the hem
of a dress brushing the floor.
you turn off the recorder.
you owe your killers nothing,
even if you got away.
the scar moves with her hand,
when she speaks and remains silent,
when she brushes a strand of hair from her face behind her
ear or the arrow gets caught in her hair.

The poem is representative of a series of poems in this collection. Its notation systems include, as we have just heard, lists that are used to itemise what has been found, what remains, what has escaped - using all the five senses. The inventory and the silence of the left-handed woman seem to be more meaningful than the recorded words themselves. By switching off the recording device, which has become superfluous, the poem finally tips over into a reflection on survivor's guilt - elsewhere, it is the feeling of shame that predominates. And the lyrical ‘you’, the dialogical principle, is also typical of Ronya's poetry. It is not a constant ‘you’ but a transitive pronoun through which various figures bear witness: a father, for example, or a grandmother. Or is even used to address oneself.

It is not always possible to distinguish between the figures in a single poem. Sometimes they appear to merge, one into another. Which ‘you’, (returning to the poem quoted), has the last drop? The left-handed woman with the scar? The investigative ‘me’ who has come to take notes? And which ‘you’ actually got away? - to my mind , these ambiguities are intentional.

Occasionally, the difficulty in distinguishing between the investigative 'I' and the survivor raises a larger issue of this poetry collection: To what degree can the investigative self empathise with the survivors and their suffering? Until it has reached the same level as theirs? That is of course impossible and would minimise the suffering of the survivors. The paradox in which Ronya's poems thrive is therefore as follows: the suffering of the survivor collective, to which the investigative 'I' is bound by its origins, is part of its identity, even if it can never fully embrace the primary experience of suffering. The subject at stake here is often discussed, particularly in the social sciences, as "transgenerational transmission of trauma". Where did the investigative 'I' go in order to write? Several city names are mentioned in the book of poems: Afrin, for example, Mosul or Nineveh. Cities in Syria and Iraq - you could also say cities in Kurdistan, where in the recent past Kurds and Yazidis have once again been victims of persecution and pawns in regional conflicts. After Turkish troops invaded Afrin in 2018, Ronya rightly pointed out that German tanks were used and that consequently, the German government was implicated. A poem about Afrin now ends with the lines:

this is not a description of a
city. this is a description of what used to be a city.
this is a description of what used to be a city.

Ronya's father is a displaced Kurdish Yazidi who grew up in a village near the Syrian-Turkish border. Her family had to flee Syria from the so-called "Islamic State" in 2014. In an interview, Ronya said that she herself had often visited these places and had many memories from these trips . It is precisely these memories that are now immortalised in her poems. In them, as in the text for the Bachmann competition, there are several references to the "four years" afterwards. This refers to her visit to the sites of the genocide against the Yazidis by the "IS", four years after it took place. Another sad chapter in the history of the persecution of the Yazidis, which began in the 15th century.

Some writers pursue themes, and as a reader you notice that. Some writers are pursued by themes, and that too is picked up by the reader. Ronya's profound engagement with displacement, flight and homesickness, with repression and massacres of minorities worldwide, is a theme that haunts her as a writer and journalist, because of her own family history. It is the central theme of her life. As far as Kurdish and Yazidi fates are concerned, we are basically dealing with a double persecution. For survivors and the descendants of the victims, physical persecution inevitably leads to psychological persecution. The commitment, the depth, the existentialism of Ronya's poems, but also of her prose and journalistic work, should therefore come as no surprise. It is the only way to deal with all the tragedy.

And by the way, it should also be mentioned that Ronya not only stands up for the historically marginalized in her texts, but also in a 'vita activa'. She has been on the executive committee of PEN Berlin for six months and has been providing practical help for persecuted colleagues from abroad at great personal cost ever since. And as fate would have it, PEN Berlin's first case was the Turkish-Kurdish poet Meral Şimşek, who was persecuted in Turkey.  Ronya has been key in supporting her.
The book of poems that won the award today is called ‘die verbrechen’ (the crimes), thus named because Ronya goes to considerable lengths, worthy almost of a forensic criminal investigation, to solve them, and appropriates the countries where these crimes took place. Nothing is too insignificant to explore, and it's not as though one had already "seen too much". The logic of the arrangement of interiors, buildings, gardens and entire settlements destroyed by the crimes is linguistically reconstructed with mathematical precision and transferred to the archival memory of the poem. Ronya calls the method used in this poetic reconstruction of a willfully destroyed, lost world: "reading backwards".

you have to read the stones
backwards. starting from the dome, sun-shaped,
the rays. but the dome landed, the dome without the fuselage
and the tip of the dome landed after the detonation
three meters and ten centimeters further.
if you count the debris, the stones back into the building,
you get a temple.

And so entire streets, paths, forests, mountains or villages are "read backwards". Old maps, route maps, are consulted and even mapped themselves. Even the most inconspicuous pieces of information are wrested from the "scarred terrain", the scorched earth. It is there that crucial evidence is stored. The poem with its
"karstified voice" becomes a writing device not only for the survivors' accounts, but for the memory of a landscape.

what you lost
that morning in September.
what left its mark, like the tread
of the tires in the earth, the boots of the soldiers
who took your brother, your father, on
that day, so unchanged blue and
dusted around the edges.

In their mapping of loss and grief, the poems also evoke mythical landscapes and bring rural life to the fore with a wealth of detail: the daily labours, the abundance of vegetation, the trees. Domestic and farm animals, such as chickens, become emblematic of a fairytale-like existence. This evocation, however, is systematically disturbed by the calamity of destruction.
One wonders how Ronya comes by so much extensive knowledge. She travels a lot, of course, hence the impressive depth of her poems and her perspective on current situations. She documents in writing what she has seen with her own eyes. But she also turns her gaze on those things which, for the most part, we are fortunate enough to be spared on social media. In a sense, she manages content for us. In an interview, for example, she talked about pictures and videos that reached her in almost real time. "Pictures of shredded children, videos of murders and ethnic cleansing and of Turkish fascists posting photos of killed Kurds".

You can well imagine: Ronya's public work on behalf of the historically marginalized makes her a target of hate and agitation in the digital universe. I wouldn't wish to be in her shoes and can only marvel and thank her for how confidently and determindly she continues her 'vita contemplativa' in her 'vita activa' and vice versa.

And this too, namely thinking about the digital mediation of war and oppression, finds its way into the poems: "cinema of murderers" and "cinema of victims" is the name of the dichotomous pair with which Ronya marks her media criticism and adds another theoretical dimension to her already sensually charged poetry.

Ronya Othmann | die verbrechen. Gedichte | Carl Hanser Verlag | 20 EUR

Ronya's literature is based on individual experiences and yet works on collective memory. Her almost biblical furor of naming, her rage at remembering the damaged, the annihilated, her poetic walks to the graves, her despair at lists of the missing and dead that read "like numbers" - all this is a representation of a pain on a grand scale and, of course, an expression of an endless lament to which there is no appropriate response.

die verbrechen is not experiential poetry , but poetry of suffering. It is a monument to the innocent, and I believe that Horst Bienek, who himself suffered historical injustice, would very much agree with awarding the prize to Ronya."