Rahmetullah Berxwedan Andan and Núria Codina reflect on their first encounter at The Poetry Project and the power of literature to open doors to strangers

Reflections on a Strange Day, by Rahmetullah Berxwedan Andan

It was a strange day, really. I woke up like a penitent that morning, as if I had opened my eyes to summon the memories of the lost back into the hours of the day. I hadn’t yet fully mourned a friend who had fled to Germany after enduring police violence and harassment in Turkey, escaping a prison sentence. Instead, I found myself ironing my shirt.

That day, I was heading to a book launch organized by Germans working to preserve the Kurdish language—the same nation whose bureaucracy had once tried to deport that very friend back to Turkey. It was strange. These lands are hailed as defenders of human rights, yet here, too, a person could become invisible. Is it a contradiction? A double standard? Or simply human nature? I can’t tell anymore.

Still… as Berxwedan, I had existed for the first time on a piece of land with a name, a place. When I first joined The Poetry Project, I wrote “Rahmetullah Berxwedan Andan” on a piece of paper. And on that paper, in that moment, I truly existed.

There’s a tradition in Islam: when a child is born, their name is whispered into their ear with the call to prayer. My father whispered “Rahmetullah Berxwedan.” Yet the state recorded only “Rahmetullah”—a name not in my language, not from my culture. From the start, my official identity bore the marks of assimilation, of denial. It’s one thing to be named, another to be claimed.

Now, years later, as a migrant in a country that once witnessed the Holocaust, under a roof that claims “humanity before identity,” I found myself rewriting that whispered call in the language of poetry. It spread through me like a quiet dopamine surge—a subtle, thrilling reminder that even in exile, language can bloom.

I chose to mourn my friend not with grief, but with resistance. That, too, is an elegy.

Before the event, I met with Meral Şimşek—the project coordinator—and a few others. As we emerged from the U-Bahn into a soft drizzle, I realized how many of us there were. We, who had mostly lived in isolated friendships, were now walking together toward a literary event shaped by a national language we’d once been punished for speaking. There was a contradiction in that, too.

I jaywalked across the median in the rain, leaving the others behind for a moment. They were now behind me, just as the dead linger behind the living. Above or beneath the earth—such differences feel vast in moments like these. I was alone. But there was comfort in that. Silence doesn’t demand explanation.

As I approached the venue, I thought of the soil beneath the pavement—how little separated me from the ground where I’d once buried friends. I wondered if the stage inside was exempt from earth, from history, from burial.

The others soon rejoined me, and we entered the venue as amateur Kurdish poets. We exchanged the usual half-cheek German kisses. The room seemed multilingual on the surface, but in truth, each language orbited alone. The subjects of one tongue never touched those of another.

During the greetings, I’d met someone—a woman. I noticed her again as we took our seats. She wasn’t an amateur. Her eyes, weary from reading, were trained to catch the letters hidden in the margins. She wasn’t from Berlin. She was impeccably neat, not just in appearance but in her clarity of purpose. Even the most radiant Slavic women here carry a layer of the city’s grime in their gaze. But not her.

She carried real notebooks—not just a notepad. She read author bios from the books she picked up, jotting down names and places with care. You could see her building lives behind those glasses. Feeling, not just observing.

As I watched her, my name was called. I walked to the stage with uneven steps, knowing she’d noted my name, too. Perhaps even my story.

Of course, something had to go wrong—my glass tipped over on stage. A minor mishap, but it felt like fate reminding me: I wasn’t meant for an ordinary reading. People watched with heightened interest—some curious, others with the quiet respect reserved for the unplaceable.

After my reading, I didn’t return to my seat. I stood near the stage, photographing the others. Then, as if scripted by the absurd, my phone slipped from my damaged left hand and hit the ground like a dropped pistol. The audience flinched. We all flinched. But it was a good evening—charged with quiet revolutions.

—

A few days later, I returned briefly to the weekly poetry workshop. My time was tight—I had a photography class recommended by a friend whose heart beats in animation. But I wanted to drop by and leave a small gesture of gratitude.

As I entered, I saw her again—the woman from my left. She smiled. We sat down and began speaking as if we’d never paused.

“Noch mal, hallo. Ich bin Núria,” she said. (“Hello again. I’m Núria.”)

“Freue mich. Ich bin Rahmetullah Berxwedan,” I replied. (“Pleased to meet you.”)

She told me she was a literature professor at Leuven University, that she’d been following this project and had come for the book launch. I’d been right—she wasn’t from here. She was from Belgium.

Our names sparked a conversation about meaning. When I learned she was Catalan, something softened inside me. Perhaps not her specifically, but Catalans, too, have known what it means to be silenced. We were alike—grapes crushed in different vineyards.

“I think Núria might come from ‘Nur’—meaning light,” I said.

“Perhaps,” she replied. “It has many meanings.”

My time was short, so I asked her to speak quickly, promising to do my best to keep up. I apologized for my fractured languages—none of them, German, English, or Kurdish, felt fully mine. But she understood. With help from AI translation, we shared an honest exchange.

Who knows what might have happened if I’d stayed longer? But her presence was a window I hadn’t expected.

Núria, without knowing it, opened a path to this text.

Because that morning, I’d woken with the weight of an unmourned friend—a friend who’d left his country seeking refuge, only to be treated as less than human. He couldn’t bear it any longer. And so many others like him—our people, our values—watch us from behind. They’re there, somewhere. But we can never quite touch them.

Literature, in its quiet insistence, opens a door right there.

Language turns the unlived into memory, silence into testimony. And Núria’s gentle questions—her presence, her gaze—reminded me:

Writing is how we bid farewell to those we never got to mourn. 

Literature is the prayer we offer in the absence of goodbye.

On Literature and Friendship, by Núria Codina

It’s Wednesday 4:30 PM when I walk into the office of The Poetry Project, an organization in Berlin that runs poetry and translation worksops for refugees. The space is warm and welcoming. There’s a large white table in the middle of the room, surrounded by orange chairs with white faux fur cushions. On the table are glasses, two bottles of juice, water, a plate of Christmas cookies, and a bowl of fruit. I like the big window overlooking the street. I can see the people walking outside, all wrapped up in their winter scarfs and beanies. It’s a rainy and cold December day. Although there is no workshop today, I am here for their open writing session, a space that the project’s participants can use to write, get some work done, or socialize. Theresa Rüger, who welcomed me the previous day and works as a project manager for the organization, had contacted the poets announcing that I would be visiting, but had already warned me in advance that the past few days had been very busy with readings and other events and not many people might show up. I’m happy to be here anyway. From the start, the Poetry Project’s work was of great inspiration for the COLLAB project – I wanted to have an ethnographic-based component in the project, devoted to the study of small-scale civil society initiatives in Europe that organize collaborative writing workshops for migrants. It’s also my first time doing “fieldwork” and studying literature off the page and as a lived encounter – it feels exhilarating to talk to the authors and the staff of The Poetry Project and to see how literature shapes their life, how texts are made, how multiple voices and languages interact. After many months following the work of The Poetry Project, I was able to attend the launch of the anthology Sei neben mir und erzähl mir, was passiert ist and talk to some of the poets. I particularly enjoyed the multilingual setting of the event: the poems were first read in the original language by the poet and then in German translation by an actress, creating symbolic meaning in the gaps between languages, new rythms in the transition from one voice and language to the next one. 

Just as I am about to start working, the door opens. Rahmetullah comes in – I recognize the face from yesterday’s poetry reading, he was seating close to me before he walked on the stage and tipped his glass over. Theresa introduces us and I tell him, in German, that I really liked his poem. It reminded me of Emine Sevgi Özdamars novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, in which migration and foreigness are described as intrinsic to human existence. In Rahmetullah’s poem, too, the poet’s birth represents his first journey:

My Sto­ry, by Rahmetullah Berxedan Andan

My story began before I was even born.
On the day my mother started to talk,
my story began too.

Already, in my mother’s belly, I heard it, her, my own language.
I couldn’t speak myself, yet my mother could sense my hunger.
I could not speak, but I could understand my mother’s lullaby.

One day I said “dayê”, mama, and my mother’s eyes smiled.
On this day my story was born.

When Theresa leaves us alone, Rahmetullah asks me to speak a little more slowly, he is still learning German. I get a bit nervous: what if we don’t understand each other? But Rahmetullah and I share a love for words, and I am a lucky person: He has an incredible capacity to make others feel at ease – I just didn’t know yet, back then. After talking a bit about our linguistic backgrounds, he immediately takes out his phone and shows me some texts he has written and that he would like to submit to a writing context. I read them aloud in the German translation and he listens to me in silence. We are replicating, unconsciously, the same dynamic and cadence of yesterday’s reading. I’m grateful for this intimate gesture, which brings us close, moving forward in time, as if we knew each other already, and yet slowing it down. This was the beginning of my friendship with Rahmetullah – a bond forged through writing and reading across linguistic differences. I experienced in the flesh literature’s affective and performative capacity to create ties. Rahmetullah and I inhabit different worlds: his, in Berlin, marked by rigid bureaucracy and, at times, blatant discrimination; mine, Brussels, where I’m rarely viewed as a stranger and where I ended up by choice. But we have kept in touch since that day in Berlin – he shares his poems with me and calls me “meine Lehrerin”, I call him “mein Dichter”. 

When I was a kid, I used to believe that the characters I sympathized with in books could become my friends one day. Now, strangers sometimes remind me of literary characters. During this fleeting delirium, they feel as real as any other acquaintances, at times even more familiar. It is this intimacy that I like about reading: to recognize in a stranger a potential friend, to experience a form of closeness that seems less contingent, that doesn’t fade away with time and space. On this cold and rainy day of December, however, literature gifted me with a real friend. Danke, mein Dichter.