#BacktoEarth: Tout-monde (Whole World)

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The image we have of our world is purely human, making it human-centric. It's up to us to offer non-humans a voice and a stage. This program created by Nisrine Mbarki gave the floor to the non-human elements of our world. It was an existentially poetic evening to experience the world from a different, more holistic, perspective.

The term Tout-monde (whole world), coined by the Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928-2011), advocates the use of language and poetry as a tool of resistance. We can see the world from the point of view of other people, animals, plants and even objects by identifying with them. In the Netherlands, writer Eva Meijer calls on philosophers, writers and artists to get to work on this.

We discussed this theme with writer and journalist Vamba Sherif, who is continually seeking the history of his family in North and West Africa, irrevocably linked to the African earth. In his novel Het land van de vaders (The Land of the Fathers) he tells about his native country of Liberia, where since time immemorial a religion of nature gave worship to trees, rocks and rivers.

We asked three authors to give a voice to beloved non-humans. These were the Eritrean-Ethiopian author Sulaiman Addonia; the Belgian essayist and poet Annemarie Estor; and the Jordanian transgender playwright living and working in Berlin and Cairo, Amahl Raphael Khouri. In their works, the search for an individual, free voice plays an important role. All three are especially adept at taking on alternative voices lacking in the usual perspectives on the world, and therefore of great value.

The authors read their resulting stories on locaion, in their own habitat, and were filmed by Ahmed El Saaty (Khouri), Shalan Alhamwy (Addonia) en Nils van der Linden (Estor). Afterwards, writer and journalist Chris Keulemans led a live conversation with Addonia and Khouri to reflect on what thoughts the assignment raised.

With an earthy and powerful voice, Shishani brought disparate worlds together and was thereby the ideal singer-songwriter to engage us with the non-human.

Read the pieces commissioned for this program by the Winternachten International Literature Festival The Hague here:


(Find the Dutch-language versions here/Lees hier de Nederlandstalige versies)


More background:

Sulaiman Addonia
Facebook
'Murder, Migration and Mother Love, the Making of the Novelist Sulaiman Addonia, interview, The Guardian, 2019

Annemarie Estor
website

Chris Keulemans
Facebook
Video: Chris Keulemans interviews authors Rosabelle Illes (Aruba) and Antoine de Kom (Surinam), Winternachten Festival 2020

Amahl Raphael Khouri
Video: conversation with Amahl Raphael Khouri; host: Alice Guthrie, Arts Canteen, July 2020

Nisrine Mbarki
Facebook
Video, as of 58'40'': performance by Nisrine Mbarki in Fatena's Poëziësalon, December 2020

Vamba Sherif
website

Shishani
website
YouTube-channel Shishani

Information

Date and time Saturday 16 January 2021 from 20:30 to 21:45 hrs
Location Online

Line-up

Nisrine Mbarki

(The Netherlands, 1977) is a writer, poet, columnist and literary translator. She writes short stories, theatre scripts and poetry, and translates poetry from Arabic into Dutch. Her poems and columns regularly appear in Dutch literary magazines. She has appeared at festivals such as Poetry International, Globale in Bremen, Writers Unlimited, Read My World, the Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp, and the Nacht van de Poëzie (Night of Poetry). She is co-founder and artistic director of the theatre company Landgenoten, for which she wrote Club Paradis (2016), which was staged in the Netherlands and Germany. Her debut poetry collection oeverloos (Endless) was published in 2022.
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Sulaiman Addonia

(Eritrea, 1975) is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. His first novel, The Consequences of Love (2008), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and translated into more than 20 languages, is a love story set in Jeddah. Silence is My Mother Tongue (2018) was longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. This second novel is about Saba, a girl in an East African refugee camp. Devoid of school and books, she struggles to give meaning to her own existence and to protect her brother. Both resist the roles imposed by their gender and environment. Addonia currently lives in Brussels, where he established the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (in Exile), a creative-writing academy for refugees and asylum seekers. Together with Specimen Press, he co-founded a new literary competition and prize for hybrid and collective writing: To Speak Europe in Different Languages.
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Annemarie Estor

(1973) is a poet, essyaist and illustrator of her literary works. She twice won the Herman de Coninck Prize: for her debut poetry collection Vuurdoorn me (Firethorn Me) in 2011 and for De oksels van de bok (The Buck's Armpits) in 2013. In 2015 she published Dit is geen theater meer (This Goes Beyond Theatre). Characteristic of her poetry is an erotic or more generally sensual and sensory approach. Her collection Niemandslandnacht (No-Man's-Land Night) is a "crime poem" about a divided city where little is what it seems. It's a world of extremes - exotic but often terribly recognizable. It was awarded the 2018 Jan Campert Prize. In 2020 she published the poetry collection De bruidsvlucht (The Bride Flight) and the long poem Een nieuwe biotoop (A New Biotope) in Zwemlessen voor later (Swimming Lessons for Later), a collection of climate poems featuring 160 Dutch and Flemish poets.
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Amahl Raphael Khouri

(Jordan) is a queer transgender playwright and theatre artist living and working in Berlin and Egypt. He has written plays including No Matter Where I Go (2014), a performance about the experiences of queer women in Lebanon, Ich brauche meine Ruhe (I Need some Peace and Quiet, 2018), and She He Me (2019), the first Arabic trans script. His work has been selected for various theatre initiatives and readings in the USA and Great Britain.
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Chris Keulemans

(Tunisia, 1960) is a writer, essayist, traveller and popular panel moderator. He has published fiction and non-fiction; was the director of the debating platform and venue De Balie; and was founder of the literary bookshop Perdu and the cultural centre De Tolhuistuin (all in Amsterdam). He performed with Enkidu Khaled in their jointly created documentary play Bagdad. Due to his curiosity about how artists recreate their cities after a crisis, he travelled to Sarajevo, Beirut, Tirana, Algiers, New York, Kiev, Jakarta and Qamishlo. At the invitation of PAX, he wrote Srebrenica & PAX 1995-2020, an overview of 25 years of support to the Association of Women of Srebrenica by the IKV and PAX in response to the genocide in Bosnia. In 2021 he published Gastvrijheid (Hospitality), in which he explores the art of hospitality through a mix of travel stories, observations, memories and imagery.
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Vamba Sherif

(Liberia, 1973) is a novelist, essayist, journalist and film critic. His debut novel Land of the Fathers (1999) is partly based on his grandmother's stories and deals with the clash between slaves returning from the US and other Liberians. The novel The Black Napoleon (2015) portrays Samori Touré, who founded the Wasulu-empire in western Africa in the 19th century. His journalism, including film reviews, appears in publications such as The New York Times, Trouw and One World. Together with  Ebissé Rouw he compiled Zwart (Black, 2018), a collection of stories by Afro-European authors from the Low Countries. Ongekende liefde (Unprecedented Love), in which he tells his life story to his ten-year-old daughter Bendu, was published in 2021. Sherif's historical novel The Emperor’s Son (2023) follows Zaiwulo, a young prodigy who trains under sage Talata of the Haidarah family in Musadu. Entangled in the intrigues of Emperor Samori, the 'Black Napoleon,' Zaiwulo matures into a formidable soldier.
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Shishani

(Namibia, 1988) is a singer-songwriter loved for her smooth and powerful voice. Her roots are Namibian and Belgian, but she grew up mainly in the Netherlands. Her work brings these worlds together. Her music is comforting and has a strong thread of social consciousness running through it. She founded the all-female band Miss Catharsis in 2019. Her anthropology (BA) and musicology (MA) studies focused on contemporary urban Namibian music.
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