In Speech, Silence, six poets responded to the question: what is poetry's relation to silence? Their poetry readings included new work, written especially for this purpose. You saw and heard Palestinian-American poet George Abraham, Danish writer and poet Asta Olivia Nordenhof, South African writer and poet Rešoketšwe Manenzhe and, from the Netherlands, poets Pelumi Adejumo, Yasmin Namavar and Maureen Ghazal.

This programme takes it's title from the poem Sprekers, zwijgers by the Dutch writer Lidy van Marissing, published in her latest collection De verwerping van het stilzitten (The rejection of inaction, 2024). Van Marissing's poem speaks of a "language half speaking, half silent, rocking back / and forth in between."

Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah commented on speaking and silence in an interview with The New Inquiry: "We need to learn how to listen in silence to the Palestinian in their silence. So far, when a Palestinian goes silent, it means they are dead or violable, digestible, liable for further erasure or dispossession. English has not begun imagining the Palestinian speaking, let alone understanding Palestinian silence."

Fady Joudah's words made us rethink poetry and silence. Poetry, and our discourse about poetry, always run the risk of degenerating into a domestication of silence, a way of making silence available and digestible to an audience, often in a language that is also used to commit the atrocities producing so many forms of silence.

The poets recited their new work written especially for Speech, Silence in their preferred language of writing. The poems were simultaneously projected in Dutch and/or English.

Speech, Silence was curated for Writers Unlimited Festival 2025 by Maarten van der Graaff.