I Breathe Like a Bird Perched on a Windowsill by Mahmoud Al Shaer translated by Katharine Halls

This episode of AIAC talk is devoted to Palestinian solidarity. In this excerpt, Mahmoud Al-Shaer shares his poem I Breathe Like a Bird Perched on a Windowsill, translated by Katharine Halls.

It is often the case that literature, film and poetry can evoke images of places we’ve never been, and can allow us to bear witness to feelings we’ve never experienced.

Relating the importance of black art in relaying the black experience during apartheid, the South African poet Mafika Gwala declared in his seminal 1984 essay, “Writing as a Cultural Weapon”: “ When you face a truth and there is a challenging need to express it, you can most emphatically capture it through poetry, because there is no way you can twist it about in a poem. You have to bring out the truth as it is, or people will see through your lines. It is also through poetry that you find, most soberly, that there has never been such a thing as pure language.”

Mahmoud Al-Shaer is a writer and poet who has acted and volunteered as a writer, a content creator, an editor-in-chief and as the executive director for 28 Magazine for more than four years. He is also initiator and curator of many cultural events and literary readings in Gaza. Al-Shaer received the first prize in the University College Competition for Poetry in Gaza in 2010, and received the second prize in the Palestinian Youth Creativity Competition in 2013.

Видео I Breathe Like a Bird Perched on a Windowsill by Mahmoud Al Shaer translated by Katharine Halls канала Africa Is a Country