Philo Ikonya is a Kenyan writer, journalist and human rights activist, and presently Oslo City of Refuge's ICORN Guest Writer. She was elected president of Kenyan PEN in 2007. Ikonya has written articles for journals, web magazines and blogs, often commenting on the social and political situation in Kenya. She has also written poetry and novels, and her novel "Kenya, will you marry me", has been translared and published in several countries. She has worked as a lecturer of Spanish at Tangaza College of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, and as a a socio-political commentator in both radio and television. Philo Ikonya was threatened and harassed for her work and political activism, and can no longer work in Kenya. 

I turn into love

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Please continue to read more of Philo Ikonya's poetry!

Pegāh Ahmadi (Persian پگاه احمدی) is an Iranian poet, scholar, literary critic and translator of poetry. She is currently the ICORN Guest Writer in Frankfurt City of Refuge.

Ahmadi began writing poetry at the age of seven, and made her début as a poet at age seventeen by the publication of a poem in the literary magazine Takāpu, edited by Mansur Kushān. She has studied Persian literature at the University of Tehran, and regularly contributed to literary magazines on subject matters related to criticism of verse, theoretical issues pertaining to poetry and translation of poems. She is a member of Iranian Writers Association. In 2007 she was awarded the Celebrity of Poetry Award of the Iranian Journalists' Institute.

In the beginning of her literary career, Pegah Ahmadi's poems were associated with linguistic experimentation as was the case with many Iranian poets in the 1990s. But then she took up political and social themes because she considered them to be more relevant. She has especially taken up issues of the history and the changing role of women in society, reflecting also what consequences these changes have for writing as a woman.

Ahmadi has published several books of poetry, anthologies, literary reviews and translation of American poetry (like Sylvia Plath). Before coming to Germany, she worked as editor of the literary review Paperik and taught "Poetry in cinema" at the Film School Tehran.

She says of her own approach to her work:

"There comes a time in your life when sentimentalism can provide no answer to everyday questions. You are confronted by the blackness of your culture and the depth of your history and are compelled to devote attention to the responsibility that society brings with it. Personal experiences and abstract games can no longer match such entities."

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Please continue to read Pegah Ahamdi's poetry!

Georgian Zurab Rtveliashvili says of his poem:

"In August 2008 official Moscow invaded Georgian territory, and occupied important parts of it. This fact of violence is the personal tragedy of every Georgian citizen. One year before this fact, I wrote the poem Mission N (Бич Божий) which was translated in to Russian by the poet M. Amelin. It was published in a well-known Russian journal, and at the same time in many Georgian newspapers.

In this poem I show the scene of foreign airplanes bombing my hometown, which is what really happened one year after the poem was published. Much was written in the Georgian press about this poem after the August war in Georgia."

AKULA

Kogda kultura dremlet, eto kolaps stixa (poezii)
izdaiu golos s gortani kosaias raskolonnoi igloi grifa.
Kogda etot golos meniaiet vse i vse zakoni wokrug,
tembr kak prujinu, medleno sgibaet pokorennoe stixotvorenie,
kak sablia zvenit golos ishcha v gortani grif,
kultura --- okeaaan! na dne ee akula
dremlet, dremlet dremlet...

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Please continue to read poem in Russian and English! (Photo: Cato Lein)

A lecture given by Ilya Trojanow

Member of the ICORN Council of Writers and Experts

Every Saturday and Sunday, all over Europe, people from different walks of life come together to support their very own. They flock into the arenas, wearing the shirts of their heroes, eager to scream and shout for the better part of two hours. What do they sing in moments of joy and ecstasy? Which slogan unites them all, whether they are comfortably seated in the stadium of Anderlecht or quivering on their feet in Lüttich? Olé! Rhythmically repeated in a distinct, well-known cascade: olé ... olé olé olé. Probably most fans link this slogan with Spain. Maybe they associate it with toreros or with Don Juan. But how many of the fans that whip themselves into frenzy with unrelenting olés realize that they are actually repeating the Arab word for God. Time and again, every Saturday and Sunday, the soccer stadiums in Europe resonate with shouts of "Allah"!

In times of crisis the rhetoric of conflict blossoms. The ongoing, seemingly endless "War On Terror", powered by deliberately vague justifications, has metastasised into a clash of canons, cultures and civilizations. We are on the edge of disaster, we have to close ranks and defend our values and traditions. The foreign is an antagonistic force that has to be repelled. Thus we are asked, more often heatedly implored, to define our identity, to become aware of our own heritage, to defend our very own values.

But what if we are not defined by a homogenous, home-grown culture, because such a thing does not exist, has never existed? What if our identity is nothing but a snapshot of a dynamic process that we are caught up in, often without noticing? What if what we regard as alien is only the result of a momentary difference, a fleeting gesture of history? What if those that are claiming to defend the core of a certain nation, a certain tradition, a certain religion are fighting windmills while the reality of cultural dynamics is in the wind? For what if the values and cultural achievements of the so-called West were the result of awakenings and rebellions made possible by what we today regard as non-European sources, by movement and migration? What if core Western values, technologies and cultural expressions were decisively formed by confluences, by a intensive exchange between Islam, Christianity and Judaism, by a vibrant culture of debate amongst scholars working in Granada, Baghdad, Palermo, Damascus, Bologna, Paris, Venice and Cairo? What if all that we perceive as canonical and classical is a hybridity that we have forgotten? Or have been persuaded, encouraged, conditioned to forget?

In the memoir "In Search of My Homeland," Er Tai Gao chronicles his
years in China from his first imprisonment in a labor camp in 1959, to
his escape from China in 1991. Read an excerpt of this new book here at Stories for Life!

In Search of My Homeland

Lanzhou Number Ten Middle School was located on the north bank of the Yellow River on a foothill called Saltfield-Town-Temple-Dune, well outside the city. Not only was the name grating, the landscape was ugly. The newly built three-story school, resembling a gray matchbox, stood solitary above innumerable low and broken-down adobe houses, which, like rows of fish scales, extended downward to the river, where green orchards lined the banks. Beyond the grounds irrigated by the waterwheels, not a blade of grass grew. From the river's edge, a narrow dirt path twisted up for about ten li to our school. Continuing farther, the houses became fewer and fewer, until there was only the dirt-covered, adobe-colored mountain-barren, without trees, grass or stones-and behind it, more indistinguishable mountains. Looking from the highest peak, thousands upon thousands of mountains formed a greenish yellow expanse, and yet in that hard-featured monotony there was a fierce, untamed ruggedness.

The youths are on the loose in Norway, campaigning. Young men and women, all over the place. The pavements are red, not with human blood, but with red roses. My most favourite party is the one distributing red roses. Young men and women giving you a rose at every street corner. They talk to you rather gently, persuasively, wondering if you would like the bunch of roses. I never refuse roses except those given by some god-forsaken dictator. I know even tyrants like roses.

As I return to my desk, I have more than twenty red roses in my hands, as if I have just come from a flower shop to buy flowers for for birthdays and other special occasions.

I cannot resist thinking of home, election time, Zanu(PF) against the rest of the world, a matter of life and death.