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| “Hawad, der einzige dichtende Tuareg”
Paris, hier bin ich meinem Kopf vorauseilend, Meinem Kopf eines ewigen Tuareg-Piraten Sinnbild des Schmerzes, Ich komme, hier bin ich den Tabak der Ironie kauend. Hawad, Horizontenentführung Dear Hawad When you appeared on stage here in Bremen in front of a well-trained audience full of designer glasses I didn’t know what to expect. On the festival programme of International Poetry on the Road you’d been advertised as “the only Tuareg writing poetry”. I can only snort indignantly at this kind of condescending political correctness. They could just as well have called you an elephant man or fire-eater. But when you, Hawad, in your whirlwind James Brown afro and denim jacket began booming, growling and breaking in Tuareg I was only happy that they’d invited you. In a cold, impersonal North German lecture hall you let me hear how one should speak to ancestral spirits and the G7 in the mother tongue of the desert; how you can stroke the wild west wind with a dying language. Hawad, if you would make such a scene on a street corner they’d lock you up. If you cried and prayed like that on an anonymous death bed in Paris people would think you were speaking in tongues and double the dose. Dear Hawad I wish you could know how I understand – understand talking with a cold November night in a language that my wife does not understand; how I know about rowing with a ship-wrecked tongue in a sinking idiom. Hawad, I see you know how it feels to hurl dead words at silence as the deep desert night bends over your tent to blow the camp fire out. |
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