Carol Rifelj Lecture Series, Maryait Khader

When does refuge begin: at the border, on arrival, or earlier, when leaving first becomes imaginable, debated, and judged? Across the Arab world, a shared language surrounds departure. It appears in everyday conversation, in the media, and in the verdicts families and communities pass on those who go and those who stay. This lecture argues that poetry makes this discourse unusually visible. Drawing on contemporary Syrian and Iraqi poets who later settled in Europe, read in the speaker’s own English translations, it follows poems that catalogue a neighborhood emptying under bombardment, answer the voices that blame those who leave, and, after arrival, imagine the newcomer as grass that survives only by bending, or as firewood for someone else’s winter. Returning to earlier research with new questions, the lecture asks how departure becomes a social and moral act long before it becomes a legal status. No knowledge of Arabic is needed.

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