"We Say, Salt": Poetics of an Atlas in Transit

• In Event: Hold Onto Time: The Art of Witness from the Middle Eastern Diaspora

Abstract

This paper examines the precarity and resilience of people in transit from Syria, Afghanistan, and Palestine to Greece, with particular focus on poetry emerging from these contexts. This writing reveals words as a restoration of what has “otherwise vanished from the world.” (Birkerts). Through a feminist lens, I address the complexity of insider/outsider vantage points with emphasis on how gender, sexuality, and nationality are revealed / reviewed/ renewed by people in transit. The paper incorporates lessons I grapple with as a white US-born poet working with refugee poets, translators, and activists in Greece since 2015.

Presenter

• Becky Thompson, Simmons College