Blues & Oraliture

BLUES & ORALITURE. MUSING AROUND THE SONIC AND LITERARY is a platform / space for gatherings, exchanges and ruminations around the sonic and literary. For the second session, we warmly welcome Salah Yousif.

Together with invited guests – poets, sonic practitioners, artists, cultural practitioners and more – the series engages with their various practices and the issues addressed in their work. The series aims at bringing in and sharing words, counterwords as May Ayim calls them in her poem "am anfang war das wort": "words that make sense, words that carry meaning". Each talk is conceived as a call and response whereby the call can be poetry, music and the response music, poetry without a need to fixate on these terms but rather a conscious will to navigate within these genres and find the overlaps between them. The series embraces and approaches multilingualism as a core transmission element.

Salah Yousif is a poet from Sudan who is in Berlin since the 1973. He studied in Bulgaria and on a visit in then West-Berlin, he lost his passport and stayed. He runs an antique shop in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Salah Yousif writes poems in Arabic which he translates to German with a friend. In his poetry he deals with difficult issues,  yet his main aim is to spread hope –  especially now with the war raging in Sudan.

During this session, he will be reading poems and will share with us his love for words, the importance of building relationships with people, and his life in Kreuzberg seen through the daily comings and goings in and around his antique shop on Urbanstraße.