Programme

_15.00_reflections
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Foyer

African and African Diasporic Authors
Presented by: Flora Veit-Wild
While Chirikure Chirikure (Zimbabwe) and Henrietta Rose-Innes (South Africa) live and work in their native countries, Kossi Efoui (Togo/France), and Helon Habila (Nigeria/USA) have left Africa. Together they will discuss the writing process in and outside of Africa.

_16.00_reflections
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Große Bühne

Crossing Africa: Migration into the Paradise Europe? Azouz Begag (France), Fatou Diome (Senegal/France), Elisabeth Hack (Cameroon/Germany), Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla (Spain), Rickard Sandell (
Presented by: Marianne Heuwagen
Many Africans head off towards Europe – often at the risk of losing their lives. The number of people in migration and flight from Africa isn’t comparable with anywhere else on the globe. 10,000 African refugees have drowned while attempting to reach Europe in recent years, according to estimates by the EU-Commission. How should the Europeans deal with this (partially self-induced) challenge?

_16.45_kaleidoscope
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Foyer

Jamal Mahjoub (Sudan/Spain)
Reader: Frank Arnold
Ilija Trojanow presents Jamal Mahjoub – a writer who was born in Khartum an is currently living in Barcelona – and his novel „In the Hour of Signs“, the first book in the series “Weltlese”, edited by Trojanow. The novel deals with Mahdi, who is considered one of the first fundamental rebels of Islam and successful leader of an uprising against the British colonial rulers in the 1880s. The story is told from his perspective as well as from the British side.

_18.00_reflections
Literaturhaus | Kaminraum

African Feminist Movements. A discussion with Susan Kiguli (Uganda) and Grada Kilomba (Portugal /Germany)
Presented by: Abisara Machold
When Susan Kiguli’s literary debut was published, she was explicitly labelled a “woman poet”; today she is still asked, what it is like to be a woman as well as a writer. She asks: “Why emphasize that a writer is female?” Grada Kilomba sees herself as a "Black female writer". "We have to understand that gender and 'race' are inseparably connected to each other. Racist constructions are based on gender roles, and vice verSat, gender influences the manner in which 'race' is constructed. It is important for me", she says, "to reflect these complexity in my writings."

_18.15_
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Seitenbühne

An evening for Hugo Claus
Hugo Claus, the most significant post-World War II Flemish writer, died on March 29, 2008. At the age of 17 he published his first volume of poetry. He wrote the bestseller “Die Metsiers”, a commissioned work, in three weeks at the age of twenty. The playwright, poet, librettist, translator, non-fiction and screenwriter published over one hundred works. He was also a director and artist.
Joachim Sartorius will commemorate the great artist in his speech. Veerle Claus-de Wit will read Claus’s poems in Flemish, while Joachim Sartorius will read the German translations. Friedhelm Ptok will then read from Claus’s recently-translated major work “The Sorrow of Belgium”, which deals with Flemish collaboration with the Nazis.

_18:00_kaleidoscope
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Foyer

Eliot Weinberger (USA) in discussion with Ingo Schulze (Germany)
Eliot Weinberger „has apparently read, read about or seen with his own eyes practically everything on planet Earth” (“Multicultural Review”). His essays, both clever and poetic, know no boundaries. In his book “An Elemental Thing” the New Yorker writer writes about the stars, sea vortexes and Ezra Pound’s Vortex, about people named Chang, about Mohammad and Noah’s descendents in Iraq and Iran, about a princess and a Chinese court lady, about wrens, tropical birds, about tigers and a talking donkey …
In cooperation with Berenberg Verlag

_19.30_speak, memory
Literaturhaus | Großer Saal

Aimé Césaire: A Season in the Congo. A play about Patrice Lumumba and Return to my Native Land
Introduction: Anna Katharina Neufeld
Reader: Astrid Gorvin
André Breton judged Aimé Césaire’s “Return to my Native Land“ (1939) to be ”the greatest poetic monument of our time“. In 1965 Césaire – politician and founder of the négritude movement one of the 20th century’s most influential black poets – wrote a play, “black, political theatre”, as he said himself, about a freedom fighter who lost more than one battle. He wrote about the failure of independence, about the first Congolese prime minister who was assassinated in 1961.

_19.30_kaleidoscope
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Foyer

Kiran Nagarkar (India)
Presented by: Barbara Wahlster
Reader: Frank Arnold
Susanne Mayer wrote about Nagarkar in the weekly “Die Zeit”: “He is one of the boldest, most politically ablaze, sensuous, occasionally crazed and jet-black comic writers of the Indian continent”. The author – distinguished with the highest Indian award for literature – the Sahitya Academi Award –will read from two of his novels, “Ravan & Eddie” and “God’s Little Soldier”.

_20.00_reflections
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Große Bühne

Alice Schwarzer in discussion with Necla Kelek (Germany), with musical accompaniment by the group TAN
For her latest book, “Bittersüße Heimat. Bericht aus dem Inneren der Türkei”, Necla Kelek traveled from Istanbul to Kurdistan, in a country whose historical relevance and beauty one can barely escape. She tells of the fissures and ruptured mentalities, the political contradictions and social break-ups, but also of the people who do something to counter the core culture of Islam in its current form.

_20.45_Focus Africa
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Foyer

Binyavanga Wainaina (Kenya/USA)
Event cancelled

_21.00_kaleidoscope
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Seitenbühne

Jon Fosse (Norway)
Presented and read by: Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel
Jon Fosse, a Norwegian poet and storyteller who has become well known in Germany in recent years for his stage plays, will be introducing his new novella “Sleepless”: “Asle and Alida walked around in the streets of Bjørgvin, Asle carried two bundles over her shoulders with all of her belongings, and in her hand she held her fiddle case with the fiddle she had inherited from Sigvald, her father…”

_21.30_speak, memory
Literaturhaus | Großer Saal

Naguib Mahfuz: Children of Gebelawi
Introduction: Anna Katharina Neufeld
Reader: Frank Arnold
”The story perhaps originated in dreams and desires. Be that as it may [...] There are so many motives for recounting the history of our area!” In “Children of Gebelawi”, the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfuz (1911-2006) forges his own narrative style, which can be read as a parable of human history. The novel is controversial, publishing was stopped, and the work, which appeared for the first time in 1959, was only published in Arabic in 2006.

_22:00_kaleidoscope
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Foyer

Zlatko Krasni (Serbia)
In 2006 Zlatko Krasni was a guest of the Literary Colloquium at Wannsee. The author has since compiled a book from his recordings of it, complete with excerpts from his diary, which he wrote during his studies at Humboldt University in 1973-74. Krasni has invited several of the writers and intellectuals who appear in these Berlin sketches this evening: among others, Volker Braun, Ulrich Janetzki, Michael Speier and Joachim Sartorius will be reading from Krasni’s observations about themselves.