Ever Since I Did Not Die

Ramy Al-Asheq is a Berlin-based Syrian-Palestinian poet, journalist and curator. He has published five poetry collections in Arabic, and many of his texts have been translated into Bosnian, Czech, English, French, German, Kurdish, Polish, and Spanish. He launched the German-Arabic magazine FANN in 2017 and was recently selected as a fellow at the Academy of Arts in Berlin and Academy Schloss Solitude. Isis Nusair is associate professor of international studies and women’s and gender Studies at Denison University, Ohio. Levi Thompson is assistant professor of Arabic at the University of Colorado–Boulder, where he teaches courses on Middle Eastern literature and culture.

"[Al-Asheq's] is the voice of a survivor who knows he didn’t deserve to live more than anyone else, and who for that reason insists, passionately and with flashes of dark humor, on the value of life and love, of a naked humanity beyond any national affiliation. He rejects ideologies, identities, pieties, and the very idea of heroism. Over a heroic death, he chooses life and fear, 'the most honest feeling I’ve known and a sincere friend.' He also tries to lay to rest the traditional refugee narrative: a neat arc of suffering, survival, and salvation. For Al-Asheq and many others, living in Berlin is not a happy ending, or an ending at all. He is still trying to come to grips with his past without turning it into a sob story for Western consumption."

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