Bilingual Arabic-French reading : Gaza ô ma joie (une poétesse en temps de guerre)

Reading

Saturday 20 September
16.00u - 17.00u

Price: Gratuit - Gratis - Free Language: Arabic - French Location: Petite Halle

with

Hend Jouda & Soukaïna Habiballah

Presentations

On stage, the intense, dignified presence of Hend Jouda, whose voice resonates with the multiple wars she has endured, is redoubled by the precise, infinitely gentle voice of Moroccan poet Soukaïna Habiballah, who performs the poems translated into French. Playing on their astonishing physical twinship, the two poetry sisters bring to the stage the hymn to life that is "Gaza ô ma joie".

What does it mean to be a poet in wartime is a poem written and published by Hend Jouda on his Facebook account in October 2023 during the massacres in Gaza. Iconic, immediately viral, translated into multiple languages. This is the fundamental question that the other poems in Gaza ô ma joie answer. They bear witness to the tragedy, terror and desolation, but also, perhaps surprisingly, to the inextinguishable thirst for life of the poetess, and of the Palestinians, a kind of paradoxical vital energy that has to be called joy.

This oratorio of women's voices, standing in the midst of tragedy and guardians of the vital flame, is a crossing from death to life, a passage from darkness to a fragile light, always threatened with extinction but fundamentally alive!

Excerpts from the collection Gaza ô ma joie, to be published in September 2025 by Héros-Limite :

Que signifie
être poète en temps de guerre

Cela signifie s'excuser
Abonder en excuses
Pour les arbres brûlés
Pour les oiseaux sans nids
Pour les maisons pulvérisées
Pour les longues crevasses aux flancs des rues
Pour les enfants pâles avant et après la mort
Et le visage de chaque mère triste
Ou tuée

Que signifie être en sécurité en temps de guerre
Cela signifie avoir honte
De ton sourire
De ta chaleur
De tes vêtements propres
De tes heures creuses
De ton bâillement
De ta tasse de café
De ton sommeil paisible
De tes proches toujours en vie
De ta satiété
De l'eau disponible
De l'eau potable
De la possibilité d’une douche
Du hasard d’être encore en vie

Oh mon Dieu
Je ne veux pas être poète en temps de guerre

Our speakers

Soukaina Habiballah

Moroccan poet and novelist born in Casablanca in 1989. She is the author of four collections of poetry, a novel and a collection of short stories. She has received several awards, including the 2015 Buland Al Haidari Prize for Arabic Poetry and the 2019 Nadine Shams Prize for Arab Screenwriters for her short film Who Left the Door Open? She is a two-time winner of the Creative Writing Fund AFAC. Her poems have been translated into French, English, German and Spanish.

Hend Jouda

Hend Jouda is a Palestinian poet living in Gaza, born in 1983 in the al-Bureij refugee camp. The author of poems and short stories published on numerous websites, she has also written numerous documentary scripts for which she does the voice dubbing. A radio producer, she works with Workers Radio in Gaza. She produced and presented the program Good Morning, Homeland for Radio Al-Hurriya in Gaza. She is editor-in-chief of Magazine 28 in Gaza. She won the Appreciation Prize by the Youth Ideas Association for her short stories and the Golden Prize at the Arab Youth Gathering Festival in Cairo. She has published two collections of poems, Toujours quelqu'un s'en va (2013) and Pas de sucre en ville (2017). An anthology in French translation will be published in September 2025 by Héros Limite, Geneva. She regularly posts poems on her Facebook page. She is currently a refugee with her family in Cairo.