Photo Credit: Makar Artemev
Upon arriving in a country where you don’t speak the language, life takes on a dreamlike quality. The sounds and smells are new, the sun rises and sets at different intervals. Utterances, letters and their arrangements don’t unfurl into meaning. The experience is enthralling and disorienting. It can also be deeply lonely, drawing into sharp relief the degree to which our experience is mediated by what we know – how relocating ourselves dislocates any stable sense of self we might have.
The French word étranger means both ‘foreigner’ and ‘stranger’. So it’s no wonder that poetry draws in those who grapple with the strangeness of living as an immigrant in Berlin: the longing for a language that can handle the fragmented nature of existence, the struggle to understand and be understood, searching under stones for the locus of meaning and just finding more stones. Yet in poetry, this process isn’t the problem. It’s the point.
Tracy Fuad introduces readers and writers alike to poetry that troubles and emulsifies the experience of otherness. As a Berlin-based poet and teacher, she directs the Berlin Writer’s Workshop and is the author of four volumes of poetry, including about: blank (2021) and Portal (2024).
Photo Credit: Tracy Fuad
Fuad’s work explores the pieces, both material and immaterial, of which we are made: the substance, the memories, the words we speak and how they land. Her poems are mercurial and haunting, suffused with a desire for oneness that equally embraces the fragment. They document transits and translations – physical, spacial, digital, planetary – as a kind of dispossession and remaking.
Fuad’s workshops are organised around a weekly theme. Students analyse a few poems that she’s selected, then take turns workshopping their own. Though clearly a student of craft, Fuad doesn’t favour arduous formal constraints, nor does she insist that poems need to ‘make sense’ in order to have an impact. Indeed, her poetry syllabus brandishes the Mary Ruefle quote: “I believe that if a poem gives you pleasure, you have understood it.”
In person, Fuad is soft-spoken, at once hesitant and deliberate. She often pauses before talking, as if the stakes for getting the words right couldn’t be higher. Having grown up in suburban Minneapolis, she came to Berlin after spending two years teaching English in Kurdistan, her father’s homeland. “I visited Kurdistan for the first time in 2009,” she explains. “Before that, I hadn’t really thought so much about my Kurdish ancestry, and I wasn’t raised speaking Kurdish. Yet, I was always drawn to spend more time there and learn the language.”
Photo: Tracy Fuad
After finishing her MFA at Rutgers University, she sold all her belongings and moved to a rural village not far from where her father once lived. “I could see what my life would look like if I stayed in New York,” she explains. “I didn’t want to stay because it was the easiest thing to do.”
The poems in about: blank draw heavily on Fuad’s time in Kurdistan, tugging the threads of history, language and lineage until they begin to unravel. Translated fragments of Kurdish are juxtaposed with poetic musings and internet slang, becoming discursive fractals of interpretation. Grammatical constructions, such as the future perfect, become meditations on place and circumstance.
Poets are often die-hard etymology fans. We believe that the origin of the word has something to tell us about what it denotes, that the traces of its origins still bear some sort of meaning.
Much of this project is a longing to understand, both in a literal and a figurative sense. “I’ve spent considerable time and energy learning Kurdish and German,” says Fuad. “It has highlighted for me how profound it is to struggle toward mutual understanding. I think that’s part of the drive to write poetry: to try to articulate something that I find difficult to say.”
This drive toward understanding emboldens Fuad to approach language with both a microscope and a pickaxe, unearthing questions about the origin of things. Objects become vessels connecting us to history and its violence: 5,000-year-old archaeological shards found at Tell Sitak, buttons, flowers, gas canisters used in the Halabja Massacre of 1988 memorialised in a town square.
Objects and words share a restless trajectory. In Fuad’s poetry, even the word ‘object’ (Latin: ‘to throw against’) becomes a mechanism for reckoning with world-historical grief: “I’m looking to come to a compromise with my objects so we stop doing harm to one another— / But the stones here hum between wake and sleep, a soft ballad for home.”
“Poets are often die-hard etymology fans,” explains Fuad. “We believe that the origin of the word has something to tell us about what it denotes, that the traces of its origins still bear some sort of meaning.” But meaning is never static; it migrates, accumulates, transforms. This is particularly true in the digital age, when our objects and bodies are hurled and collapsed into flatness:
minted with a cheerful palm
belonging only to the isle of depreciated objects
typing…
it’s December and the blades of grass have scissored up the heartache
so receipts must be everywhere waiting for rain
I hunger for the tender of the ping
my fly loves it when I’m home
I say hi with a rolled book of songs
I dreamt in a new language, but couldn’t understand it
– from ‘The Pith of Every Language is a Rift’
Fuad’s second collection, Portal, is like a treatise on the relationship between embodiment and disembodiment. Reading it, you feel as though you’re entering someone else’s dream. In a series of poems called ‘Hyposubject’, the voice moves up and out of the body. Fuad says that, in these poems, she was imagining what a non-human intelligence might say about her life.
Berlin plays a starring role: its impromptu gatherings and lack of jobs, its feral apathy, its seemingly endless reminders of a severed and war-torn past. Fuad guides us through the city like a bewitched cartographer – out to picnics and into bathtubs, across stumbling stones and remnants of the Wall. This attentiveness is perhaps born of Fuad’s sense of otherness: “An unfamiliar place feels like a container for history,” she posits. “Perhaps being non-German and not having grown up here exacerbates the degree to which I’m confronted with the history here.”
The collection’s first poem, ‘Song’, depicts scenes from an apartment in Berlin where the narrator experiences a suspended state of permeability: the sound of opera singers two floors up, slugs brutalising the beans in the garden, the social media account of an estranged lover, the residues of the past one treads upon each day. And then, the baby enters the poem:
And the blighted beans
That I had planted
And the bricks
Laid into the street
Where the wall used to stand
Which I followed some mornings
As I walked alone
And the hands and feet
And the toes and fingers
Of my baby
As I saw them for the first time
And the singing—
That all of this
Was mine
Although it wasn’t.
There’s a sense in Fuad’s poems of trying to hold onto a thing that is already slipping away. Even having a child isn’t an experience of ownership, as it suggests, but that of something passing through you. “Your children are not your children,” writes the poet Kahlil Gibran. Instead, they are “life’s longing for itself”. Perhaps the act of creation is really about the porousness between life and not-life, possession and loss. Portal’s final poem, ‘Birth’, explodes this reality:
You were born in a brutalist building
Rising above a long body of water.
The body, a bypass canal.
You were born beneath six beaming spotlights.
Born of a sharpness, and set to music.
In the backroom, on a tablet, through a portal.
To have a child is a study in relinquishing control, and yet Fuad is grappling with something more transcendental: the extent to which we are integrated with our history, setting and those around us. “Our Western sensibility ignores how much we’re influenced by the people and environment around us,” she says. “I’ve been reading about social ecology lately, which is one of the guiding principles of Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish region. Social ecology disputes the binary and hierarchical relationship between humans and the environment around them – it insists on the interconnectivity between humans and our environment. It’s something that I feel we’ve lost in our society completely.”
One way Fuad ritualises the practice of interconnectivity is through teaching. After finding a home at the Berlin Writer’s Workshop as a teacher in 2021, she took over as director in 2024. “We’re a group of about 20 teachers, all working writers from different backgrounds,” she explains. “We offer workshops in English, but we also host meet-ups almost every month and organise readings. We tend to meet in teachers’ homes or in bookstores, so there’s a sort of intimate community that develops. And because it’s outside of a formal institution, everyone is there for the love of writing.”
Photo Credit: Tracy Fuad
Lately, it’s easy to be reminded of the malleability of truth, how agreeing on a coherent reality is no longer a given. So what does it mean for Fuad, in this historical moment, to sit in a room with a group of poets and ponder the weight of a poem? “For me, it actually feels like an act of resistance,” she says. “I’m not so interested in the poem itself as a site of resistance, or as a political tool, but I think the poetic mode of observing changes the relationship between us and the world around us. It’s a different mode of relation, and I think it brings us in deeper contact with the real.”
I’m not so interested in the poem itself as a site of resistance, or as a political tool, but I think the poetic mode of observing changes the relationship between us and the world around us.
“At the heart of poetry,” she adds, “is not the poem-as-product, but the poetic mode or poetic state. I’m working on an essay about the power of this poetic mode to bring us into a deeper and more authentic engagement with the world around us, not just as an observer in a subject-object relationship, but something more nuanced, less hierarchical, moving more toward an interconnectivity. I think this might be important or even essential in the present political context.”
The poet Adrienne Rich called poetry “the liquid voice that can wear through stone”. Perhaps, instead of always turning over stones looking for answers, we would each do well to find a voice that can wear through them. Or, better yet, to get quiet and listen to what they have to say.
Follow Tracy Fuad at @trace_of_tracy and the Berlin Writer’s Workshop at @writeberlin.
