The Little Smuggler is a poetic sequence drawn from the memories of a young Kurdish boy who lives in the borderlands between Syria and Turkey. Forced to smuggle essential goods for his family, he tells of barbed wire, mines, soldiers, wounded landscapes, and the fragile courage of childhood shaped by war. His short prose-poems reveal how a child learns to move between danger and hope, carrying not only small items across the border but also the weight of a divided homeland.
The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Symbiotic Futures – Ecopoetics in the Age of Extinction, Unruly Forms – Experiments in the Poetic Wild.
Author
Abdulkadir Musa
Abdulkadir Musa is a poet and translator. He studied French and literature at the University of Aleppo and social work at the ASH Berlin. He works as a social worker, translator, and cultural advisor. His poetry collection Your Wings Have Taught Me to Fly (Semakurd, Dubai 2007 and AR, Istanbul 2013) was published in Kurdish and has been translated into German, Spanish, French, English, Polish, and Arabic. In 2017 he published a Kurdish-English poetry anthology Kurdish Voices from Rojava, (Inner Child Press, Ltd. USA) in collaboration with Katarzyna Sala. In 2018 he received a grant for non-German authors from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe for his new project in Kurdish, “The fleeing head and the frightened pillow that has nightmares.
