Simone Khanyi Hadebe

As part of our Writing the Self, Writing Berlin series, editorial intern Divya Ghelani spoke with Siddhartha Lokanandi, who runs Hopscotch Reading Room, a Berlin-based English-language bookshop he founded in 2017. A haven for the intellectual – and political – bibliophile, Hopscotch is regarded as ‘an outlier of a bookstore’ in both its home city and beyond, for its intentional centring of non-Western, anti-racist, Global South, and anti-colonial perspectives, as well as minor literatures.

This World Poetry Day, we are sharing poems by Fatimah Asghar that speak to multiple communities, geographies, and crises in our world — where solidarities flower in beauty salons, ICE trucks cluster, grandmothers pray, empires collapse, and fists pulse. The poems thread rhythmically through equally horrifying and tender, grandiose and soft everyday images, nurturing resonances between our varied personal, communal, and political experiences. With an illustration by Simone Khanyi Hadebe.

Read two new poems by London-based poet Hasti, weaving together influences from Hafez to alternative hip-hop, Black poetry, and Iranian cinema. Titled 'Future-La' and 'Yek Atash', these vulnerable poems see the speaker absorbing unfathomable turbulent change in a world where 'we've hewn a home ... in empire's gut'. With an illustration by Simone Khanyi Hadebe.

For the Venezuelan poet Adalber Salas Hernández, 'poems are not unlike the microorganisms that act as his diminutive muses,' writes his translator from Spanish, Arthur Malcolm Dixon. Four such poems are presented here in both languages, where the reader is immersed in imagery from the Bible alongside observations of tiny living forms. Accompanied by a translator's note from Dixon, these poems become a meditation on the complexities of life at both large and small scales, between the tangible and intangible.

Isabella Peralta, who is part Filipino and Spanish, grew up in the Philippines on a former US naval base, consuming delightful varieties of Filipino foods and American media. In this evocative piece of life writing, she reminisces about her year working in Madrid, finding a sense of familiarity in instant ramen and an East Asian supermarket — a common, comforting presence for Asians living in global metropolitan cities. In the face of homesickness, dislocation, and growing anti-Asian sentiment, Peralta's experiences as an ethnically ambiguous, hybrid Filipino woman in Spain reflect how foods, objects, memories, smells, and tastes can furnish a sense of home across racial, linguistic, and geographical barriers. With an illustration by Simone Khanyi Hadebe.