A New Action for “No Jail Can Confine Your Poem”: Lecture and Workshop to Celebrate the Publication of Collected Poems of an Afghan Poet

We are proud to tell you that we held a lecture and workshop to celebrate the publication of Madness of Geography in My Veins: Collected Poems of Somaia Ramish translated into Japanese, at Faculty of Letters, Chuo University on January 8th 2025.

Akira Okawada, a poet, critic, and lecturer of Tokai University and a translator and editor of the book was invited to the class of Professor Miwa Ota, giving a lecture titled “Possibility of Protest by Poems: About Madness of Geography in My Veins: Collected Poems of Somaia Ramish.”

Somaia Ramish is an Afghan poet in exile who founded BaamDaad, or House of Poetry in Exile and asked poets all over the world to unite and protest against the prohibition of poetry in Afghanistan. This poetic movement has developed into worldwide movement, publishing of the book titled No Jail Can Confine Your Poem in Japan, France, Netherland, and holding assemblies of poetry reading face-to-face and online.

Okawada tells students how to read a poem by taking the seventh poem by Somaia Ramish as an example, referring to mimesis by Erich Auerbach. Next, Okawada and Ota take turns reading Somaia Ramish’s twenty pieces of poems aloud while they walked in the classroom. And then Okawada asked all students and external attendees to pick up one poem and make a short comment. At first students seemed nervous, but gradually expressed their views of the poem in their own words. The classroom turned into a poetic space filled with words of poems and words about poems. Finally, Okawada encouraged students to see the world from the viewpoint of “planetarity” as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak put it.

We would like to express our gratitude to those who attended the lecture and workshop and those who were interested in the event. Thank you very much.