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2 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 2 AUGUST 2026 BOOKS Poetry opens a space where emotions can be voiced and silence safeguarded Nadia Mifsud interviews Claire Lajus in the run-up to the 2026 edition of Inizjamed's Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival NM: Claire, you are French, yet you live and teach in Is- tanbul. You have translated around ten books from Turk- ish into French. You have also founded the online journal Ay- na, which means "mirror", to promote contemporary Turk- ish poetry in the French-speak- ing world. Would you say that your writing and your connec- tion to Turkey and the Turkish language mirror one another — and if so, how? CL: I founded Ayna in 2013, when I returned from Turkey af- ter six years there, because I real- ised contemporary Turkish poet- ry was barely being published in French. Since 2008, I had been translating the Turkish poets in- vited to the Voix Vives festival in Sète, so I decided to share their work more widely through a free online journal. Since then, I've continued adding new content. Reading Turkish poetry intro- duced me to new voices, but it didn't necessarily influence my own writing. Living in Turkey, however, did — and still does. Some poems were born direct- ly from something I saw or felt there, and certain motifs keep re- turning in my work. One exam- ple is the fig tree… I'm also fin- ishing a series of poetic texts on Istanbul, and I've written a novel, still unpublished, set in Turkey. NM: On the Versopolis web- site, you speak of writing as a necessity. Where does this necessity come from? Are you driven by the same necessity, whatever the genre, or does po- etry respond to a more urgent call? CL: Writing is a necessity for me — publication is not. That is why I only began publishing after turning thirty. Poetry has been my compass since high school. It helps me understand the world, the people around me and my own self. It opens a space where emotions can be voiced and si- lence safeguarded. It offers a re- sponse—never final, always to be reshaped—to the questions we have had to confront in our lives, especially in childhood. It rises from an initial wound, from the sharp awareness of a certain fragility that shapes the way each of us inhabits the world, and that gives all of us the same need to transform and sculpt our reality. My poems have become mark- ers in retrospect, milestones that chart my life and allow me to re- member. The "I" appeared late in my writing; mine is a gaze-ori- ented poetry, turned outward. Like all poets, I have themes that preoccupy me more than others: time, the fragility of all things, nature, suffering, the difficulty of inhabiting the world, the beauty of living things… Publishing has allowed me to join different publishing houses, meet poets who have become friends, create or take part in projects, travel to festivals and meet writers from all over the globe, as with the Malta Mediter- ranean Literature Festival, where I'm delighted to be invited and translated into Maltese. I wanted to write a novel be- cause I wanted to tell a story. It's a very particular exercise — the rhythm is different, it's a different way of saying things. In a novel, I can use humour, which isn't present in my poems. NM: In the chapbook that In- izjamed is publishing in collab- oration with Versopolis, there is a poem titled "Chorus – City of Palmyra". This text stems from the beheading of Syrian archaeologist Dr. Khaled al- Asaad by ISIS militants on 18 August 2025, in front of the mu- seum where he had worked for more than fifty years. Despite being tortured for a month, the 81-year-old scholar refused to reveal where the museum's treasures were hidden. In an- other poem, "The Refugee's Song", you evoke the hardships faced by those "caught in the great migration's trap." What can literature — and especially poetry — do in an increasingly uncertain geopolitical land- scape? CL: A poem can give courage, through gentleness or anger. It can spark something, express what we would have wanted to say but couldn't. A poem is the testimony of an emotion, a scene, a moment of life. Poetry's place is insignificant in our capitalist world, and everything is done to keep it that way, I think, because poetry has real subversive pow- er. It reminds us of our freedom and our singularity. The tragedy of the Syrian war affected me deeply, because I know the his- tory of that region well and feel close to it; I couldn't just watch from afar. And it seemed to me to embody the whole of human tragedy which, sadly, repeats itself throughout history. I felt compelled to give my voice to this tragedy by writing a tragedy of my own, in the form of chants. NM: Your poems also explore intimate themes, such as illness and heartbreak, which you ap- proach with modesty and a stripped-down language. What moves me most is your trust in everything that surrounds us, everything that goes beyond human experience. In "talis- man", a pebble "[tells you] non- stop / must hold on / hold on." In "simple sometimes", you write: "you are one with gal- axies / and all underground." In your universe, there's the sea, the mountains, landscapes unfolding. We encounter seagulls, wagtails, swallows, thrushes, flying ants… One of my favourite poems is "to be in the world", in which you write: "we should gauge our own weight / by the grandeur of the living / observe the cycles that revolve according to their se- cret / mechanisms listen to the metronome that beats differ- ently / than our pulse / see that everything fits / with and with- out us." In these lines, I sense something close to Nâzım Hikmet's way of looking at the world — one of the major fig- ures of Turkish literature and a poet you've translated. What do you think of this reading of your work? CL: Thank you for your reading — I'm deeply touched by it. Writ- ing is a solitary practice, so one is never sure that the emotion in the poems is strong enough to reach readers. Over time, I've allowed myself to speak about myself, to lay myself bare. But my life is in no way more interesting than anyone else's. What's in- teresting is what it reveals about what's universal. I tend to move from the micro to the macro, to zoom in and then pull back. I've always done that; I don't really know why. It's true that in this sense, I belong to the tradition of Nâzım Hikmet, Pablo Neru- da, Paul Éluard, Andrée Chedid — poets I love deeply. Inscribing small stories into history, be- lieving in humanity, cherishing beauty, cherishing life. "Living is no laughing matter," says Nâzım Hikmet, "you must take it seri- ously." That is what I try to do when I am writing. The 21st edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Fes- tival will feature seven leading authors from six different coun- tries: Jen Calleja (United King- dom), Claire Lajus (France), Karl Schembri (Malta/Kenya), Keith Borg (Malta), Hamed Aboud (Syria), Rosaria Lo Russo (Italy), and Batool Abu Akleen (Pales- tine/France). The Festival, or- ganised by Inizjamed, will be held between Tuesday 25th and Saturday 29th August 2026. This edition is being held in partnership with the Malta Arts Council and with the support of Versopolis. The Festival is col- laborating with Spazju Kreattiv and also has the support of APS Bank, Għaqda tal-Malti — Uni- versità, Istituto Italiano di Cul- tura di La Valletta, The Data Knitters, Merlin Publishers, Mer- lin Library, Notarial Archives Foundation, and Teatru Sales- jan. For more information fol- low us on Facebook, Instagram, and Inizjamed's website www. inizjamed.org Claire Lajus