UNIVERSEN: Poetic Justice mit Raphaëlle Red

In the organizer's words:

In the Poetic Justice literary series, Bachmann Audience Award winner Necati Öziri invites authors into the living room of universes. The guiding question of this series for the invited authors is: What influenced, accompanied, moved them when writing the text? A photo, a song, a movie, another text, a memory, a dish, a street corner or something completely different? Together with the authors, we want to create an archive of political inspiration and invite you to Çay and Çekirdek.

In November, Raphaëlle Red takes a seat in the living room of the universes with her recently published debut novel Adikou.

In Adikou, Raphaëlle Red writes about the phantoms of the past, about shame and anger and about what it means to be with oneself:
Adikou's origins are hazy, the traces of her family history are blurred, she doesn't even know how to pronounce her name correctly. Then, one oppressively hot summer, she can no longer stand it in Paris. Adikou flies to Lomé, Togo, the place of origin of her father, whom she does not know. She is not sure what she is looking for, the questions are constantly being asked by others, at passport control, in the Lomé snack bars, in the accommodation: who is your father, are you white or black or both, how does it feel to travel alone as a woman, do you speak Éwé, are you a journalist, what are you looking for here? From Togo, Adikou travels along the West African coast to the USA. She creates a legacy of snakeskins, skylines and sticky nights, exploring history and stories, past and present - until she can listen to the words of her missing father.

Raphaëlle Red was born in Paris in 1997, grew up in Germany and currently lives in Berlin. She first studied social sciences, then literature and graduated in 2020 with a master's degree in literary writing from the Université Paris VIII. She is currently researching contemporary literature of the African diaspora at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Her texts have been published in French (Jef Klak, L'Humanité), English (gal-dem, The Funambulist) and German (Bella Triste, anthologies Resonanzen and Glückwunsch). Adikou is her debut novel.

Necati Öziri, born in one of the many gray corners of the Ruhr area ("Hell, hell, hell!"), studied philosophy, German studies and contemporary German literature in Bochum, Istanbul and Berlin. He lives his third life in Berlin, writes, does theater and sometimes goes all Intelelli, for which his sixteen-year-old self would probably give him a slap. Of course, everything in his texts is true. Öziri was a scholarship holder of the Heinrich Böll Foundation and taught formal logic at the Ruhr University in Bochum until he realized that logic doesn't describe the world very well. Since then, he has tried to write not about how the world is, but how it feels. He is a fierce enemy of coldness, lactose and short biographies.
As a playwright, he writes for the Maxim Gorki Theater, the Nationaltheater Mannheim and the Schauspielhaus Zürich. Öziri regularly meets up with old versions of himself, they sit on the floor of offices leafing through exercise books full of coffee stains and waiting (for what?) or they chill on benches at the train station and offer him a joint. At the 45th Days of German-Language Literature (Ingeborg Bachmann Prize), he won the Kelag Prize and the Audience Award.