We’re super excited to be able to share the recording of an evening of readings by poet and activist-scholar Nat Raha and novelist Sulaiman Addonia. It took place at our space in Brussels on 7th of December 2024.
Nat raha read excerpts from her most recent book apparitions (nines) and Sulaiman Addonia invited simon asencio to read an excerpt from his novel The Seers. the evening concluded with a conversation between the authors.
About apparitions (nines)
Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.
About Nat Raha
Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (2018), countersonnets (2013), and Octet (2010). Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems (2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018), and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, amongst others. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.
About The Seers
Suliaiman addonia’s The Seers follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are.
About Sulaiman Addonia
Sulaiman Addonia is a British-Eritrean-Ethiopian author based in Belgium. His novels, The Consequences of Love (2008) and Silence is My Mother Tongue (2019), have been translated into more than twenty languages. Silence is My Mother Tongue was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards, the Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, and the African Literary Award from the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. He currently lives in Brussels, where he has launched a Creative Writing Academy for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, as well as the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile). In 2021, he was awarded Belgium’s Golden Afro-Art Prize for Literature, and in 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Enjoy!