Gaza o my joy

How to be a poet in wartime is a poem written and published by Hind Joudeh on her Facebook account in October 2023, at the height of the massacres in Gaza. Iconic, immediately viral, translated into multiple languages. This is the fundamental question around which revolve the other poems in the show, forming the backbone of it. They bear witness to the tragedy, terror and desolation, but also, perhaps surprisingly, to the poet's, and the Palestinians', inextinguishable thirst for life, a kind of paradoxical vital energy that has to be called joy.

On stage, the intense, dignified presence of Hend Jouda, whose voice resonates with the multiple wars she has endured, is redoubled by the precise, infinitely gentle voice of Moroccan poet Soukaina Habiballah, who performs the poems translated into English. Playing on their astonishing physical twinship, the two sisters in poetry bring to the stage the hymn to life that is Gaza o my joy.

This oratorio of women's voices, standing tall in tragedy and guardians of the flame of life, is a crossing from death to life, a passage from darkness to a fragile light, always threatened with extinction but fundamentally alive!