Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Back to Basics program / SEPTEMBER 2022
Martine van Bijlert
Netherlands
www.martinevanbijlert.com
About
I’m a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer, who grew up in Iran
and now lives in the Netherlands. In between, I worked as an
aid worker, researcher and diplomat, mostly in Afghanistan.
Last year’s collapse of the Kabul government pulled me back
into a period of intense political reporting, which I’m just
coming out of, while I kept writing poetry and started a series
of hybrid essays.
Lately, I’ve been looking into gender fluidity and storytelling,
documentary poetics, auto-ethnography, the limitations of
empathy, and abstractions like ‘cultures of circulation.’
I’m bringing my notes and my cameras, and am looking
forward to finding out what life looks like without Google.
words / images / thought
The hollow lit-up globe over the kitchen table with the names
of the world in Finnish / makes me want to hold a map / the
ridge of trees / I trace its contours, track its colours as they
change / there’s silence here and I am in it / thoughts come in
the form of questions / finding myself in front of a bookshelf
muttering: I don’t know what to do / missing hard work but
not missing the exhaustion / taking home twenty little books
in different stages of being made / like weathered objects /
like a tahwiz / the first about destruction, the second about
a hanging / a third has turned its writing around / and the
clouds are lit and the rock is covered in a forest of moss /
plant matter determined to belong anywhere / and we’ve
been slowly turning our faces home / emptying, returning,
giving back what we borrowed / ready not ready but ready.