Tue,
17:30
Poetry Talk with No'u Revilla
How we shed & shed & never die
The aloha ʻāina poet No'u Revilla (born in Waihee-Waiehu, island of Maui) has published two chapbooks: Say Throne (TinFish Press 2011) and Permission to Make Digging Sounds (Salt Publishing 2019). Her first complete collection Ask the Brindled (Milkweed Editions 2022) garnered significant attention and was the winner of the National Poetry Series. “This is not poetry for the heart; this is poetry only for the gut,” wrote Brandy Nālani McDougall, the Poet Laureate of Hawaii.
No'u Revilla’s work repeatedly engages with gender and transformation, as well as colonial violence—for instance in the central piece How to swallow a colonizer. She adopts a distinctly queer perspective, which she emphatically frames as a position of resistance: “A wasp’s nest is growing where my heart should be,” reads one of the poems. Frequently incorporating Hawaiian terms and concepts, her work includes the subversive Hawaiian deity Maui and references to the sacred island Kahoʻolawe, which was devastated by U.S. military testing. In this way, she reclaims suppressed narratives as an act of reappropriation, endeavoring on a process of decolonialization, also at a linguistic level. The poem Don't have sex with Gods suggests: “ʻĀina will fuck back”—where ʻĀina signifies humans’ connection to nature. No'u Revilla is deeply influenced by the poet and activist Haunani-Kay Trask, a pivotal figure in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, who died in 2021.
No'u Revilla in conversation with her translator Rike Scheffler
All the poems presented at the event have been especially translated for Poesiefestival Berlin.
The event will be interpreted into English and German. Kindly supported by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.
The event takes place at silent green's Atelierraum.
-
Location:
silent green
Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin
-
Admission:
9/7 €
- → Book tickets