The Karachi Literature Festival, located in Pakistan’s largest city with nearly 15 million residents, might not be a prominent feature in the international literary scene. However, the recent invitation, and subsequent disinvitation, of German author Ronya Othmann reflects the heightened tension pervading the cultural and literary worlds due to the Gaza war.
The literature festival, in partnership with the Goethe Institute, had invited Othmann, born in Munich in 1993, to Karachi. Her agenda included presenting her novel “The Summers” and a selection of her poetry. Othmann had already arrived in Pakistan, following a performance in Sri Lanka, when the festival organizers received an open letter from a feminist collective.
Withdrawal of the Moderator
The collective expressed its shock at Othmann’s invitation, citing her supposed “Zionist” and “Islamophobic” stances, and her previous discussions that allegedly aimed to “discredit pro-Palestinian protests in Germany as anti-Semitic and Islamist.”
So what was the festival’s response? They cancelled Ronya Othmann’s appearance after presenter Claire Chambers from the University of York withdrew. Othmann also had to change hotels for safety reasons. The open letter specifically mentioned two of Othmann’s columns. In the “taz”, she reportedly labelled Muslim immigrants and pro-Palestinian sympathizers as “jihadists” and “terrorists”. In the “FAZ”, she purportedly reinforced “the degrading, racist, and deeply dehumanizing Israeli narrative” that Hamas uses Gaza’s residents as “human shields” to justify “Israel’s genocide” as “legitimate self-defense”.
Critic of BDS
Perusing the letter, it becomes challenging to comprehend Othmann’s other alleged missteps, such as her criticism of BDS and her signing of a statement titled “Artists Against Anti-Semitism”. It’s almost a given that the letter, which now boasts signatures from almost five hundred academics, activists, authors, and other cultural workers from the region, repeatedly mentions Israel’s “genocide” but fails to mention Hamas’s atrocities. The letter acknowledges “the importance of KLF as a space for literary and intellectual discourse in a deeply polarized country”, but asserts that they cannot remain ‘neutral’ in the face of Israel’s violent dispossession and genocide of Palestinians.
My great-grandfather was murdered because he refused to convert to Islam.”
Ronya Othmann in her novel “Seventy-Four”
Ironically, Ronya Othmann could have enriched this discourse in a predominantly Islamic country that frequently experiences radical Islamist attacks. In a “taz” piece in 2020, the author wrote: “All Islamism threatens our society. Islamism, not Islam. One is ideology, the other is religion.”
Yazidi Descendant
Othmann is the daughter of a Yazidi and Kurd, born in northeastern Syria, who fled to Germany after 1980. Her grandparents and other relatives barely escaped the genocide committed by IS against the Yazidis in Shingal, Iraq, in 2014.
Othmann chronicled these events in her debut novel “The Summer”. Her upcoming novel “Seventy-Four,” scheduled for release in mid-March, delves even deeper into the Yazidis’ history before and after 2014. The author frequently discusses her visits to her father’s homeland: “This is the landscape where my grandparents grew up. Owning this fertile green land signified wealth. (…) It also happens to be the landscape where my great-grandfather was murdered for being an Ezidi. And for refusing to convert to Islam.”
Over the weekend, Othmann told the “FAZ” that she writes from a Yazidi viewpoint about “Islamist continuities and rape as a weapon of war.” It seems that this was a conversation people in Karachi weren’t ready to have.
