Yousif M. Qasmiyeh's Writing The Camp is an exceptional, essential collection drawn from the poet's experience of the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon. The poetry moves beyond the observational into a philosophical meditation on the existential nature of place. Qasmiyeh asks "Where is time?", crossing footprints of Derrida, "To experience is to advance by navigating, to walk by traversing". Writing The Camp is a brave and beautiful work, one which will surely be of historical importance.
Yousif M. Qasmiyeh was born and educated in Baddawi refugee camp in North Lebanon. He is currently completing a DPhil on containment and the archive in ‘refugee writing’ at the University of Oxford’s English Faculty. Time, the body, and ruination inform his poetry and prose, which have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Stand, Critical Quarterly, GeoHumanities, Humanities, and Cambridge Literary Review. Yousif is Creative Encounters Editor of the Migration and Society journal, Writer-in-Residence of the Refugee Hosts research project, and Joint Lead of the Imagining Futures Baddawi Camp Lab.
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