Yahya Hassan: Digte

"He came from the ghetto in Aarhus and had spent most of his childhood and youth in and out of institutions. He had a criminal background, he also had a background of writing rap lyrics and more than anything what is important for us: he was—and is—extremely talented as a poet. He was 18 when his poems were published and they blew us away. The fuss is about him being the most original, talented, vocal poet we have seen for decades. He came from a place nobody expected, he mixed other traditions in his language, he gave voice to a generation and a population that was never heard. There was no compromise in his poetry, there was no sense of future, and thinking back it was the lack of future that made Yahya Hassan’s poetry burn from the pages like something we hadn’t seen burn in Danish literature for a long while back then. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And then of course it became political, because Yahya Hassan was attacking his own background as well as the ethnic Danes, the hypocrites on all sides were getting beaten up by this young desperado. It was quite a debut! He’s vocal, he sometimes chants his poetry; a trend that is a little too used in Danish literature, if you ask me, and that he was of course inspired by, but he chants in a way that almost sounds like the imam of the local mosque. But there the resemblance stopped because he was not chanting what imam’s might be chanting. Far off. There’s also some rap tradition in his voice and he writes in capitals. LIKE THIS! AS IF HE’S SCREAMING! IN YOUR FACE!"