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A cheerfully smiling black man with a bald head and short gray beard wears a purple wool sweater with a leaf pattern against a black background. Next to the photo is the book cover of the reading, a pink-yellow-green gradient.
© Phil Dera
A cheerfully smiling black man with a bald head and short gray beard wears a purple wool sweater with a leaf pattern against a black background. Next to the photo is the book cover of the reading, a pink-yellow-green gradient.
© Phil Dera

Diasporic Echoes im Avant-Garten

Reading: Musa Okwonga "In The End, It Was All About Love" / Concert: Maxym Pustovit "Unihorn"

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Thursday

8/18/22

6:30 PM

At 18:30 (Reading in English) Musa Okwonga's touching essay »In The End, It Was All About Love« (to be published in German by Mairisch Verlag in autumn) tells of what it is like to find one's way as a Black man in Berlin and to reconcile one's past, present and future. The protagonist arrives in Berlin to find peace and perhaps love in the city known for both its hedonism and cosmopolitanism; only to find that the problems that have long haunted him have also arrived there. As he approaches his fortieth birthday, and with it the age at which his father was brutally killed in Uganda, he drifts through Berlin, through its slow days and bottomless nights, wondering if he will ever escape the trauma left by his father's death. As the world at large becomes more uncertain, Okwonga tells of loneliness, loss, fears and self-acceptance. The episodic structure mimics the kind of brief encounters that seem so characteristic of the narrator's life in Berlin. Through the use of the second person, readers experience the world intimately through the protagonist's eyes. Okwonga's narration is »precise and all-encompassing in one sentence. His poetry is intimate and wise, passionate and beautiful« (Kate Tempest). »In The End, It Was All About Love« is an honest tale about love, sexuality and spirituality; about racism, dating and alienation, and about escaping the greatest possible pain. It is also a declaration of love for Okwonga's adopted home of Berlin - tense, stormy and yet characterised by affection through and through.

Musa Okwonga, born in London in 1979, is a British-Ugandan writer, journalist and musician. He has written numerous essays and articles on culture, racism, gender, music, sport, politics and technology. His texts appear in The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent, The New Statesman and The New York Times, among others, as well as in Die Zeit and taz. He has also published two books on football, volume of poetry and his personal account of his time at the UK’s most prestigious school Eton College. He has lived in Berlin-Friedrichshain since 2014.

At 20:30 The jazz trumpeter and composer Maxym Pustovit toured the world before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Since then he has been living in Hamburg. With UNIHORN he presents virtuoso sounds between jazz lounge and deep house.


A three-week series of events brings together diasporic voices at the Waldbühne with readings and concerts.

The war in Ukraine resulted in a wave of solidarity and an openness to welcome people fleeing from this war. Because we love this energy and want it for all those who have to leave their homeland, every Thursday to Saturday the Summer Festival, in cooperation with the ZEIT Foundation and NDR, presents authors and musicians and their stories about times of upheaval and displacement, of the search for belonging and empowerment, and of global political and family entanglements. Each evening begins with a reading, including a discussion with the authors and NDR journalists, and continues with acoustic concerts in a small setting (programmed by Anas Aboura und Alexei Volinchik).


Reading: Musa Okwonga

Talk: Musa Okwonga, Yolanda Rother (Moderation)

FUNDED BY ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius

IN COOPERATION with NDR Kultur