Foreword (English) We write from a place that came before us.
A place where the word took shape, where the sign became memory, where humanity, for the first time, tried to speak itself into the world. Mesopotamia is not merely a land between two rivers; it is a threshold, a beginning, an ancient breath still alive within our words.
Between the Tigris and the Euphrates, humankind learned to name day and night, law and dream, fear and hope. It learned to inscribe its trace not only in sand, but in time. To write about Mesopotamia today is therefore to write from a source, from an origin where history and myth once walked hand in hand.
This anthology was born from the desire to let the voices of the present converse with the echo of the first steps of human thought. We come from many horizons, from diverse
cultures and distant languages, yet a single memory brings us together: that of a humanity that seeks, doubts, hopes, and rises through the power of the spoken and written word.
Here, the poems and texts do not claim to rebuild vanished stones or resurrect buried cities. Rather, they strive to awaken what these lands have sown within us: meaning, questioning, longing, fragility, and that intimate light that urges human beings to create, even at the heart of impermanence.
Mesopotamia thus becomes more than a place: it becomes a symbol. The symbol of the birth of consciousness, of the passage from instinct to thought, from silence to speech. It reminds us that every civilization begins with a breath and is carried forward by a voice.
Through this anthology, we offer not only texts, but a path. A journey between past and present, between memory and creation, between what once was and what continues to arise within us. May the reader find here not ready-made answers, but a space to feel, to question, and perhaps to remember what they, too, carry from the origins.
For to write about Mesopotamia is, in truth, to write about humanity itself.
Khalice Jade / Saliha RagadAlgiers 2026.
