Sholeh Rezazadeh
& Ish Ait Hamou

Mixed identities

In The Time of Our Singing, the multi-ethnic and multicultural marriage of an Afro-American woman and a German-Jew results in a complex identity experience for their children: ‘being mixed’. Where can you feel at home when you have roots in different places? Doesn’t ‘mixed’ simply mean ‘double’, or does it spell ‘conflict’? And to what extent do your roots determine your identity? These are questions that surface in the work of the Dutch-Iranian writer Sholeh Rezazadeh and the Vilvoorde dancer cum choreographer and author Ish Ait Hamou. Passa Porta brings them together in a literary encounter, in which they read from their work and explore the role identity and origin play in it.

Sholeh Rezazadeh came to the Netherlands from Iran in 2015. Five years later she released her literary debut De hemel is altijd paars (The Sky Is Always Purple) in the language of her new home country, and instantly won two literary awards. Her second novel Ik ken een berg die op me wacht (I Know A Mountain Waiting For Me) received a special mention from the European Union Prize for Literature. Her first collection of poems will be released in September 2024.

Belgian dancer and choreographer Ish Ait Hamou made a notable entrance on the literary scene in 2014 with his debut novel Hard hart (Hard Heart). He has published four more successful novels since then, and in 2023 he released De theorie van de 1 of 2 (The Theory of the 1 or 2), a book in which he comes to terms with the demons from his past.