There are poets who speak of exile, and poets who inhabit it—who turn exile into the very syntax of breath.
Amal Al-Jubouri and Stephen Watts belong to this latter lineage: both have lived and written at the porous edge where language becomes a homeland, and poetry becomes the only surviving passport.
In Then I Survived, the Iraqi poet writes from within the furnace of betrayal and disillusionment. Her words emerge from that “black box with no windows,” the archive of memory where each syllable is both wound and witness. Exile, for Al-Jubouri, is not geographical—it is ontological. It begins when trust collapses and the poet discovers that betrayal speaks all dialects, East and West alike. Yet she survives through language itself: “only words remained with me.” Poetry becomes the pulse that refuses extinction.
Stephen Watts, writing from London’s East End, walks the same territory in quieter footsteps. His book The Republics listens to the displaced voices of Europe—the Albanian mother, the Somali child, the Kurdish refugee—each carrying the faint hum of a homeland erased. Watts’s poetics are tenderly polyphonic: his English trembles with foreign music. Where Al-Jubouri’s fire scorches, Watts’s light diffuses; yet both ignite the same truth—that to be human is to be perpetually translated.
Al-Jubouri’s poem Exilismus extends the cry into philosophy. Here she names exile as a collective condition: a civilization of poets breathing underwater, writing “to whisper No through the cloak of the poem.” In her vision, exile has devoured even poetry’s purity; the poem itself becomes suspect, recruited by politics, rewarded by markets, sterilized by awards. The lyric turns into reportage, the poet into a reluctant informant. What survives is the voice that still dares to grieve.
Watts too understands this corruption of speech. His minimalist diction resists the noise of commodified suffering. In his lines, language is pared down to breath and compassion—“the kindness of strangers / is all that keeps us.” If Al-Jubouri’s exiled self burns toward revelation, Watts’s voice listens toward healing. Together, they form the two wings of one exilic bird: fire and air.
Both poets challenge the myth of belonging. For Al-Jubouri, home is not Baghdad, Berlin, or London; it is the sentence that saves her. For Watts, home is a listening so radical that it dissolves borders. Each reveals that exile, paradoxically, births the most authentic communion: when one has lost everything, one can finally hear everyone.
Their meeting point lies in endurance as art. Al-Jubouri’s “Then I Survived” is an anatomy of moral resilience; Watts’s Journeys Across Breath is an anatomy of gentleness. Both re-humanize the migrant condition, rescuing it from the abstractions of news and politics. They remind us that exile is not a metaphor but a metabolism—a way the body learns to breathe without air.
In a world where poetry is often instrumentalized—as identity marker, as marketable trauma—these two poets reclaim its sacred uselessness. “Poetry became everything—and nothing,” writes Al-Jubouri. Yet within that nothing, the ember of meaning glows. It is the nothing that outlasts empires.
Then I Survived ends not with triumph but with lucidity: the poet recognizes that even the West’s promise of freedom conceals new prisons of hypocrisy. Likewise, Watts’s quiet republics teach us that survival is not victory; it is the slow labor of tenderness, the ethics of remaining open when history demands hardness.
Their shared credo might be summed up thus: to survive is to continue singing, even when no one listens; to write is to remember the unheard. In the convergence of their voices, exile ceases to be a punishment and becomes a pilgrimage—a journey from illusion to insight.
And so the poem survives, not as monument but as breath, carrying forward the memory of what humanity still could be.