Olivia Elias has published three collections of poetry in French. The first two have already been translated into English: Chaos, Crossing, by Kareem James Abu-Zeid (World Poetry Books, 2022) and Your Name, Palestine, by Sarah Riggs and myself (World Poetry Books, 2023). I am currently finishing the translation of her third book, Ce Mont qui regarde la mer (This Mount Overlooking the Sea), forthcoming in May 2025 by Cambourakis. In April 2025, for Volume, she agreed to answer my questions about this new work, much of which has already appeared in magazines and anthologies. —Jérémy Victor Robert

Jérémy Victor Robert
The first big question: how to write? More precisely, how to write in wartime, especially when one is, like yourself, intimately affected by it?

Olivia Elias
The question of “how to write in wartime” is closely related to that of “how to live in wartime.” For me, the questions represent two sides of the same global coin. And the answer is “with difficulty.” Especially when you are directly involved—as I am and have been ever since I came into this world – in what is happening in occupied Palestine, culminating in today’s Genocide. A word that is crucial to spell out and write down, because the refusal to qualify intentions and actions using the appropriate expressions kills as surely as missiles and one-ton bombs.

Jérémy Victor Robert
In “I didn’t see the fall this year,” you write: “overflowing in the middle of madness / the big living river with multiple arms / of the children of Gaza.” This poem and many others from This Mount Overlooking the Sea seem to be born of the shock and paralysis imposed by war.

Olivia Elias
Of course, I’m not trapped in the Gaza ghetto, I’m not sleeping in a sodden tent amongst mountains of rubble and garbage, I’m not freezing, starving, thirsty, or deliberately deprived of medicine and care, I’m not agonizing over the fate of my children and loved ones, not knowing whether they, or I, will be alive within the hour. But distance doesn’t prevent me from feeling in my bones what is happening. In the poem “sounds & distance,” I say: “meters and kilometers / are not the unique units / of distance.”

You are right in saying that these poems were written in a state of shock, which I’ve felt physically. At the beginning of October, I went to a small town in the south of France with a river running through it. In the first three weeks after October 7, contrary to my usual habit, I didn’t go for a single walk along the river banks. I couldn’t leave the house. It seemed to me that this was the only place where I would be safe. I also saw nothing of the acacia tree outside my window – a friend whose seasons I follow closely. One day around November 10, I suddenly realized that it had lost almost all its leaves (the poem “I didn’t see the fall this year” comes from my astonishment).

Jérémy Victor Robert
Whether you refer to a boa constrictor in the poem “time has swallowed time” or to “yellow bulldozers” in the poem “de-escalate,” the themes of destruction and annihilation are very present in This Mount.

Olivia Elias
What is happening on our ancestral land revives a deep pain, one rooted in our family and collective history. That of our expulsion, our replacement, and our persecution, which one word, Nakba, the Catastrophe, sums up. It is a pain that is constantly being rekindled, because for us Palestinians, whether living in the homeland or the diaspora, the past is not the past. It repeats itself tirelessly and ever more intensively. The plan to erase us – if we don’t accept to live crushed under a military dictatorship and if we persist in staying – culminated after October 7 in the most clearly stated intention, implemented in every possible way, to do away with us, once and for all. “Human animals” who deserve to be killed, they said. To be killed and, for the ones who survive, to be thrown out of their land, just like their parents and grandparents were in 1948, because all of them – adults, old people, children – are “labeled” terrorists or terrorists in the making, even newborns. Why bother when you have all the forces you need to dictate definitions, as Toni Morrison pointed out.

Writing means talking about all this. Emotions, fear, anguish, the struggle for survival. Facts, too, and the attempts/pressures/intimidations/lies that would have us conceal them and/or whitewash reality.

Jérémy Victor Robert
When speaking about your work as a poet, you’ve said you’re reluctant to use the term “commitment,” and instead prefer the phrase “poet in the city.” Could you elaborate on this? Is it a moral duty?

Olivia Elias
Let’s start with the question of moral duty. I don’t see it that way, simply because I am part of this great body: the diasporic people of Palestine who suffer, cry, raise children, have projects, create, and stand in solidarity with their brothers and sisters living under the yoke of the new Khans. To persecute them is to persecute me/us, to dehumanize them is to dehumanize me/us – and, in a broader sense, to kill something in our common humanity.

Now let’s move on to the notion of commitment. Insofar as they do not come out of the blue, it seems to me that all poems are “committed.” Indeed, poets write from where they stand, marked by multiple influences: childhood, environment/country of origin, cultural baggage, life experience. Why did this expression or that image seep into their consciousness? And why did they keep it to the detriment of others? This applies to everyone, including those who deliberately seek to set aside thoughts and ideas. Conversely, in the case of other poets, the intention is clear, sometimes so much so that it detracts from the writing.

Yet poetry does not tolerate regimentation and control, and Mahmoud Darwish warned us: “A bad poem kills poetry.” Others take the opportunity to automatically disparage the approach of a poet whose antennae are open to society and the world, and whose work reflects the conflicts, dreams, and hopes that run through them. That is why, in the end, I prefer to talk about being a “poet in the city.”

Jérémy Victor Robert
Could you explain the title, This Mount Overlooking the Sea? I’m curious about its symbolic, geographical, literary, and perhaps political significance. In the poem “words are too poor,” you write “a mountain lives in me.” Throughout the collection, the mountain’s calmness is set against what we might call a “poetic art of savagery” – to borrow from the title of another poem – applied, with no remission, to this region of the globe. Is this one of the keys to reading your new book?

Olivia Elias
The title comes from the eponymous poem “this Mount overlooking the sea,” where the mountain in question has the status of an “autobiographical landscape.” This is Mount Carmel, the place where I lived from the very first days of my life until my family was forced to flee, our possibility of return denied. Scientific advances indicate that the first Africans to leave Africa settled in Palestine, precisely in the caves of Carmel. They enjoyed living there so much that they didn’t set off for Europe again until a century later. In “I write from a lost place,” “tongue like ground,” and “Carmel,” this totemic mount appears as a fundamental anchor point, a beacon that lights up the horizon, facing a mountain of lies, fables, and legends.

Jérémy Victor Robert
Could you say more about the origin of this new manuscript? It started out as an (auto)biographical project before turning to war. Now it oscillates between poems that rail against the dominant forces (such as “Hear Ye, Hear Ye!” and “it always starts with words, Gaza”) and more reflective pages (such as “Forestower” and “in the river bed”).

Olivia Elias
Between the submission of the manuscript of Chaos, Crossing and its publication by World Poetry in November 2022, two years passed during which I continued to write. When October 7 happened, I had in my possession a collection consisting of three parts focused on erasure and its various forms, plus a more personal section. But the day after October 7, I immediately realized that it would be impossible for me to publish a collection without addressing this unprecedented shift into the terrifying new dimension that we are currently witnessing. So, I decided to put aside the fourth part and replace it with new (forthcoming) poems. In the end, as I became more mindful of the texts I wanted to include, the structure – from erasure to genocide – imposed itself, with a first section as an introduction.

Jérémy Victor Robert
In This Mount, as in Chaos, Crossing, we can see a wide range of forms and registers. While some poems, like “time rambles,” resemble haiku, others are prose poems deconstructed by the layout. Are invention and reinvention important to you?

Olivia Elias
I come from a very classical background, and I like the classical form of writing. But after my second book, Your Name, Palestine, I deliberately sought to break this mold, which no longer seemed so relevant in the face of the ever-increasing flow of information we are facing. The exercise suits me because I like to play with different methods/forms of writing in order to make reading less automatic. I’ve abandoned the conventions of punctuation and tried to simplify the language by dispensing with articles wherever possible, for instance. I’m also more and more interested in the poem’s layout. This is why This Mount includes a few graphic poems, such as “Hear Ye, Hear Ye!”, which you’ve mentioned, and also “say my name,” which I would describe as a poetic dazibao. In the latter case, I wanted a poem of few words that would “rock” and be compelling.

My interest in experimentation is reinforced by the fact that I do not set out to write the “ideal” poem. And that is because I find it impossible to exhaust the mystery of poetry, and when I struggle with a theme, I try to get around the difficulty by approaching it from different angles.

Jérémy Victor Robert
How do you go about structuring a collection? Does it dictate the themes or the structure of the poems to come?

Olivia Elias
When I get to the composition stage of a collection, I see it almost as a musical writing exercise in which the alternation of short and long poems helps to vary the rhythm. But that’s only the easiest part of the process, because grouping the poems by theme and affinity – in other words, structuring the collection – is another matter altogether. I struggled quite a bit to get This Mount right, whereas it had been very easy with my previous collections. The reason for this became clear to me afterwards. Faced with the urgency of the situation, I tried to get things done quickly and hit a brick wall. A manuscript is ready for publication when it is difficult to add anything to it, when it really becomes part of the author. You have to let it mature to get to that point, and also know how to give up, how to discard poems you like because they don’t fit with the others. This is essential if the whole collection – disparate at first – is to find its unity. This Mount has helped me to become more aware of the necessity to “hold the line,” so to speak, and make your own voice heard.

Jérémy Victor Robert
I have one last question. In the poem “drop by drop,” the poem from This Mount published in Volume, you write: “words dig the mountain until reaching this shiny place… / where waters will divide & allow for passage.” You also quote Juan Felipe Herrera: “you have a poem to offer / it is made of action.”* What are words still capable of?

Olivia Elias
After October 7, we were all stunned by how little importance the Empire and the vast majority of Western countries attach to our lives and claims, and how easily they betrayed the fundamental principles of international law, despite their proclaimed adherence to supposedly “universal” democratic values. We can prosecute individuals for failure to assist a person in danger; we should be able to do so when countries are involved, especially those that are guarantors of fundamental conventions such as the Geneva Convention. And of course, the attitude of the mainstream media and cultural institutions/organizations did nothing to reduce the shock. Their responsibility is huge. What a contrast with the support given to the Ukrainians from the very first day of the Russian attack.

Fortunately, millions of citizens mobilized. Fortunately, too, poetry has offered me a place to gather myself, to find peace, and to reconcile a little with this world that is so indifferent to our fate. As I said, putting together this collection was no easy task. But, in the end, I hope to have made visible and tangible the inconceivable and unspeakable atrocities that have been going on for a year and a half in the Gaza ghetto, and to have contributed to keeping alive our dream of a reunited people in a country that would not be divided into ghettos and Bantustans. Khalid Lyamlahy clearly understood this, titling his afterword to This Mount: “This Palestine that Found Refuge in Poetry.”

However, I couldn’t have found a home in poetry if I hadn’t believed in the power of words, which are as immaterial as air and have the ability to spread, like sound, by vibrating from heart to heart and, in so doing, to release an energy likely to bring about major changes. History provides numerous examples of this.

Themselves convinced of language’s potential, the powerful predators are doing their utmost to stifle the energy thus created and accumulated. Why else would they ban the publication of UN resolutions in the West Bank? Why else would their soldiers burst into a historic Jerusalem bookstore to confiscate books, harass the booksellers, and take them into custody? Why else would they murder poets, academics, and researchers in the Gaza ghetto, and systematically destroy schools, universities, and libraries? Why, in the capital of the Empire, would they draw up multi-page lists of forbidden words, only to destroy reports and documents that contain them?

For quite different reasons, Eastern philosophies, and Buddhism especially, also believe in the power of language. Very explicitly, they classify words as “Acts” that accentuate or alleviate human suffering. Because it has the power to go straight to our hearts, poetry is particularly relevant. This Mount Overlooking the Sea ends by imagining the advent of a radical compassion that would accelerate the breakdown of a murderous and destructive system.