Hello Karim, I discovered your work more than seven years ago now... you'd given a reading of your reworking of the Song of Songs, interwoven with a contemporary love story, and it moved me deeply. That same thread runs through your new poetry collection, Hortus Conclusus — the enclosed garden. Which is what gave us the idea of talking about gardens.

We're walking through the gardens of Bagatelle — what is your relationship to this place?

I remember coming here as a child, when we were passing through Paris, and I've kept a wonder-struck memory of this great, vast garden that seemed to me to hold the whole world. To me, a garden was something contained and domesticated, pretty within its bounds. That's true here too, of course, but it's so big that as a child I thought it was infinite. And as a child you marvel easily at everything: at side paths, a stone, a hiding place behind a tree.

Today, whenever I get the chance, I come back to Bagatelle, alone or with others. I'll walk for hours if I can. When I'm stuck on a text, I come here. It's an extraordinary luxury. The garden changes, transforms, with the seasons, and so do I.

What do the names of the roses we came across on our walk evoke for you?

I don't remember the names we saw in that immense rose garden — it felt as though it held every variety of rose on earth! — but we found it very funny: some were deliciously inventive, sometimes super kitsch, downright camp. I love imagining who the person is who looked at this or that rose, its colour, its shape, and said: I'm going to call you "Dancing Queen" or "For Your Eyes Only."

How would you describe the garden of Artas from the walks of your childhood, near Bethlehem?

To come back to the Song of Songs, then: the village of Artas, which I write about in the preface to Hortus Conclusus, is said to take its very name from that biblical text — Artas coming from hortus, if ever a name had flowers in it… It may be a fanciful etymology, but I find it beautiful. There isn't exactly a garden, but in the town the convent (itself also called Hortus Conclusus) is surrounded by a beautiful hillside and by land cultivated by the nuns. I find the place magnificent: a haven of peace, hope and colour, in the midst of colonisation. Recently, we wanted to go for a walk there, as we often did with my uncle, who loved to take us out to explore the nature around our home. Convents and monasteries are often nestled in settings of green and, since Bethlehem is a town of convents, it's there that I learned to love gardens and to associate them with rest and mysticism. But the threatening presence of the settlers and soldiers stopped us. For me, it was the sign that we had just lost something more.

I have the impression that the enclosed garden in the Song of Songs is experienced as a place of intimacy, a place of love, a metaphor for the beloved. What happens when one is shut out of that garden?

Yes, among other things: you can read the Song as a political text, a mystical text… the beauty of ancient texts is that, as contemporary readers, we can make them our own more or less as we please. The garden — this enclosed garden and its spring, the water and the flowers, the honey — is also a space of protection. What happens outside that space?

I think of the ecological destruction caused by the occupation of Palestine: in Gaza, with the genocide, everything else has been destroyed, the soil is no longer arable, the ecological impact is immense, the land is essentially unusable for decades. In place of gardens, there is rubble. In the West Bank, in Bethlehem for example, the great green spaces around the town are now almost out of reach for us. Where, then, can one simply go to rest, to walk, to restore oneself?

It's one way of measuring the profound destruction of life. Raja Shehadeh, the great Palestinian memoirist and avid hiker, reflects on these questions in several of his texts. I'm thinking in particular of Palestinian Walks. And when the outside is too dangerous, the garden, at home, becomes the place of ultimate refuge, of introspection, but also of confinement. Sometimes one has to consent to leave one's gardens.