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KAJAL AHMAD POEMS AND INTERVIEW

This interview was conducted by Michael R. Burch with the marvelous Kurdish poet Kajal Ahmad after Burch translated three of her poems into English. The interview immediately follows the translations.

Mirror
by Kajal Ahmad
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My era's obscuring mirror
shattered
because it magnified the small
and made the great seem insignificant.
Dictators and monsters filled its contours.
Now when I breathe
its jagged shards pierce my heart
and instead of sweat
I exude glass.

The Lonely Earth
by Kajal Ahmad
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The pale celestial bodies
never bid her "Good morning!"
nor do the creative stars
kiss her.
Earth, where so many tender persuasions and roses lie interred,
might expire for the lack of a glance, or an odor.
She's a lonely dusty orb,
so very lonely!, as she observes the moon's patchwork attire
knowing the sun's an imposter
who sears with rays he has stolen for himself
and who looks down on the moon and earth like lodgers.

Kurds are Birds
by Kajal Ahmad
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Per the latest scientific classification, Kurds
now belong to a species of bird!
This is why,
traveling across the torn, fraying pages of history,
they are nomads recognized by their caravans.
Yes, Kurds are birds! And,
even worse, when
there's nowhere left to nest, no refuge from their pain,
they turn to the illusion of traveling again
between the warm and arctic sectors of their homeland.
So I don't think it strange Kurds can fly but not land.
They wander from region to region
never realizing their dreams
of settling,
of forming a colony, of nesting.
No, they never settle down long enough
to visit Rumi and inquire about his health,
or to bow down deeply in the gust-
stirred dust,
like Nali.

KAJAL AHMAD INTERVIEW

MRB: Dear Kajal, thanks so much for agreeing to do this interview and for allowing our readers to learn more about you individually and about Kurdish poets and poetry in general. Let me begin by saying that it was a great honor for me to translate three of your poems into English. With so much poetry in the world and so little time, I only translate poems that strike me as the very best, and I thought those poems of yours were strikingly good. My first question is to give you the floor and let you tell us about your life and how you came to be a poet.

KAJAL: Welcome dear Mike and readers. I am very happy to interview with you, because I am a woman from the East who prefers to listen to men and the silence of the woman. We have a proverb that says: "A shy woman is worth a whole city, but a shy man is only worth a comb." I am a woman in a very manly society. We Kurds are without a state and citizenship in our homeland, which has made great sacrifices for freedom and democracy, but at present its authorities are trying to prevent freedoms and rob our people of everything, even their voices and the pens with which they write. I consider myself lucky that you are interested in translating my poems and consider them the best of all.

MRB: I am very honored that you consider my translations the best. That means a lot to me.

KAJAL: Now is the time for me to tell you about my life story: In 1967 I was born from a poor Kurdish family in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, by an Assyrian nurse. And in the presence of my mother's friends, who were Turkmen and Arabs. Kirkuk was a city of diverse nationalities and religions. I moved with my family to the city of Sulaymaniyah when I was four years old. During my primary school years, I had a talent for writing. In the writing construction subject, I used to write about subjects that attracted the attention of the teachers to the extent that they were asking me to read what I wrote to my classmates and to students in other grades of our school. Other than school books, I used to read from the library of my Uncle Ibrahim and order books from the school library. People love stupid people more, so I used to see people moving away from me, but I drew closer in harmony with myself. In high school, that is at the beginning of the eighties, my culture pushed me to work inside a secret student cell fighting against Saddam’s rule, which was killing students by firing bullets in front of their schools and in the presence of their parents and teachers. I was participating in demonstrations and distributing leaflets calling on people not to accept such injustices. With those feelings, I started writing my first poem at the age of twenty and repeated trying to write dozens of times, but I did not publish any of those poems. My poetry was so enthusiastic, direct, and so forbidden that no one dared to publish it! 

I was also writing political poems that I hid from everyone but my friends and girlfriends in the struggle. I wrote other poems about women and the human view of life on planet Earth. I was reading these non-political types of poems to my mother, until she told one of our relatives, a well-known poet, to see how talented I was at writing poetry. I was upset with my mother because I was writing in order to breathe through the poem and not choke, and not for someone to evaluate me. But I must now thank my mother because the poet who read my poems was a professor in the Department of Languages ​​at the University of Sulaymaniyah. He persuaded me to publish my poems in newspapers and magazines and introduced me to the public in 1987, in my first poetry symposium in Sulaymaniyah. His admiration for my poems and his encouragement was sufficient for me to continue my steps so far. He put me at the start of the road and left me alone. This was like teaching a child to get up and learn to walk. They teach girls to walk in our childhood, then leave us to our destiny. We climb mountains and tumble down the stairs until we fall to the ground and get up again, but no one is buying. Still, we remember how everyone clapped for us when we took the first step. And what did everyone say, uh, when we first signed? Now nobody cares. We have grown up and I say in one of my poems: "Do you see, my eyes, do you see?! What a misfortune when we become big!"

In the year 1987, Karwan magazine published a poem of mine entitled "A Woman Said in a Whisper." It aroused the interest of critics and readers of the magazine, and was translated within days into Arabic, Turkmen and Farsi. I was asked to conduct the first poetry seminar in the Hall of Culture and the People in Sulaymaniyah. This was an important literary event in that city. A professor at the College of Languages ​​introduced me to the people. This was the poet who discovered my talent. After many years had passed and hundreds of poetry seminars had been held inside and outside Kurdistan so far, an entire generation is talking about that rainy day and my first appearance in my Kurdish clothes and a bold and strange feminine language to the people. From the beginning until now, I have been confronted by the forces of darkness and male domination, and I confront them with all my might. Many stories and propaganda have followed me that affect my personal life, and you cannot imagine the seriousness of these words unless you know the reality of living in a society where women are killed to wash away "shame" and the reasons make no sense. I have never had a room of my own and no one to support me in my approach to life, so I said in my poem titled "No":

Believe me...
I am the one who waited for my father to marry my mother
I am the one who waited for myself, until I was born!!!
I was the midwife when I was born
And I cut my umbilical cord myself

Honestly, I do not know how to become a poet in conditions that do not allow freedom and I am not encouraged to continue.

MRB: Kajal, your life story reminds me of Nadia Anjuman, an Afghani poet whose poetry became popular with readers and won critical acclaim, and yet she was never accepted by her male-dominated culture. In one of her poems, which I translated, she wrote:

Which plunderer’s hand ransacked the pure gold statute of your dreams
In this horrendous storm?

How terrible for a female poet to be so gifted, but for the "pure gold statue" of her dreams to be ransacked and taken from her. I'm glad that you at least had a mother and uncle who recognized your talent and supported you. Hopefully the rest of the world will catch up with them!

How do you see yourself and your poetry evolving at this stage of your career?

KAJAL: I see that my personal development and my attempts to write poetry at this stage of my professional life are unfortunate, but the problem is that the social, political and economic environments in my country have not developed well. This sick Middle Eastern environment affects us negatively and slows down or paralyzes our steps at times. How am I satisfied with the development of Masari's path as a writer and the path of my eastern community's development when both are almost stalled?

Before I moved to Amman-Jordan in 2008 and before I exiled for 10 years, I was a journalist for the New Kurdistan newspaper, which is a daily newspaper affiliated with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. I was also the editor-in-chief of the New Kurdistan Rest magazine, and I was the presenter of a talk show on the courses of a satellite channel called Against the Current. In addition to my journalistic work, I was the head of the Culture Department in the Culture Directorate in Sulaymaniyah, and the Directorate is affiliated with the Ministry of Culture in the Kurdistan Region. After I returned home in 2018, and to this day, I did not start my journalistic work or career, but I was rather forced to retire at the age of less than 50 years. All this was due to a change in my vision of working in the partisan press and my distancing from the parties and my partisan society. I thought a lot about working in the private press or working as a free journalist, but I could not find an independent press. There was a press that claimed independence, but all of them were secret accounts or people within the regime. I had to be unemployed because it was dishonorable for me to work in media channels that live luxuriously from the theft of oil and with rhetoric reversing policies that supported the oppressed, while defending with all force a government that does not give employees their salaries and dues, but claims to be the voice and throat of its citizens! Throughout my years in journalism, I have not been involved in the process of playing on people's minds. I did not use my journalistic ability except to serve people, especially the oppressed among them. Women and children were my concern.

It is true that I quit journalism temporarily for the time being, but my activities as a poet are continuous and more influential than those in cultural institutions supported by Kurdish parties in my country and abroad. Despite the difference in the Kurdish dialect within the Kurdish-speaking world, my poems written in the Sorani dialect flew from southern Kurdistan (affiliated with Iraq) like a bird breaking the borders and reached my readers in northern Kurdistan (Turkish Kurds) and speaking in the northern Kurmanji dialect. I also reached my readers in Eastern Kurdistan (affiliated with Iran). And when they translated my poems into Arabic and printed them in Syria, the Syrian Kurds could know me through my writings. As for the translation of my poems into other languages, that started with a collection of my poems translated into Norwegian that was printed in Oslo in 2005. And in Washington there was an edition of a group of my poems translated into English in 2016. This book was titled A Handful of Salt and it was translated by Alana Marie Levinson Labrouse, a professor at the American University in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq.

Other than English, there was promotional Arabic, Tamil, Persian, Turkish, Russian, and very soon in French. With all this, I look forward to more and better, because I am a person from a marginalized world and a battleground for many battles. A Kurd does not take the Nobel Prize unless he is a victim of collective penitential campaigns.

MRB: I think it is important for poets to speak for women and children. That's something I have done myself. In fact, my most popular poem on the Internet is an epitaph for children who have died due to injustice, neglect and violence that I have variously titled "Epitaph for a Child of the Holocaust," "Epitaph for a Palestinian Child," "Epitaph for a Child of Darfur," etc. The last time I did a Google search it appeared on more than 35,000 web pages. That's a lot of cutting and pasting! Which poems of yours have become the most popular with your readers? Please feel free to comment on them if you have the time.

KAJAL‌: Such a beautiful coincidence, that the love of poetry brings me together in dialogue with a poet who resembles me in caring for the wounds of the oppressed on the ground, regardless of the differences between nationalities, religions, and the affiliation of those who need help to enter the world of safety and mercy. My most popular poem among my readers is my poem entitled "The Holocaust" which is a lament "dedicated to the spirit of the flowers of the Anfal season, those flowers they picked in the spring." Anfal is a surah in the Qur’an that Saddam Hussein used in 1988, in a campaign to exterminate the Kurdish people. A summary of the Qur’anic verse tells the Muslim to kill the "infidel" and take all that he owns, even women and their children! Saddam considered the Kurds to be infidels, and ordered his army to destroy villages, destroy mosques of the Kurds, and kill more than 182,000 people, many who now lie in mass graves. I wrote a long poem about these diamonds, here are some of the lines:

At the end of the sunset horizon
In those times when even there was no opportunity to notice
They said goodbye...
Goodbye, ruined house,
The Empty Village, Our Little Village
Good-bye …
Anfal erased the drawing of nature
To introduce us to the desert
And it creates a common tragedy
From the murdered soul of our rose
And the body of its Ramadan.
This is how the Anfal wished
To say these insured storms can
To bury a generation
She says goodbye to a people without an entity!

I say in another passage of the poem:

From here the women became widows
Goodnight and married to wait
The elderly, they carried necklaces in their hearts
And remembrance rings
Their daughters and nieces, black-eyed
They fell in love with Braid for constant crying.
Weird, that was the time of history, so weird
The youth are gone,
And the old women returned walking from the galaxy of hell!
They left the irrigated land from the North East
To where the arid southwest is
The Packers of the Kavroshi Sisters
Kidnapped like eyeliner
And with the blink of an eye,
There are no gazelles left in this meadow
Clobhar Cloak..
Khammar Zulekha..
Cue Khawar Al Muhanna..
Even the desert ran the splendor of the wind and returned it
Even the desert killed them the shiver of the wounds' ghost,
And the shoes of those distraught children stayed here.
They are still unripe peaches and raw pears
Those children, we will not see them again
To never see them...
That was the year of Anfal,
Year of Anfal
General hemolysis
And the year of exterminating the seed of butterflies,
Notches separated the slender necks of the mountains
Separate the notch of sheep
Separate burglary
Separate the invasion

And at the end of the poem I say:

When they took them, everything looked faded
Revolution, morals, life, beauty
And the poem is like their necks
Hang aside.
That date was the drunkenness of the light,
Melted into the toxicity of the homeland of darkness
That date
Denudation of orchards flowers thorns
The story of a people massacred
Forgetful!

My first poem was considered the most popular among my poems and discussions about the world of injustice that women and children live in. It is titled "A woman said in a whisper." Another poem that shook Kurdish society and caused me to face problems and risks was a poem entitled "In the homeland of street assassinations." I wrote this poem as a response to the killing of women, which they called "the washing of shame." Until now, men kill women in my country and call such crimes "honor crimes."

In the country of terror I love the streets more than men
by Kajal Ahmad
translated by Mewan Nahro and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse

The street doesn't ask, Where are you now? And where are you
headed, you crazy girl?
The street isn't unjust and commanding.
It doesn't know terror.
Nothing of the street looks like men and
Nothing of men looks like the streets.

It tells me:
Go, cross over me.
Grow up:
Love
Doesn't carry even the smallest load.
The wings of women who fly wilt
When they pass through the neighborhood of loving
An arrogant man of darkness, an ignorant boy.
The jar of life breaks
Without a doubt in the hands of its own heart.

That street —
It was nice to cross it with that someone.
Fate forbid us from loving each other.
My heart flew when I ran with that someone.
He let himself lag
So that he wouldn't pass me, so that I would run ahead of him.

Just one street is enough
For freedom to celebrate and cross over,
For children to cross and go to school,
For boys to look at girls and
For girls to laugh.

A street that carries my name
Should have no sculpture of famous men along its length.
Let it be broad, let it be broad, broad
As my heart.
Let it be empty in the morning and in the evenings
Like the quiet of a poem's house and
Let it be noisy at other times
Like my insides. Lips within lips.
I need a street
Empty of bloodstains,
A street that has never seen
Or known terror.
Let it be flawless, let it be flawless, flawless
Like the sex of these girls that are killed unjustly.
Let it be long, let it be long, long
Like their agony.

On that street,
We are all travelers
But I will remain a traveler.
The quatrains of Nishapur
Will not suddenly trust themselves
And madly drunk with love
Walk arm in arm with me.
Kajal Ahmad

I have another poem entitled "Burning" which is an elegy for women who burn their bodies because of their inability to bear injustice, and die or live in deformities that society denies. This method of suicide has become widespread in my country and had not been addressed before. My poem has become a song for a TV series that tells the story of a woman burning herself in order to get rid of the oppression of her father. People have repeated the song since 2007 until now. I have many examples of the extent to which my poems permeate the concerns of women and children in my country, but I am satisfied with this amount of reference and clarification.

I told you about some of my poems most famous among my readers, now I am talking to you about my poems that gained popularity in other languages. When the Poetry Translation Center printed my poem translated into English in London and published some of my translated poems on its website, one of the readers of those poems was the Swedish Maestro Joseph Raheidin. He particularly liked my poem entitled "The Lonely Land."

The Lonely Earth
by Kajal Ahmad
translated by Choman Hardi and Mimi Khalvati

Neither do the white bodies of the universe
say good morning to her
nor do the handmade stars
give her a kiss.
Earth, where so many roses, fine sentiments are buried,
could die for want of a glance, a scent,
This dusty ball is lonely,
so very lonely,as she sees the moon's patched clothing
and knows that the sun's a big thief
who burns with the many beams he has taken
for himself and who looks at the moon and the earth
like lodgers.

The Lonely Earth
by Kajal Ahmad
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The pale celestial bodies
never bid her "Good morning!"
nor do the creative stars
kiss her.
Earth, where so many tender persuasions and roses lie interred,
might expire for the lack of a glance, or an odor.
She's a lonely dusty orb,
so very lonely!, as she observes the moon's patchwork attire
knowing the sun's an imposter
who sears with rays he has stolen for himself
and who looks down on the moon and earth like lodgers.

After receiving my approval he composed music for the poem. The soprano Hannah Holgersson sang the poem in Kurdish and English at an art event to mark Earth Day in Malmö.

One day, a female student at the American University in Sulaymaniyah translated three of my short poems; one of these poems was about separation from the land. A professor at the same university liked it, and decided to translate and print a group of my poems with the help of this student. After she visited me in Amman, where I lived in Jordan, I gave my approval and printed my book, translated into English in Washington, entitled A Handful of Salt. It was translated by Alana Marie Levinson Labros with the assistance of Derya Ali and Mewan Nehru, under the direction of Barbara Goldbrog.

A Handful of Salt
by Kajal Ahmad

Every day, hoping
he would leave, I poured
a handful of salt in the shoe
of the irresolute man
I once loved greatly.
I knew,
so far as I could
tell, that this visitor
would kill me and my poems.

"Handful of Salt" is Kurdish folk wisdom: place a handful of salt in the shoes of a guest who has overstayed. It is a host’s subtle signal for the guest to leave.
   
This is another poem about the earth and the human being. I hope my idea reaches you. All this interest and love for the earth and my concern for its safety stems from my concern for the future of people on earth.

Separation from Earth
by Kajal Ahmad
translated from Kurdish by Darya Ali

When I exploded
Like the horizon, my hair
Became a belt around the Earth’s waist.
For the frozen poles of the south,
I turned myself into a pair of socks,
For the chills in the North, from threads of my soul
I wove hats and turbans.
The homeland was sick of me:
it wanted to tear me off like an old coat,
But I hung myself on the mercy of its beard
And from earth I was thrown off into the arms of the universe.
In the sky I became a star
And now I have my own place and my own passion
And I am denser with lives than Earth.

Really, Derya and Marie Labros' translation, with their experiences, was a beautiful literary work that increased the popularity of my poems in other places far from Kurdistan but close to my soul.

MRB: Kajal, the earth is lucky to have a woman like you, and your marvelous poems. Thanks so much for doing this interview, and I wish you and the Kurdish people all the best.

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