4 Iraqi poets transliterated by SJ Fowler

 

A product of the remarkable Reel Iraq project in April 2014, where four British and four Iraqi poets spent a week together in the Safeen mountains of Kurdistan, I had the pleasure to spend time meeting and transliterating the work of Ahmad Abdel Hussein, Miriam Al Attar, Ali Wajeh and Zhawen Shally. These works appear without their Arabic originals to emphasise that in the process of their being reconstructed into English, I have transliterated, rather than translated the original poems, and while I was as loyal as I found myself able to be (feeling deeply responsible to the poets, if not the poems, I have actually been very careful to maintain the original texts, by my own mangling standards), they now exist somewhere between myself and the original authors, in a no man’s land of sorts, possessed by neither, and better for that. They are four complete failures. – SJ Fowler

 

 

 

in the name of god (lower case)

transliterated from the Arabic of Ahmed Abdel Hussein

 

you are the well of thirst

you are the black prize in the mouth of the wolf

 

leave off your endless light of miracles

which lights up the name of Iraq

raise up your blindfold

which has been gently knotted upon the eyes of Baghdad

gather the decorations of war from the thresholds of home

turn the guns of battle

to brooms, so that they might not kill

snuff out that light which propagates the darkness of the mothernight

and don’t leave my lover to course in dread

from her home to the halls, and from the halls to her home

but print on her heart instead, the furthest stars

until she knows while she’s tightening her hijab

that you are the rictus grin that proceeds death

 

you put fear into the core of my little one

having no choice but to touch your heart

 

your angels are nomads

from Zacha to Fao

your masked angels with painted claws and iron fangs

with their bombbelts & vests

let them return to the desert

and make for them a well of thirst

so they can drink from it forever

 

and if our women return to you with their baskets

with their progeny ready to barter

don’t fill them with the Offcuts of Aid

fill it instead with an unknown, with your hiding

with the taste of dawn will fill the wombs of our women

with the flitting of white birds that attacks the evening prayer

flood their eyes with carbon and remaining ash

and their hearts with the pitched cooing of the newborn

so that they won’t be taken by the prayer that feeds you

the names of their children

some of whom are dead, some of whom are fled

 

you are a well of thirst

a guide to the hoopoe of the ma’dan

to the springs of the unseen air

where the feet of souls have broken in loss

as they search for water

and make the Kurdish mountains gold and their waterfalls silver

as the khatem ceased life in the wake of 1988

because everytime they reach the sura anfal

they meet again your death’s head

 

it is you who ordered us to sew the bones of our children

and said to wait for harvest

we waited, for that which never came

and in its place the Al-Arab

with their beards and their Arabic Qu’ran

and within that book was written a putrefying disease

 

and look at the Assyrians weeping

and the debris of their church

and look at the Rafadhi, blood soaked, in Karbala

and look Manda’i, the Baptist children of John, begging for water

which the strange sun will evaporate

burning Iraq as it burns the rivers dry

 

look again to god

and look again at our oncoming end

 

our black prize

our well of thirst

abhorrence warms our core

having no choice but to touch your heart

your aged heart

which resides beating in the book we must read

 

 

 

the domestics

transliterated from the Arabic of Miriam Al Attar

 

we’re eight, sitting around the dinner table

pleasing abused.

my father joins us

my mother swallows bile.

my brother eats

pressed against his cheeks

the drunk police.

the abuse which we girls eat

without taste

which we are so eager to consume

while my eldest brother devours slur

on his voyage to the bar.

he sinks his fingers into the glass

wet with him

the droping core of his love.

the abuse so equipped

at the mouth of friends

are scarred across my fingers,

writing is not possible.

the doctors come

naturally

my grandmother is starved,

and wants for us the same.

 

my grandfather is smoking

for each cigarette a sin.

the endless smoke.

he won’t ask forgiveness

knowing his wife to blame.

when she is dragged

by Azrael,

he’ll laugh.

a child dictator

casting down kings in the interval

his chess board of hair

ready for my mother too.

woman into fire

the poise of family burns

but quiet, let the men speak

abuse is the only driver of this cab.

its pulse raised, its temperature

grief riddled, full

the stench of crude shipped beyond our borders

the due of our land smuggled for pittance

mirroring the sorrows of his children.

the money slight, paid for slurs

thrown to the pavement.

yet they were his for nothing.

raiding our house at night

while we sleep

our entrails fail to cope

the abuse sticks within our stomach.

 

 

 

Accounts of Solitude

transliterated from the Kurdish of Zhawen Shally

 

In praise of the solitude

that compels.

 

The confrontation that renders my mirror self-knowledge,

that’ll put distance between the frenetic,

that’ll awaken the birds that might be worthy

& within me, to fend protections.

 

Loneliness makes states of being

& commits to the past my anger, & the breaking of household things.

Not to see dearth as affliction,

I find excuses for every (No) I discover.

Not to follow the hunter into perfidy, against my father,

nor to search out the prey.

Not to imagine him as the storm, the (Squall) that he was.

 

In praise of rain

without question,

undated.

With its infantile visage, deluge my emptied home.

From the fall, the solitude grows, fondly.

New songs are composed,

the empty country blooms,

the obstruction before my seeing dissipates.

Solitude becomes mine.

 

In praise of Autumn,

the season that’ll not remove me, that’ll intend protection

from the others, the change,

because love between us,

    the love that shall not die.

 

In praise of nothing,

that returns from me the farside of meaning

to the beginning of the sentence.

A sentence replete with nothing,

that returns to me myself, articulating life’s proof of denial.

A concrete mirage,

nothing. Returned,

in praise of solitude, again.

 

The excess of the mute is frightening?

With welted rain & the nothing,

I find myself embraced

& from my shoulders, will not allow my head to fall.

Solitude doesn’t see the right,

the river dry, & solitude, lonelier

cracks mirrors, obscures my sight

& the veil of doubts, a memory;

rain over the shadesky of a girl.

In me perpetuity, solitude is formed.

 

 

 

Highway 80 of the poem

transliterated from the Arabic of Ali Wajeh

 

(a dialogue between Ali Wajih & himself)

 

I said:

 

“Before I put a memory in a package of my early forgetting,

  I placed a random prophet’s face over my own

  unseen highway 80

  could I know a road without a map? how would I take

  the red letter that shapes the mouth that says goodbye?

  & how do I continue between speech & errant thinking

  & the taming of dead sheets?

  I ask because each time I’m writing    I’m wreckage

  because I didn’t age the work long enough to be tanked”

 

I replied:

 

“If you begin breathing, then crying, somewhere between those two

  you’ll begin again singing, ‘Abd al-Zahra Minati

  the home, the coffins, the soft women, the garden canned

  the faces of Allah in the Euphrates

  the civil dead, the unknown thrown to the river

  the drinking of the fled & corpse alive

  the water gurgling suspicion

  the wail that eeps from shattered ribs

 

  how can I have written & not to have changed?

  the nails of the robe tear the spirit

  I find the poems as a cross, a mothercountry sympathetic

  & I was not exiled by them

  not by the attack I launched long after my victory was won

  on the traditions…

 

  I gouge my fingers into grief, & the poems began

  I gouge my fingers into grief, & was born”