KAMAL MIRAWDELI GETS INVITED TO SPEAK AT MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY LITERARY FESTIVAL 2021

(The Kurdish poet Kamal Mirawdeli was one of the guest poets invited to speak and read his poetry at Middlesex University Literary Festival 2001 on 4th April. Below is the text of his speech, in which he touches upon some aspects of his poetic experience in exile, and the poems he read).

Being in exile puts you in a peculiar position. You feel that your existential space has turned upside down. Outwardly you can cope, compromise, accommodate. You read, you write, you talk, you work, meet people and you are still part of the 24-hour cycle of time. But the dislocation of space creates a different internal order: a different play of time, and stream of sub-consciousness. Gradually you find reality is overtaken by dreams: daydreams, midnight dreams and nightmares. The past in the form of its presence there, overturns the equation. It is this powerful presence of the past and the elsewhere in the reality and overwhelming nature of dreams, which destabilizes your presence here: You can only be here by being absent there. But the dreamflow of there ensures that for the most of your unconscious and even conscious time you are somewhere/nowhere. In your real-life daily practices, you are absent: you can be absent-minded, away, thoughtful. There is always this unavoidable inner odyssey which makes sure that you have no real presence anywhere. Given the demands of active life, work, necessities of survival and pressure to be, this can result in an unbearable condition. A schizophrenic experience, a dualistic existence which each dimension trying to negate the other. What makes the matters worse is lack of solution. For there is no solution for exile once it settles in. It’s your life burden, your destiny, full stop. At least that is how it worked for me. In the Kurdistan of mid-seventies, the time when I started to write, the poet had a position between a prophet and a political leader. He was the voice in a society controlled by a system of tyranny whose main obsession was the suppression of voice and the elimination of all means of expression. Free media, free meetings, free voices were nil. For Kurds this tyrannical system, even in this twenty-first century is functioning with a fundamentalist extreme racist effect. In Turkey, for example, even the words Kurd and Kurdistan and the use of Kurdish geographical names are political crimes. They are viewed by the ruling racist establishment as a threat to national security. However, your experience as a Kurd is not confined to total denial of identity and suppression of natural human impulse for self- realisation and self-determination. In fact. the divide line between political/national repression and physical elimination is very thin. For racism, which is universally practised by the regimes ruling over Kurdistan against the Kurdish people as a matter of course, is a violent creed by its very nature. Racist views and attitudes are easily translated into offensive language, oppressive legislation, and physical aggression. Lack of any kind of democratic accountability or international responsibility further facilitates this technical transformation. As Kurdish human and cultural aspirations, both at individual and collective level, are historically interpreted by the ruling regimes as threats to national security and divinity of unitary or chauvinistic states, or as conspiratory devices of foreign powers, then any expression or demonstration of Kurdishness entails a violent repressive response, progressively reaching the level of genocide. And it was genocide, real cultural and physical genocide, which I experienced in my country South Kurdistan under the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussain. I was born and I lived my childhood in a Kurdish village which throughout living memory had never been under direct control of any foreign power. I had good fortune of being immersed in full Kurdishness as identity and way of life. My father was a known poet writing in Kurdish and fluent in Persian and Arabic. As a child, I saw in my father’s library the pictures of Salahuddin, Shaikh Said, Sheikh Mahmud and Qazi Mohammad. There were books on Kurdish history and many collections of poetry of famous classical and modern Kurdish poets. On the other hand, the geography itself, that is the village and its location, were embodying voices, colours and characteristics of Kurdishness. Our home was in a narrow valley with a small river dividing it into two opposite stretches of land covered with trees, orchards of fruit and small farmland plots. We were self-sufficient in every way. We had more than 20 types of figs and grapes. We had every other fruit: peaches, pears, pomegranates, melons, watermelons, etc. We had cattle and a variety of domestic and wild vegetables. The river traversing the valley of Marga was small. But as it streamed down from higher to lower grounds, it was cleverly utilised to operate 18 water mills providing different kinds of flour to villagers in the area. There were craftsmen for every purpose: carpenters, shoemakers, tailors, barbers, builders, dyers. There was a strong deep-rooted local culture. Ballad singers (beytewan) and storytellers (hikayetewan) were abundant. My aunt used to relate to us Kurdish epic tales on winter evenings some of which would last for a whole week or more. Then there was the ever-lasting omnipresent mountain. The symbol of Kurd and Kurdistan. The only steadfast friend of Kurds throughout history. Just opposite to our home was the mountain known as Barda-qlisht which meant “the split rock”. It represented a cave-like opening at the summit of the mountain. There were huge rocks. On one of them was a statute of a woman with a baby in her arms. The form was gradually eroded by weather. Perhaps it was the image of the Virgin Miriam. Then there is on the southern side of the mountain a hill called Gewra Qala “Great Fort” which was understood to be a pre-Islamic citadel of Kurdish Kings. On the back of our home, was another hill called Mila-qiran which means ‘the neck of annihilation’. This in the popular memory referred to the slaughters which happened during the Islamic invasion in the seventh century. I want to say Kurdish mountains are full of archaeological sites and signatures that can reveal a lot about genealogy of power and history and civilization of the Kurdish people. (But imagine now, in this twentieth century, only last week the Turkish prime minister, who does not hide his pride of being a Turkish poet, sent a memorandum to all civil servants instructing them to prevent the use of Kurdish geographical names as this encourages “separatism”.!! Isn’t it shameful for Europe to accept these people as civilized and democratic?) In Kurdistan, the land experiences four full seasonal lives with each season erupting in a different exhibition of romantic or sublime natural sensuality. Rainfalls, snows and storms in winter, followed by a Nawrozian spring of green grass, blossoming trees, singing birds and playful animals. Then a dry summer of long hot sunny days doing its best to ripen fruit, regenerate the farming land, and offer a generous harvest of variety of wheat, barley and other cereals. Then graciously arrives autumn: a romantic queen with tragic tears of lost love and pale panoramic view of the world playing a sad nostalgic tune of absolute eventuality of every living instance. You never know the value of what you have until you lose it and then miss it. The missing of There is a traumatic experience. But it becomes more complicated and horrid when you know that what constitutes you as identity, history, and psychology has been destroyed. Gone forever. It is at this point that you feel and realise that you have lost some very precious part of yourself which perhaps can only survive in dreams. I never imagined how much human brain can store and create. I am still puzzled by the infinity and often metaphysical nature of my dreams. Dreams in themselves were a kind of subconscious configuration in which symbolism is an essential mechanism. For the first ten years in London I never had any dream about my London life. I was always there in my villages and towns. The powerful persistence of dreams was the result of conscious anxiety and fear due to the genocidal events taking place in Kurdistan between 1981 and 1990. Especially 1988 was the climax. It was in March of that year that the Kurdish town of Halabja was decimated with chemical attack. In the same month the village of Marga in which I was born and had my primary school education, was obliterated. Then the town Qaladiza, in which I had my secondary school education and then taught as a teacher, was bulldozed and all its population around 150,000 were deported to south of Iraq or concentration camps. In the same year 182,000 women, children, old and young people were uprooted from their villages and taken to unknown destination in south of Iraq. No one still knows what has happened to them. In exile, you lose your audience, your constituency and with it much of inspiration and motivation? For whom do you write now? How? What do you want to achieve? I usually wrote and still write poetry primarily for myself. It is totally subjective in the first instance. I write poetry to recognise and reassert my humanity, to give back equilibrium to my relationship with the external world, to remain sane, to give me a haven in times of loneliness, alienation, anger and anguish. I write also to reassert my national identity and my love for my people and my language. But it is through being subjective, being your true self, that you can express your full existential and human dimension best. Then you will be surprised how universal poetry can be. I like poetry to be lyrical, and be an insurance for such feelings and emotions which are increasingly challenged and submerged in a society becoming more and more technical, more and more materialistic, more and more selfish, more and more driven by values, agendas and superficial attractions set by unaccountable commercial lobbies who direct their attention to the utmost exploitation of basically beastly instincts of mankind: sex, violence, and getting richer and richer. I write poetry to assert that love is the sole value of human life that can still give a meaning to life in spite of all the absurdities, contradictions and hypocrisies we experience. When you suffer, you understand suffering. You can have a different reading of events and appearances. You have a dream to change the world. You have never given up conquering cruelty with love. You have concern for environment, human rights, and justice. You want peace. You value democracy and civic society. You admire human capacity for unstoppable progress, creativity and technological revolution. And you think the West, Europe is the place where all these ideas are embodied in institutions, images and expressions. I was in exile here in London in the 80s of last century when genocide was raging in Kurdistan. There were news and images of death and destruction every day. My village, my town along with 4000 other villages and towns were obliterated. These news and images were being constantly recreated in hundreds of configurations over and over in dreams and nightmares. There was a political urgency for survival. What could poetry do in these circumstances? Poetry seemed to me too innocent, too feeble, and too mythical to respond to the enormity of genocide at least in its immediacy. Can all poetry of the world stop the killing of a child let alone the destruction of a people and a culture? I became so hopeless about the image and impact of poetry in a world dominated by cruelty that for a long time I was alienated from it, I could not even read poetry. This meant really becoming a zombie. Add to this total disappointment with the Western world, Europe, and its claims of democracy and human rights. Genocide was an officially declared policy of the Iraqi regime. And it was happening not only under the eyes and noses of Western democracies but also with their full support and collaboration. Saddam was armed to the teeth. Chemical weapons were used as a routine strategy to eliminate population. People were being packed in military trucks like cattle and transferred to Arab deserts for Saddam’s experiments in biological warfare. There was no news, no voice, and no express of concern. Only silence of lambs. As a writer I was expected to be with people on the streets to demonstrate, to lobby, to shout. To attract the attention of the world to our plight. Instead of poetry I wrote petitions, appeals, political articles. I set up community organisations, Kurdish magazines and newspapers to make people aware of what was happening. Academically, I studied history, literature, philosophy and economy. But none of these could diminish the amount of depression and despair I was suffering from. Is there anything more painful and traumatizing than seeing your people slaughtered like sheep, your villages and towns razed to earth, your culture and civilization destroyed, and you are helpless to do anything about it?? Thus, the stream of daily dreams and nightly nightmares continued. Only after I was able to return to my country in 1992 after ten years in exile, they began to diminish. There was some reconciliation between past and present, between exile and origins, between poetry and politics. I started to write poetry again both in Kurdish and in English. I survived. Poetry helped me to survive and it survived with me. I still write for myself, my inner self, when I feel a strong impulse to shed some poetic tears or share some romantic inclinations or show some realistic aspects of a world still ruled by cruelty. Above all, I managed to keep in my soul a safe poetic haven for love. And love will keep me going on living, writing and dreaming beautiful dreams.

 

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