Trying Again to Stop Time Read online

  Published by

  The University of Alberta Press

  Ring House 2

  Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E1

  www.uap.ualberta.ca

  Copyright © 2015 Jalal Barzanji

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Barzanji, Jalal

  [Poems. Selections. English]

  Trying again to stop time : selected poems / Jalal Barzanji ; Sabah

  A. Salih, translator.

  (Robert Kroetsch series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978–1–77212–043–1 (pbk.).—ISBN 978–1–77212–074–5 (pdf).—ISBN 978–1–77212–072–1 (epub).—ISBN 978–1–77212–073–8 (kindle)

  I. Salih, Sabah A., translator II. Title. III. Series: Robert Kroetsch series

  PS8603.A788A28 2015 C891.5971 C2014–908276–2 C2014–908277–0

  First electronic edition, 2015.

  Digital conversion by Transforma Pvt. Ltd.

  Copyediting and proofreading by Peter Midgley.

  Cover design by Alan Brownoff.

  Front cover image: Angus Wyatt, Diving Board, 1991. Acrylic and ink on tar paper. 136.2 x 91.5 cm. Collection of The Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Used by permission.

  A volume in the Robert Kroetsch Series.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written consent. Contact the University of Alberta Press for further details.

  The University of Alberta Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from The Canada Council for the Arts. The University of Alberta Press also gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund (AMF) for its publishing activities.

  Contents

  Foreword

  SABAH A. SALIH

  Preface

  Trying Again to Stop Time (2009)

  Trying Again to Stop Time

  A Soulful Sunshine

  Beauty’s Fault

  Smart Poems I

  Winter Is the Season of Grief

  Home in a Suitcase

  The Pocket

  I Didn’t Want to Leave Alone

  Returning to Autumn

  I Want To Be Named Home (2007)

  To Go Back and Back

  Beyond the Sky Is a Blue Window

  A Woman Befriends Darkness

  To Be Free and Lonely

  Even Autumn Had No Room

  In Memory of a Person Swept By the Wind (2006)

  In Memory of a Person Swept By the Wind

  A Terrible Morning

  Too Late for Watching the Sunset

  The Last Refuge

  Smart Poems II

  The Rain of Compassion (2002)

  War

  Hello Exile

  Life Coming to an End

  Nature’s Playground

  The Fallen Doves

  The Rain of Compassion

  Untitled

  The Sun Ignores My Boat

  No Warmth (1985)

  Keeping to Oneself

  Midlife

  My Heart and Water

  Shouting at the World

  The End of Conflicts

  An Old Desire

  The Shade’s Wound

  Water’s Limitation

  Before Leaving

  The Most Depressing Time

  The Wind of Exile

  Winter’s Response

  Burial

  A Lonely Flower

  The Shrine

  To Be Naked Again

  After the Storm

  His Soul Returned to Us

  The Anthem of Departure

  The Evening Snow Dance (1979)

  A View

  An Accident

  That Evening

  The Immortal Lorca

  A Poet and a Suitcase

  The Lantern

  No Return

  A Legend

  Returning

  A New Cloud

  Always Anxious

  Our Breakup

  The Shade

  To Be Surrounded

  To Love

  A Visit

  Having No Need for Fire

  The Evening Snow Dance

  The Meadow

  The Fish Eagle

  The Dance of the Waves

  That Tree

  Your Heart

  Any Time You Come

  The Death of a Poet

  The Kindness of Trees

  Separation

  A Layer of Dust

  Falling in Love

  New Poems (2012–)

  Where Am I?

  The Shadow of a Wall

  Together, Alone

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  IN 1976, Jalal Barzanji had just begun his teaching career at a primary school in the tiny mountainous village of Sktan, some seventy miles from Kurdistan’s regional capital of Erbil (or what the locals call Hawler), when he unexpectedly found himself in love. Allowing their daughter marry a teacher would not be a problem, said the girl’s family to Barzanji, but letting her marry a teacher-poet was out of the question. That’s how the culture was, and still is. Even with jobs, poets are generally seen to be incapable of raising a family.

  The little crisis of his love for the girl passed, but a bigger crisis, namely, what it meant to be a poet, had just begun. The isolation of village life made Barzanji look inward, deep into himself and his world. The questions were many and always complicated, the answers were seldom satisfying, and the rewards, though often meagre, required hours and hours of thinking and rethinking. And then there was this constant state of anxiety—anxiety about words and ideas, about culture and society, about politics and the government—that never seemed to go away. Though the three years in Sktan were a hard on a young man unused to the absence of running water, electricity and other modern conveniences, the experience, as he himself often acknowledges, did help anchor Barzanji’s poetry in themes and concerns that continue to define his craft to this day: meditations on nature, reflections on the complexities of human emotions and situations, the way language and culture both collide and co-operate, what poetry can and cannot do, and the villagers’ way with words—features not hard to detect even in his first published poems.

  Appropriately titled The Evening Snow Dance, this first work also helps situate Barzanji in the multi-layered narrative of what could be described as Modern Kurdish poetry. Barzanji belongs to a generation of Kurdish poets, writers, and political campaigners from Iraqi Kurdistan (or Southern Kurdistan) who came of age in the late 1970s. This was the heyday of Socialist Realism. Art and literature were supposed to be easily accessible to the general public; more important, they were supposed to play an important role in the Kurdish people’s long struggle against Saddam Hussein, whose basic plan for Kurdistan was to Arabize it by force. The Iraqi regime’s overwhelming embrace of Socialist Realism meant that Modern Kurdish poetry tended to take a decidedly pro-Soviet and anti-American line.

  While he, too, was politically sympathetic to Moscow’s line, Barzanji could not, aesthetically, allow himself to be drawn to a view of literature that paid lip service to artistic freedom and creativity. For him, mixing literature and politics just didn’t seem to be the right thing to do. This point looms rather large throughout his poetry. Militancy, certainty, political urgency, ideological purity—these are largely absent from his poetry. More than anything else, one encounters ambiguity, symbolism,
imagism, curiosity about language, and, since coming to Canada in 1998, the losses and gains that come with a hybrid identity.

  If this sounds like a partial description of a poet who has come under the spell of Western Modernism, it is. Though he is well versed in classical Kurdish poetry, and though he continues to return to its masters (Wafaie, Haji Qadiri Koyee, and Mahwe in particular), Barzanji seems to have decided, and in my judgement rightly so, that such models are there for inspiration only, not for emulation. As a poet made cosmopolitan and out-of-place by globalization, he had to seek his models elsewhere. It is, therefore, perfectly understandable for Barzanji to have formed an attachment to Western Modernism, in particular to its pioneers, most notably Charles Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot, so early in his career. Modernism, by emphasizing experimentation in technique and writing style, by insisting that the artist should be accountable to no one but art, by being suspicious of mass politics, and by welcoming cultural and linguistic mixing in art, has offered a more attractive alternative to traditional and local views of art, which in general tend to subject art to political, religious, and moral controls. The result is that in Barzanji’s case one doesn’t have to be either Kurdish or knowledgeable about Kurdish culture and history to feel a connection to his poetry.

  As Barzanji himself has said in conversation, to be a poet in the modern world is to feel like an outsider everywhere. It is a world in which cultural borders are fast disappearing and, as a consequence, the poet can no longer be satisfied with just addressing a local audience or just trying to modernize a native tradition. It is a world in which Western Modernism continues to be a big player in shaping not just artistic and literary creations but also architecture and styles of living. In that respect Barzanji’s poetry is shaped by pressures and challenges not all that different from those shaping the poetry of so many other contemporary poets—Taslima Nasrin, Adonis, Yehuda Amichai, Shuntaro Tanikawa easily come to mind. Like theirs, Barzanji’s is a voice in which the native willingly mutates into the global.

  This translation follows the order of the original Kurdish text, Trying Again to Stop Time and Other Poems (published by Aras Press in Erbil, Kurdistan, in 2009), a reprint in one volume of Barzanji’s previously published collections: Trying Again to Stop Time (2009), I Want to Be Named Home (2007), In Memory of a Person Swept By the Wind (2006), The Rain of Compassion (2002), No Warmth (1985), and The Evening Snow Dance (1979). There are three more recent poems at the end, which appear for the first time in print in this translation.

  SABAH A. SALIH

  Professor of English

  Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, 2014

  Preface

  I CAN MAKE NO ASSUMPTION on the part of readers, nor give them any specific ideas about my poems before they have actually read them. I would like readers to form their own connection to these poems and to shape their own opinions on them. I have published several books of poetry, but I have never introduced any of them. However, this time I am publishing for different readers, many of whom are not familiar with Kurdish poetry. I don’t know who first said “All Kurdish people are poets,” but I have always considered this adage be true, because most Kurdish writers began by writing poetry, me included. I didn’t attend any creative writing courses, yet the reading of literature slowly turned into a love for writing for me. I took a special interest in poetry. I began with love poetry, but this did not fulfil my initial ambitions of attracting women, so I expanded my notions of love to include beauty, human desire, nature, and peace. These have become the only way I can exist this world, and bring back the things I have lost in life. I also created images from my words and thoughts of beauty. When I started writing poetry in 1970 there was no university in Kurdistan, no newspapers or literary magazines; nor were there resources I could draw on, except for a small library in Hawler that housed a few hundred Kurdish books. The rest were all in Arabic, since the Iraqi regime did not allow Kurdish people to receive an education in their mother tongue. My education was therefore in Arabic, which gradually became my second language. In the library I read some books about Kurdish, Arabic and Western literature. I was influenced by Western poets like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Saint-John Perse, and T.S. Eliot, among others.

  In 1970 most Middle Eastern countries demanded Socialist Realism from their writers. I couldn’t agree with this, because I wanted to write without interference, to give expression to what was inside me without any ideology or political grandstanding to inhibit my imagination. On the other hand, there was a demand for resistance poetry that supported the struggle of the Kurdish people for freedom. Then again, there was heavy censorship aimed at keeping the media and everything revolving around it state-run. Writers were never given accolades for their work; instead they were jailed, tortured, killed, and persecuted in different ways. I decided, however, to write beyond the rules, and to create an empty canvas for readers, allowing them to use their own minds to paint on it. The dictatorship didn’t want to allow readers such unlimited access to my voice. I knew I had to stand up for the rights of Kurdish people, but I didn’t write any resistance poems to encourage people to go to war because I think that overt protest poetry takes writers way from aesthetics, which is what interests me. Besides, I wanted to write for the world, not just for Kurds. I kept to the aesthetics of my poetry, but I wrote columns about peace, cultural cleansing, and social justice. Thus I worked through words for liberation, and these efforts were enough of a crime for the Iraqi regime. I paid a heavy price for my writing—this story appears in my memoir, The Man in Blue Pajamas, published by the University of Alberta Press.

  Poems use words as weapons, and words don’t have the power to change regimes. Yet dictatorships fear bold writers who speak out against them. They censor writers heavily, making them write under conditions of fear, hoping that they will hide something and constrain their minds. I used symbolism and masks to express myself. Sometimes using these tools will take you way from your real feelings, and may this affect your writing in many ways.

  I published my first book of poetry in 1979 under the title The Evening Snow Dance. It was well received by Kurdish readers as a new work written in a modern style, and with timely vision. Crossing borders, and being away from my birthplace, along with the experience of exile, becoming involved with a broader writing community of writers in Canada and having freedom of expression, has brought new materials, new vision and new landscapes into my poetry. Some of these poems appear in this collection and I encourage readers to find their own interpretations in them.

  JALAL BARZANJI

  Edmonton, November 2014

  Trying Again to Stop Time

  At sunrise

  time begins to depart;

  at sundown

  time turns into intense darkness.

  When I travel,

  I can’t wait to arrive,

  but when I arrive,

  I see that time is there already.

  Sometimes,

  no more than a quick look toward the east is needed

  for my past to turn into present;

  in a flash time takes me back to reality—

  it resembles a wooden stretcher,

  like the one leaning against a mosque wall.

  With the hours of love coming to an end,

  time becomes my biggest obstacle,

  even as my wife and I reach ecstasy.

  It’s a losing battle:

  my words have no chance against time.

  Sometimes,

  unable to catch up with imagination,

  I leave the battle, candle in hand,

  in complete darkness.

  Sometimes,

  nature, too, is like that:

  grass is unstoppable in the spring,

  but in autumn it is in full retreat.

  Often I see my words sinking in time’s depth.

  Often I see some of these words resurfacing,

  the little waves they create fleeing away sheepishly.

 
It’s a battle I can never win.

  A Soulful Sunshine

  1

  The middle stream

  pours into a different life;

  you have yet to experience it,

  but it’s no stranger to you.

  2

  Since childhood,

  my imagination had been pulling me to the north,

  into the heart of winter.

  Once there,

  it abandoned me

  for good.

  3

  One morning,

  long ago,

  juice from an apple

  dripped onto my words,

  leaving them stained forever.

  4

  Ever since imagination has become my guide,

  it’s been trying to conquer shame

  in the hope of going everywhere naked.

  …

  7

  Don’t throw stones:

  sunshine is all around you—

  you may hit its soul.

  8

  At the burial site of his legs,

  the youth turned to God:

  “God, how can I manage without legs?

  You could surely have given my legs a second chance,

  let them grow like grass.

  You could surely have rendered the mine harmless.

  You knew Saddam Hussein

  had planted it in the meadow

  near our house,

  but you let it go off

  while I was studying!”

  9

  Every evening in exile,

  I try to paint the clouds,

  but I always fail:

  they’re way too fast for my brush.

  10

  My wife,

  on my fifty-fifth birthday,

  gave me a walking stick

  from a tree

  known not for strength but weakness.

  11

  Look what they’re doing to me:

  they say they have no time,

  they’re too exhausted.

  Yet somehow they always find the time and energy

  to be cruel to me.

  Beauty’s Fault

  We drove to the sea,

  so that water and earth

  could reunite us with the sky.

  On the way,

  even the mountains

  and sunset