A Map in Flames

The world is changing again. At least the part of the world where I spent my youth.

I saw a map on TV about the Syrian conflict and two names reached deep into my long locked memory vault and for a minute, I ignored the passage of time, the vastness of continents, the languages I learned, and the lessons I cherished.

Ras el-Ain and Qamishli.

… One of the Kurdish-Syrian intellectual’s works I first read in the 1970s was the poetry of Saleem/Salim Barakat.  He is a Kurdish writer, poet and intellectual who now lives in Sweden. He originally described his approach as writing in Kurdish using Arabic language.  In fact, his original poetry was influenced (in my opinion) by historical moments from the Arab, Armenian, Assyrian and Yazidi cultures. And that is not surprising since Qamishli, where he was born and spent his youth, is a melting pot of all these cultures.

I have written about Barakat’s work before here https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2018/11/freedom-did-maslow-overestimate-human.html. Today, after seeing that map on TV, I searched the Web for more and found a very thoughtful literary site called Jacket2 (https://jacket2.org/about-us) that publishes literary commentaries, reviews and interviews. There, I read a commentary by Huda J, Fakhreddine an academic from the University of Pennsylvania. It is a very well written essay about Barakat and his influence in modern Middle Eastern and world literatures. In that essay Dr. Fakhreddine has also included a few translations she and a colleague made of the most poignant statements and imagery from Barakat’s 1983 work. Having read many of these in their original language, I found the translation well representative of the message Barakat sought.

Here are my favorites:

Writing: violence testing the forgotten

and

Sound: the ruin of form

… An academic myself, I often proposed that the answer is the death of the question.

And today, I hope the answer to that map on TV where burning icons are placed atop the cities is not the death of the question.

Since all questions start with Why?

October 19, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019