Latvian Daina, Japanese Haiku, and Armenian Troubadouring

I can tell my story but cannot surround it. Latvian Daina and Japanese Haiku never captured my moment, although I read thousands of them. What surrounds my poetry is my experience which is the same as everyone else’s, yet I have not written about fleeting moments. Rather when I remember a name, a face, a place or a train station or aromance (aroma of romance as I titled one of my books), it is not about the moment that passed but about my reliving, now, through remembrance, of that very moment.

As such, my fleeting moments are reincarnations when I write about them. And then, incarnation is not a moment anymore but a vast space where I once lost myself searching for time.

Time I can freeze, not stop. Freeze it long enough to enjoy it like an icicle hanging from the gutter of my house in January. And then let it melt away, become that drop of water that one day will rain upon a river running North.

… There is no poetry, no life worth living without the pursuit or the beatitude of love. Perhaps that is the only story I can tell by surrounding it, as if Latvian Daina, because what cocoons love also surrounds it with promises that cannot be kept, but can be ignored.  

“Love is not a feeling” I learned more than 50 years ago. Yet I looked for love in all the forms that I was told it exists.  Strangely, love has been  a one-liner like Daina or Haiku. It is often that one line we cannot get out from, escape at midnight when the moon is looking away. That line is a black hole with only a way in. And that one line cannot be un-structured  no matter how many times we change the subject, the tense of the verb, and the caressing of the adjectives.

Love keeps us locked in that line. A line others can read and recite, but a line that means little to us. Because that line never has a period. An end point. Because love is that train station with many stops but infinite kilometers of rail line. We stop at many stations in our search for that end point.

But the rail line never ends.

But there is no end point.

January 17, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2109

It Was Simply Black & White

It took me a while

To learn about what I missed

Without climbing atop mountains

To find what I had forgotten

To miss

What was left behind

Was nothing

It took me a while

But I learned about my search

As when one breaks his big toe

Hitting a rock that was not on the search road

At the last search

What was left behind

Was time not spent

It took me a while

To give a name to what I found

To give a meaning and to come down the mountain

For what I had missed was in the valley

Lost without a name

What was left behind

Was a whisper and good-bye

January 1, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019

Dependency

When loneliness keeps you company

Spring feels like a winter day

That does not start with sunrise

Nor ends with freezing rain

When memories keep you covered

Like a soldier’s blanket in a trench

Through its holes you can still see

Shooting stars above the trees

When a name has brown eyes

You lose yourself in cities of steel

Hoping to run away

From all that sounds like good-bye

But when your face has deeper wrinkles

Than the desert dunes after a storm

You call that name, in loneliness

And pull the blanket to your eyes

Your brown eyes

November 30, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Freedom-- Did Maslow Overestimate the Human Need for Shelter and Food?

I received a note from a dear Argentinean friend who had read my last poem “The Walls of Leyla” (https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-walls-of-layla.html)

He wrote:

“Indeed, Romeo and Juliette have existed through Majnun and Leyla centuries before Shakespeare wrote his version of that love story. But have you read “Dylana and Diram” by Saleem Barakat? It is the Kurdish version of Leyla and Juliette, Romeo and Majnun. I know years ago we had talked about your love of his writing style.”

Ha! “Years ago” was 1974, almost 45 years before we started our journey around the planet. In those years we were stuck in a city in war, with little electricity, dirty shelters, and uncertain future. During those days in Beirut, I read most of the days, any book that I could find in languages I knew.

And it was in 1976 when I read Saleem Barakat’s “The Iron Grasshopper” (Al-Jundab al-Hadidi) about the life of a Kurdish boy in Syria. The subtitle of the first section of the book read “"The unfinished memoir of a child who never saw anything but a fugitive land" which I understood well sitting in a shelter when bombs were falling in the neighborhood.

… Barakat is a Syrian-Kurdish writer born in Quamishli, where there used to be a sizable Armenian community. Many of my friends were also born in Quamishli and eventually became citizens of countries expanding from Australia to Europe and the Americas. We stayed in touch, sometimes because of serendipity. It was one of these friends who after hearing from me that I had indeed read extracts of Dylana and Diram, sent me Barakat’s “The Iron Grasshopper” this time in a French translation “Le Criquet de Fer” published in 1993.

“See if upon re-reading you will see what has changed in you in 50 years, and what has not.”

So I did.

… I do not speak nor understand Kurdish, but I have heard a lot of Kurdish in the streets growing up. I know a few words and a sentence or two. So, as I was reading “Le Criquet de Fer”, the word “Azad” kept on returning with resonance from my memories. It means “Free” in Armenian and Kurdish, but was not sure if it was also used as such in other languages.

So, I Goggled!

Well, Azad is used both as a masculine name meaning “free man” and a word meaning “free” in Asia Minor cultures such as Iranian, Turkish, Armenian and Kurdish, but also in Hindi. Perhaps of the Silk and Spice Roads?

It is delightful that freedom, a concept and goal shaping human cultures is also defined by the same word in so many cultures.

So I decided to research if the two other pan-human concepts and aspirations also have common terminology. I chose “love” and “beauty” for the languages which used Azad as a common word.

Here is what I found:

A.    Love

In Armenian it is Ser

In Kurdish it is Evîn

In Hindi it is Mohabbat

In Turkish it is Aşk

In Iranian/Farsi it is Mehr

B.     Beauty

In Armenian it is Keghetsgoutyoun

In Kurdish it is çelengî

In Hindi it is sundarata

In Turkish it is güzellik

In Iranian it is Iranian/Farsi is Jamal

Maslow and the hierarchy of human needs: When we mention needs, in most parts of the world those who have taken a class of psychology will bring Abraham Maslow’s pyramid to the discussion. Yes, that pyramid has made us believe that we have a hierarchy that needs to be fulfilled stepwise in order for us to find comfort, happiness, love and success in life. Interestingly, in the original version of the famous Maslow-pyramid freedom is a ‘luxury’ or meta-motivational need that comes after all other needs such as food, security and shelter are fulfilled.

Today I am thinking about the work of Barakat, one of the most prolific Syrian – Kurdish writers of the century. His name in Kurdish is Bereket meaning good fortune. He has made Stockholm, Sweden, his home since 1999 but all his writings, in original Arabic, are about the part of the world where the word for freedom is the same but not the words for beauty and love.

I am not sure how Maslow’s pyramid explains the power of Barakat’s writing echoing the centuries-old sorrow and hopes of 35 million Kurds, the largest cultural group without a country of their own.  Kurds speak their language in parts of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan. 

For them, freedom may not be a luxury.

…And, 45 years after reading his first autobiography while in a Beirut shelter during the civil war of the 1970s, I cannot but wonder if indeed Maslow had underestimated the desire of humans to place freedom atop the list of their needs, surpassing hunger and shelter.

After all, a hungry but free man is more at peace with destiny than is a man enslaved to material or non-spiritual desires.

Unless of course one has to cherish Shakespeare’s Sonnet 57 where he writes:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire?

I have no precious time at all to spend,

Nor services to do, till you require.

Somehow I know that Saleem Barakat never used this Sonnet for inspiration….

November 27, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

The Walls of Layla

Majnun

At noon

Laid down by her grave

And carved verses of virgin love

As nazira

She had already descended

Into the ruins of his lonesome soul

To find silence

In assorted songs, years later, in secret

It was his turn

In madness and hope

To pass by the walls

And find in the desert

The simple name he knew

Dark as night, dark as the sunset

When he let that name bathe in the sand

Repeating “I am yours”

Before the sun came back

As a song

In time

November 15, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Even As the Archer Loves the Arrow That Flies, So Too He loves the Bow That Remains Constant in His Hands. — Nigerian Proverb

And she wore the sounds

She often hoped to hear

When the desert slept

And the moon rested upon her pillow

All colour, all sound

                   

Predictable pleasures

Get lost in the rhyme

In the hope of a name

That ends the dream

Like a couplet

And she wore the sounds

Like a hat, like what’s remains

Of an embrace

When love had left her pillow

And gave its space to the silence

Of a cold moon

She will not get old

For she was never of that youth

When one wears a sonnet

En guise of a stolen kiss

To give a rhyme to the silent

Desert

November 1, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Hirundinidae

The swallowtail top

Of the ancient building

Caught

The luck

I had given away

I was in a world where incense

Is not burned

But surrounded by its smoke

To let forget

The human fear

Of being known

Before green tea

And plum wine

Are offered

Passerine

Like a yellow bird

In a cold mind

The incense

Lined on my table

In shapes of red cones

Let me promise

What I had forgotten

About the luck

The swallowtail top

Of the house

Had caught

Then, when the smoked

Was fanned

When the red cones turned to ashes

And grey

I had green tea

And sweet plum wine

October 16, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018