SoJust, the Art of Social Justice, was an international arts festival designed by the English Department and Drama Program at the American University of , Sulaimani (AUIS) to encourage the rising generation of intellectual, social activists in their current and future projects. It was backed by the  State Department and hosted six  artists for a week of workshops, classroom visits, panel discussions, plays, poetry readings and other events. The vignettes that follow are snapshots from the festival.

Jamal Khambar

The poet, famous in , the first face to be broadcast decades ago by  television, waits at the table with Bzhar, AUIS’ media relations officer, and Soran, an emerging poet who is also an AUIS student. By 9pm, the restaurant has filled with smoke and men. Built narrowly, tables on both sides of the small aisle that leads to the back, the restaurant forms a perfect gauntlet for a woman. A crest of muted conversation rolls behind me as I head for Jamal Khambar’s table.

Khambar keeps ordering: hummus, chicken tikka, fatoush, hot glasses of beef broth and fresh orange juice. But when the two of us can’t pull ourselves away from his books to eat the food, he stops. He sips at his whiskey, I my orange juice, and he begins to read. With tables crowded in the restaurant, he has to lean into me more than is considered appropriate. The two of us, bent over his book, ear to ear, he intones the words, caressing each syllable. He twists himself around the lines, coaxing emotion from them. I become an ear. The restaurant falls away.

He is reading the poems he would like for me to translate for the reading we’re hosting together as the festival’s opening night. He has chosen poems he dedicated to specific women who have died in honor killings. One poem mourns, satirically, the meaning “honor” has come to have in Kurdish society. The lovers in his poem cry out:

“Go inside … bar the doors and the windows.

The knife is coming … the dagger is coming … honor is coming!

Go inside.

Don’t open the door, even for the clouds.

Don’t open the window, even for the rain.

Daggers are falling like rain, honor has begun to storm,

Don’t open the sky, even for God … go inside!”

Later, after he and I read his work, in Kurdish and English, to the gathered SoJust audience, students swarm toward him, elbowing each other for a chance to ask more questions or get a picture with him. What we imagined would be an hour’s reading pushes deeper into the evening. Khambar hands his phone to me from inside the throng of students. Please would you call my friend, he asks, I was supposed to meet him. Make pretty apologies? Then he disappears back into the cluster of questions, into the buzz of fame.

Castle Climb

����Ǿ��Ա���� and a small group of student-writers: Umniyah, Mohammed, Saud and Mewan. They headed out of the city. Shea began talking with the students about what they were seeing, using the natural landscape around us to discuss how a writer sees. The striations on the hillside: what were they? Geological features or goat paths, worn over decades of grazing? The augers resting by the roadside beside piles of aluminum poles: what is happening in this village? At the top of the range, before bouncing on the bus’ shocks down into the valley, a herd of goats in the road stopped them. A water tank had been opened on the shoulder and the animals were flocking, drinking, unconcerned with the driver who honked and yelled out the window. A small puppy, guarding the goats, barked back.

Community and Memory, a workshop on photography and the process of memorializing, began in the city of Sulaimani and took its students to Halabja. The site of Saddam Hussein’s 1988 chemical attacks, Halabja is a gravitational center in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region for community and commemoration. Radcliffe Roye, a photographer, and Michael Galinsky, a filmmaker, worked with students as the workshop leaders and Jillian Armenante, an actor and director, accompanied them as an observer. 

When they arrived at the base of the hillside, the castle ruins looming above, the students groaned. The climb to the castle comes in three parts. The first is uphill, but steady: a nice walk. The second is steeper, a scramble from pasture to the top of an almost vertical rise. The third is on the flat top, tracing the edge to the castle entrance. Umniyah, revealing her deep fear of heights, rested with Raffo below an overhang. The rest of us pushed on to the castle, writing as we went, looking at our surroundings and contemplating the nature of seeing.

Mewan noticed the way that water flowed through the landscape below the ruins. It was the end of spring, the last of the water, and the hills had begun to brown, though their crevasses remained green. Wherever the land creased, it kept its moisture. The castle’s water catchment system, hundreds of years old, revamped with concrete to preserve the original masonry, still sits within what would have been the original walls and still collects water. Exploring the cistern’s construction, Neil discovered the almost human hair of a goat. Where there’s hair, there must be bones. Someone had walked their meal up the mountain and slaughtered it, leaving the hooves and head to rot in the sunlight several feet from the path. The guts they left next to the water, where they must have washed their meat.

The group of students at the top walked over lines of stone that hinted at old walls, peered through what must have been windows and up chimneys that still conducted air. In one room, they found six alcoves perfect in their peaked domes. In another, at the edge of the castle exposed to the sun, Neil pointed out carnivorous plants: long vines lined with little green jugs. The cilia around the opening allowed bugs to enter easily, but made escape impossible. Once a bug fell in, it became lunch, like the goat at the fortress well, dissolved in the stomach of the plant. A horrible way to die, and Saud wanted to see the process. He caught a bug, dropped it in. Then, taking pity, he shook the plant upside down until the bug tumbled out.��“I felt bad,” he said.

At the road again, hours later, they ran into a man who lives nearby and has been appointed by the Sulaimani Museum as the castle guardian. Neil prompted the students to ask the man questions about the castle. “It’s called Sirochik,” he said. But he knew little more. The castle, its former occupants, were nearly as much as mystery to him as they were to the visitors.

Slogans

The visiting artists began to play a game: If the KRG had a slogan, like Las Vegas or New York City, what would it be? Shea suggested:  — we got this. He had just passed a pick-up truck on the highway with a horse, tethered complacently in the truck’s bed. , director of Iowa’s International Writing Program, offered: Kurdistan — it is not what it will be. He reflected for a moment, laughed, and added: “Yes, Virginia is for lovers, but West Virginia is open for business.” This game of mottos, what they say about a place, the people living there, intrigued him.

He had just come from Baghdad and felt both uplifted by the creativity he’d seen and deeply unsettled by the way the city had felt. The Baghdad book fair, he said, was vibrant, but US officials and visitors ran between the cover of buildings.

In Iraq, women often shy away from singing or dancing in public. It is considered unfeminine and immoral to drink or smoke. Reputation is both essential and fragile.

Driving from Erbil to Sulaimani, through the Red Valley, green before summer’s heat, it was hard for him to believe that he was still in the same country. After he led a poets’ field trip to Three Oaks, he drove through the Naked Valley to Lake Dukan. From the rocky shore, he dove into fresh snowmelt. Swimming in Iraq. Merrill laughed again, perched, shivering and drying in the last hours of the day. “Baghdad,” he said,��“it is what it is.”

The Women

All the plays that AUIS students have performed under Peter Friedrich’s leadership have confronted their audiences with relevant and vital questions. Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire����ǰ��ٰ�������� and Iraqi-American women, with all their various desires, before, during and after the American invasion. A series of monologues, the play showcases its actresses.

In Iraq, women often shy away from singing or dancing in public. It is considered unfeminine and immoral to drink or smoke. Reputation is both essential and fragile. Under these conditions, this cast of young women threw themselves into their characters.

One is an Iraqi woman exiled in London. On opening night, the young woman’s character saunters onto stage, British punk rock blaring, swinging an empty bottle of Jack Daniels. In a burst of emotion, she improvises: the bottleneck becomes a fret and she wails on her glass guitar. Throwing her head back, she sinks to her knees, still shredding. The audience gasps, then, in sudden exaltation, whoops and applauds.

Another character, an irreverent and brutally honest artist who is killed in the invasion, tells a joke: Above a restaurant hangs a sign, “You eat for free! We’ll give your grandchildren the bill.” A young man eats and eats until he is contented. His waiter hands him a bill. “Oh, there must be some confusion,” the young man says. “No, there’s no confusion,” the waiter says, “this is your grandfather’s bill.” As the audience sits in contemplative silence, the character cackles. Into the silence, she laughs herself breathless.

A third character, an Iraqi-American woman living in New York City when the invasion begins, lists the names of her relatives back home in Iraq. As she intoned her list, I felt audience members around me making their own: names of dear ones lost, names of family members and friends still in danger. I found myself listing names I had learned in my two years of teaching and living in Sulaimani: names I didn’t know when our country began the invasion, names I came to know and love, names of people who had survived. The actress kept going, her list relentless, each name passing her lips like a rosary bead between fingers, calling out love across the continents that separated her from home.

The Professional Victim

Community and Memory, a workshop on photography and the process of memorializing, began in the city of Sulaimani and took its students to Halabja. The site of Saddam Hussein’s 1988 chemical attacks, Halabja is a gravitational center in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region for community and commemoration. , a photographer, and , a filmmaker, worked with students as the workshop leaders and , an actor and director, accompanied them as an observer. Armenante had her own interest in the events of Halabja: She was directing a production that examined the Herero genocide in Africa during the Second Reich.

Genocide is a life-long concern for Armenante. “When something that global happens,” she said, “it always distills to the personal for me. I took in each image [in the Halabja Museum] and tried to pay respect as much as I could to as many names on the wall as I could.” She didn’t realize until she had completed her tour and was watching the closing film of the exhibit, she didn’t realize until her guide, Omed, pointed at the screen and said, “That’s me,” that he was one victim of the tragedy. There he was, on screen, in 1988, sobbing and talking to reporters, and wearing the white piece of cloth that had been draped over the six family members he had lost.

The two embraced, tears in their eyes. He said: “Please tell my story – please tell my story.” Her eyes watered. She embraced him again. Days later, Armenante still felt reverberations from the encounter. “The fact that he worked there, among photos and videos of his own personal tragedy for years and years and years left me with chagrin,” she said.

Levantine Viper

Muhammed spotted a snake, sitting in the courtyard outside the administrative building at dusk. He waved Neil over. Without a thought, Neil picked it up, looked it over, and carried it to a line of shrubs at the edge of the courtyard. We found out later that it was a Levantine Viper: highly venomous. I laughed: “Well, at least it was a small one.”

“No,” he said, laughing, too, at his own dumb luck. “Those are worse: They don’t know how to control their venom yet.”

“Will There Be Violence?”

We left for dinner in the gardens of Mangal. Poised above the river sometimes clogged by construction debris and misdirected sewage, these gardens can be quite cool and spacious. Over salt-soaked blanched almonds and cucumber salad dressed with lemon juice, Galinsky and Roye began arguing with a student about the pitfalls of national pride. Competing with the student’s escalating volume, they only wound him up.

Galinsky kept repeating, “I’m not proud to be an American.” Roye went further, asserting, “Obama has done nothing for black folk in America.”

It is easy purchase for an American in the Middle East to condemn his country and his country’s leaders. These statements’ pyrite glitter can seem like the only counterweight to extreme and unexamined nationalism.

Merrill sat listening. These were individuals whose trip had been funded by the US State Department. These were artists making statements with no room for uncertainty. After 45 minutes, he interrupted.

“You’re an idiot,” he said to Galinsky.

“I’m sorry?” said Galinsky, stunned.

“No, no, you’re right, I’m sorry,” Merrill said, “you’re a f**king idiot.”

One of the girls attending the dinner looked to Shea and murmured, “Will there be violence?”

“Oh, no,” Shea replied, “They’re just arguing.”

A few days later, I discussed the event with university colleagues. They showed me day-old video footage of Iraqi diplomats beating Jordanian supporters of Saddam at a seminar on mass graves in Amman. “This is where we live,” they reminded me.

*[Note: Read the full anthology of the SoJust Festival .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The auditorium fills. A janitor weaves through the crowd to unlock the upper balcony, and soon that fills, too. Men sit on each other’s knees, three to a seat, careful not to touch the women around them. Men fill the center aisle, flowing around the five video cameras that will broadcast the event to several television channels. Groups of women sit on the floor, leaning against the bolted-down chairs. Photographers clog the stairs to the stage. When the enters the room, those not already on their feet spring out of their seats, applauding.

The poet, in a collared shirt beneath a sweater vest and elbow-patched blazer, takes his seat. The more audacious fans push to shake his hand; he rises to accept, to graze cheeks in the formal kiss. Each time he stands, the audience follows, breaking into fresh, ferocious applause. He takes the stage flanked by three bodyguards who clear a path through the grabbing attendees.

During his short speech on political parties and their failings, the language and its splintering, the audience keeps bursting into applause, like peals of thunder. I start a tally as he reads his . Audience members mouth the words along with him. After one poem, the clapping synchronizes and the audience takes up a chant, “Doo-bah-rah! Doo-bah-rah!” — “Again! Again!” and the poet relaunches, delivering the poem a second time. He leans over the lectern to deliver the lines. The tally: 48.

Backbeat

I remember the first time I’d seen such a response to live — at an elocution contest sponsored by the American University of , Sulaimani (AUIS). Some 20 contestants took the stage and at least 100 students crammed into the cafeteria just to watch try-outs. At the time, the school only had 400 students. When the student-translator took the stage to read the poem in its original language first, the audience interrupted him, cheering at the end of each line. All this while the university had trouble galvanizing students to come to soccer games. The audience heard the same poem 20 times and never seemed to tire of it, developing a steady beat to their clapping which, during the longer transitions between contestants, they used as the backbeat for spontaneous line dancing in between the seats.

It was a delight to watch, and yet I wondered why these students responded so fervently to poetry.

Only in 2003 did Kurdish become the state language for the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. Until then, Iraqi Kurds were forced to fluency in Arabic. The Turkish government banned the use of the Kurdish language for a hundred years.

Back in the auditorium, the joy had an odor, intensified by the struggling air conditioning: cologne, dust and sweat. All these people pulled together so tightly in anticipation of rhyme, meter and reflection. Why such devotion to these poets? To their poems? I asked a few Kurdish poets to reflect on this question.

The Two Worlds’ Effect

In his poem, “Two Worlds,” Hemin Latif asks: “Don’t you see how I’m divided? / Don’t you see how I am two parts? / Don’t you know these two worlds?” His readers might imagine that these two parts, these two worlds are the corporeal and ethereal or perhaps the western and eastern. As an emerging poet and the former chair of the IT Department at AUIS, however, Latif means to indicate the worlds of poetry and information technology. Though he is an extreme example, with his two worlds as unrelated as they are, he is not unique in the pantheon of contemporary Kurdish poets.

While American poetry has become professionalized through the academy, Kurdish poetry remains, in Latif’s words, “a hobby, secondary.” So, Kurdish poets remain intimately connected to worlds other than poetry. Sherko Bekas, after he retired as a peshmerga — a Kurdish freedom fighter — ran Sardam, a publishing house in Sulaimani. Jamal Ghambar, renowned for his beautiful readings, practices law and just this fall ran for political office. Sherzad Hassan, a poet and translator, works as a media specialist for the Directory of Education in Sulaimani. Latif now serves as the acting provost at AUIS and will eventually transition into his role as the vice president for University Advancement.

In our conversation, Abdulla Pashew, one of the most famous living Kurdish poets, remarked: “I think you know, or have heard, about the Russian poet, Yevtushenko. He said, ‘In Russia the poet is more than a poet!’ Sometimes it seems to me that he said these words about Kurdish poets.” Referencing a particularly political poem he wrote, “12 Lessons for Children,” he says: “Could I write such a poem if I had been born or grew up in Paris or Stockholm? There, the papers, broadcast television and radio, the PMs, they say such things: not poets. Yes,” he adds for emphasis, “in poets are more than poets!”

Dana Gioia starts his , “Can Poetry Matter,” arguing: “American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group.” This is the academic poetic environment in which I grew up. Even my favorite poets, writers I considered famous, receive not even name recognition in broader circles. Is it possible that in Iraqi Kurdistan I have witnessed what poetry can mean before it confines itself to the academy? Is banishment behind academic walls the inevitable fate of poetry, or does Kurdistan show us another path?

Perhaps contemporary Kurdish poetry demonstrates the inverse of Gioia’s theory. These Kurdish poets are part of the larger world around them, so the world responds to them. Or these poets engage in professions other than poetry, so they write on topics and in styles that achieve greater relevance to their audiences.

“He Says What We Cannot Say”

At one point, as I translated the controversial poet, Sheikh Raza Talabani, with a young Kurdish woman, she sat back and paused. “I see why he’s so important now,” she said. “He says what we cannot say.” In a society where certain things simply aren’t said, or can even be dangerous to say, poets become voices for all that individuals keep silent.

Pashew is known for being critical of Kurdish society, ungoverned by the political parties. In 1972, he read “12 Lessons for Children” in Kirkuk. A poem against the forced Arabization of Kurdish regions, it was “a forbidden poem,” only published in Kurdistan in 1991. He had been warned not to read it. Pashew remembers the event well: “During and after the reading, it was unbelievable! [The poem] was a demonstration under that bloody regime. I don’t know whether it was a good poem or not, but I know that I said what was forbidden to whisper, even to friends.”

The Kurds are divided across five politically sovereign nations. They have survived many military conflicts in the past century alone. It wouldn’t be surprising that Kurds would cherish recitation as a reliable method of cultural transmission.

When I asked if the connection between politics and poetry was a more recent trend, Homer Dizeyee, a famous lyricist, singer and political advisor to former President Jalal Talabani, responded: “The 400-year-old epic Mem u Zin is not only a love story. There is patriotic motive behind it. Consider the nationalistic poems of Haji Qadiri Koye; a few verses of Mustafa Pasha Yamulki; Ahmed Mukhtar Jaff,” and so many more.

In a more recent poem, “Viagra,” Pashew remains concerned with the silence surrounding corruption and betrayal in politics, but uses a lighter tone. He writes:

“There’s no need to advertise it

The whole world knows the blue eyes of Viagra,

The service it does for the right and the left,

But it strikes me

That our parliamentarians, when they eat it,

Get weak

Go silent.

Even swallowing 1000 pills

Won’t help.

Only their hands and their pockets can get erect!”

He speaks what others consider unspeakable. Even Sherko Bekas, author of the poem that would become the anthem for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), evolved into a man who implicitly turned away from politics. One of his final books bore the title, Now a Girl is My Homeland. Bekas moved his attention from “Garmyan’s Hurricane” to a “cloudy girl”:

“Instead of the river

I sit beside the rim of her body

Instead of on moss and beside the waterfall

I sit under her lovelocks.”

To a Western audience, this love-language is innocuous. Yet most readers of this poetry may not have, as Latif said, “free, open relationships and interactions with the opposite sex.” He adds: “Love poems are always welcome. People find they meet their thirst for thinking, interacting, and relating to the opposite sex.” It is as controversial to speak of love, especially anatomically explicit love, as to be politically critical.

A young woman, translating Kajal Ahmad, a female poet known for her fierce, sensual, poems, worried that simply bringing Ahmad into English might damage her reputation. With poems like “Nietzsche,” her fear doesn’t surprise me. Nietzsche said:

“Women are cats

And if they breed they become cows!”

If fate had put me

Before that mad man

I would have told him, […]

Give me one night

But let there be a conscious sun

Not a drowsing, dull moon,

Until I give you truth like a kiss and

Turn from the philosopher to philosophy.”

Dizeyee, famous for his more explicit romantic lyrics, is adamant: “I am a politician, artist, and lyricist. Critics see sensual inclination in my lyrics; I am fond of beauty, beauty in all its senses; I roam in a realm of aesthetics when I write.” But this realm of aesthetics, in the daily life of the young people I have known, is circumscribed. It is poets who set people free; through language, they liberate thought.

Present and Past Entertainments

From Latif’s perspective, until recent developments, including the Iraq War and a rise of investors in the KRG, there have not been public entertainments aside from concerts and poetry readings. Readings retain popularity because there have historically not been many other options. “In Western countries, such as the ,” Latif said, “people have a plethora of options when they need a break. Options in this country are limited. Anything that promises difference is worth it.” Sulaimani, for example, a city of a million people and several major universities, didn’t have a movie theater until 2009.

The history of the Kurdish people, Dizeyee counters, has as much bearing on poetry’s popularity as the present: “Oral literature flourishes” in “nomadic societies”; “in rural areas, this became a deeply rooted culture, which has gone on and on until our day.” Additionally, have undergone significant political persecution that would force literature to remain oral and performance-oriented. used the Kurdish population as the national scapegoat, perpetrating acts of genocide.

Only in 2003 did Kurdish become the state language for the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. Until then, Kurds were forced to fluency in Arabic. The government banned the use of the Kurdish language for a hundred years. Though this ban was recently lifted, the legacy of an outlawed language remains in the oral transmission of literature.

The Kurds are divided across five politically sovereign nations. They have survived many military conflicts in the past century alone. It wouldn’t be surprising that Kurds would cherish recitation as a reliable method of cultural transmission.

National Identity

One way to conceive of the Kurdish identity revolves around negatives: past atrocities and persecutions, recent civil wars, current political fissures. Often the reference points for Kurdish identity in Iraq are and . But how can the Kurdish identity be something to celebrate that is neither tragic nor inherently politicized?

Even a poem about Halabja, the city that Saddam chemically bombed in 1988, is an act of creation. However small that creation, it stands in the face of that destruction. The poem is not contested territory. Even if it discusses controversial ideas or contradicts itself, it belongs to each reader equally. Each poem that articulates ideas through beautifully crafted Kurdish is an intimate celebration of that identity. “The nation” is not a political entity for Kurds at this moment. Poetry might offer Kurds an affirmative way to participate in their nationhood.

In our interview, Pashew mused: “Poetry is, first of all, the sound of nature and instinct. Material prospect and technological progress lead to rationality, which blunts instinct. Grown-up nations need poetry less than others.” It’s possible that in a “grown-up nation” like America, the reason a writer or a reader turns to poetry has changed. Perhaps the writer and the reader aren’t looking to tap into a larger ethnic identity, but to reach singularity.

*[Note: Read the full anthology of the SoJust Festival .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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