Of all the horrors of this benighted century, the genocide of the Yazidis at the hands of ISIS a decade ago stands out for its extreme brutality and inhumanity. At the time, few people outside the region were aware of the group’s existence; as non-Muslims (Yazidism has pre-Zoroastrian roots), Yazidis were specifically targeted. The world has by now, alas, largely moved on to other atrocities.
At such times and in such situations, people have often turned to poetry. Something Missing From This World is a collection of a dozen or so contemporary Yazidi poets, with translations from Arabic (the language of the countries whence they hail) forming the bulk, with others translated from Kurmanji (the language of the Kurds) and the occasional poem written directly in English.
The collection would be easier to review if the poems only spoke to the Yazidi’s particular plight. Some do, some reference war, violence and refugee camps, some directly, others obliquely, but many others, perhaps most, are, well, poems about things poets have always written about. The imagery and language can be inventive: “The leaves of grass / Are the Earth’s cigarettes” starts one by Emad Bashar who still lives in Kurdistan. “They did not tell me / That village women have no right to write poetry” starts another by Janan Dakhil, a poet who relocated to Germany.
Others, such as this poem by physics teacher Sahba Dexîl develop vivid, detailed imagery with commendable economy of language:
Our home boasts a big, beautiful clock
Made in China
We drape it in old-fashioned cloth
Then
Draw a circle
In our backyard
We mark the center with a stone
A shadow scorpion shifting with the sun
To map destinations disappearing
At the periphery
To tell ourselves apart from the wind
Wacida Xêro’s background and day job as a singer is evident in this example of hers.
late one tapering afternoon
from two discrete tap roots
a fig tree and a pomegranate tree
grow high up over the walls
at the corner of a neighbor’s yard
their branches writhe
naked embracing
at the mouth of an intersection
in the sight of god and passersby
But of course, the past looms large, as in this poem by Sarmad Saleem:
Only the child who crossed the border
From Mount Shingal to Rojava
In too-big boots
Knows the names of those soldiers
Who left their boots behind
Few poems are very long; some of the shortest are the most striking, as this poem from Saad Shivan, now a refugee in Greece:
What you call displaced people
Are rather the gaps
The killers in every war
Left behind
He goes on to say in another: “We were not betraying anyone—I mean, we had no country”.
The volume is multilingual, with the originals in Arabic or (romanized) Kurmanji. Enough of my College Arabic remains to give me some idea of what we must be missing by reading these in translation.
The editors write in their introduction that
Nothing about this anthology was inevitable. In fact, from some perspectives, it is a miracle.
Indeed.