Refugee Number 33,333

Farhad Pirbal is an experimental Kurdish poet whose first collection in English, Refugee Number 33,333, translated by Pshtiwan Babakr and Shook, features excerpts from six of his poetry books published between 1990 and 2009. Pirbal’s poems, often restless and peripatetic, are concerned with immigration, exile, and belonging. Though the route of an exile is often imagined as isolated and singular, Pirbal writes to preserve a kind of collective memorial archive of immigrants, and there is a sense throughout of the shadows of all immigrants, past, present, and future, passing through these poems. In “For Ernst Rodin,” Pirbal writes:

Naked, perched, sunken in contemplation,
the fingers of one hand beneath his chin, seated, he thinks.

[…]

We pass by and gaze at him,
some of us sad, some of us happy hearted,
some of us jokingly,
and some of us awed:
               “Why is this man sitting naked, thinking?” 
                “How long has this man
                 been sitting right here, thinking?”

This poem relates an immigrant’s experience of strolling a European city, where ridiculing a canonical piece of work offers a way to momentarily offset feelings of otherness. In the list poem “44 Definitions of Exile,” Pirbal writes:

11. Wishing for all your family and relatives from Kurdistan to move nearby
your house in Oxford Circus, in London.

Which immigrant hasn’t wanted to move their family close, or balked at economic injustice as Pirbal does in “1993”:

as long as the price of a pair of underwear in Geneva 
is worth fifteen kurta and shalwar in Bombay,

as long as the asshole dollar is worth five hundred dinars in Slemani, 
as long as even thirty 500 dinars is not worth
a glass of ice cream in Venice,
this world must be destroyed—entirely!

In the long poem “I Remember,” when the speaker recalls a bygone era of Hewlêr, I feel his sense of loss keenly: “I remember that the place where Orosdi-Back is today (across from the court) was a big field.”