Writing Their Way Out of War: Poets Bejan Matur & Maram al-Masri

 

The Guardian's Ed Vulliamy wrote about the literary force coming out of a troubled region. "It comes in defiant journalism, like the story televised last week of a gardener in Aleppo who was killed by bombs while tending his roses and his son, who helped him, orphaned. And it comes in the verses of two female poets, part of an emergent school of verse, much of it written by women: Bejan Matur and Maram al-Masri – Kurdish and Syrian respectively," he writes. More:

Matur and Masri are the two most illustrious and cogent of this new generation of female poets; their verse combines to create a devastating but richly composed verbal landscape that it is at once epic and intensely human. Raw and lyrical, of the moment but seeped in the memories of their people, immediate and for ever.

The two women write very differently. Masri’s poetry vividly encapsulates the frailty of our human condition in a brutal society. It can flay you at first reading. It is fair to see Masri as a love poet whose verse spares no truth of love’s joys and mercilessness, to whose work war then came, as it tore her native Syria apart, and overwhelmed it, and her.

Matur’s verse is more mystical: it sublimates the political and politicises the sublime; it locates her people’s wandering within a philosophical meditation on both the meaning and emptiness of being. While Masri’s verse is modern, and modern war poetry of the cruellest order, Matur’s evokes the Romantics, Coleridge and Emily Brontë. Both record, with power and sentient humanity, the vortex of war in our world today, and the millions these wars scatter and shatter across it, not least to Europe’s shores.

‘For me, only through writing poetry can I reach my own horizons,” says Matur. We’re talking in a cafe by the river Lee in Cork, after a discussion of her work in the city library. During the discussion, she had confronted the fact that all her poetry until now was written in Turkish, rather than her native Kurdish, the banned, therefore private language of home and family.

But in the library, she had read aloud her first Kurdish poems. “My mother corrected me,” she told the audience. “She pointed out, for instance, the different Kurdish words for ‘to turn around’ and ‘to return’ – I had used the wrong one. So there was my mother, who cannot read, becoming my editor!”

Now Matur reflects on these origins. “We lived a happy life, but it was always confined; even as a child I was aware of this. I’m Kurdish, and you learn early that others do not regard or accept the land in which you are born as your own.”

Now, repression in the wake of the failed coup against Turkey’s President Erdoğan moves against all Alevi Kurds, like Matur’s family – seen not only as enemies of the state, but also as heretics by its aggressive Islamicisation. “No one feels safe,” she says, as pro-regime mobs stage incursions into Kurdish communities.

Read on here.