With members across Kurdistan, the United States, Andalusia, Sweden, Turkey, and Palestine, the collective Pinsapo creates and publicizes “homeless poetry and art works.” The press has launched their Kurdish Poetry Series with a bilingual edition of Selim Temo’s Nightlands, sensitively translated from the Kurmanji by Zêdan Xelef and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse and edited by Öykü Tekten. It’s a noteworthy introduction to a vital series.

Although Temo is a celebrated contemporary Kurdish poet, with three collections in Kurmanji as well as three others in Turkish, his work will likely be new to many anglophone readers. Xelef’s moving introduction is especially welcome, providing a valuable overview of Temo’s work, with additional insight into the breadth of Kurdish history and cultural experience:

When I came across Temo’s work for the first time, I realized that the way I had started writing in Arabic after forced Arabization in Iraq was how Temo had started writing in Turkish after a century of Kurmanji language and culture being banned in Turkey. In both our nation-states, our language was unwelcome, suspect, and, for large spans of time, outlawed. I saw myself clearly in the shift he made from writing in Turkish to Kurmanji, a shift he made after he won a Turkish prize for his debut poetry collection as a Turkish poet.

Temo’s choice to write in his mother language—the language of a person’s DNA, their dreams—is a radical act, especially when doing so publicly in his country was for years a criminal offense. This choice can serve to ensure that historical events are remembered, such as the Roboski Incident in late 2011, when nearly three dozen Kurdish civilians were killed after a bombing by the Turkish Air Force near the Iraq-Turkey border. Temo’s haunting poem recalls how “in Roboski / there are fathers, my son, / broken as the branches of flowering trees / just mention a child’s name / and they run to the graveyard.”

The loss of children, of innocence, is a recurring theme throughout these twenty or so poems, as it is in our current political moment. In “the island of our love,” despite the disturbing imagery of the first stanza, I’m more overwhelmed by the second, especially its last line:

i am a corpse in a narrow alley in Cizîrê
my head is a muddy beehive
my arms marked by the barbarian’s eye teeth
my rusted rifle the skin of a clever snake

my friends were good and brave
we fought the fight of all fights
but we didn’t ride our bikes enough

Everywhere we look in our darkening world, we witness youngsters who haven’t had the chance to ride their bikes nearly enough, if at all. As specific as they are to the Kurdish experience, Temo’s verses—with the distinct power that poetry has over prose—will resonate for many.

Bilingual editions offer special pleasure, even if the reader knows only one of the languages. The visual nature of the characters adds the engaging dimension of a secret code and, more practically, underscores the importance of translators as guides into worlds not typically open to us. The bilingual aspect of this book is especially noteworthy with respect to alphabets: the “original” poems are transliterated, which allowed me to sound out Kurdish words that felt both familiar and new, much the way I savor basmati rice in its many variations, whether it is my mother’s or from another culture’s recipe. Adding further nuance is the fact that the Kurmanji language employs different writing systems depending upon which country it is used in.

Another dimension to these words on the page is the echo of the oratorical cultures that many of us share. Poetic recitation was part of my life before I spoke any language, and I felt an auditory sense of the voices of these poems (though without pure understanding or fluency) as I read them on the page. I found myself yearning for an audiobook of Temo reciting these poems, especially as the paternal side of my family was born in Kermanshah, which has one of the largest populations of Kurdish people in Iran. Poetry, which holds a unique, quotidian space in our cousin cultures, is how familial stories and cultural histories stay alive—at home, in small gatherings, perhaps whispered, yet sustained by breath and repetition.

There’s a universality to Temo’s subject matter, of course, as well as a contemporary connectivity. Language is political. So is location. And the most complicated of subjects, in our current moment and throughout history, is what constitutes homeland, and who gets to determine such. In “the clouds woke once,” the speaker says: “my heart my heart my heart; one name of yours is lament, one mourn / you are fevered, flushed, pale / come shelter me in this distant country / say sweat and blood are the rose’s dew.”

As befitting what Kurdish people have undergone and how they have rooted themselves in spaces inhospitable or, worse, hostile, these poems are laden with grief, but also, to my ears, carry a tremendous love and hope, without which, surely, there could be no endurance. Temo is particularly eloquent when exploring the relationship between land and language, as in “now, somewhere,” which laments:

there came a voice that swept everything from the face of our homeland
i thought it was happiness the retrieval and revival of our language
but no

no

pain speaks this language
loss and grief splatter from each word
here in exile it tightens around my neck

so, nothing, this language is nothing
it does not echo through London’s streets
it bows down to civilization

but we will dance shoulder to shoulder
ferment each word with fear
like a sulking child who runs off and then forgets her way home
we will bloom like red-hearted roses
where a tarnished lake flows beside time’s waist
i am ready now, Kurdi

In the translation of “the pomegranates woke once,” which is dedicated to “my winged nephew, [ ], perched in Shingal today,” Xelef and Levinson-LaBrosse elect to elide the original name in the text, in order to leave space for readers to enter in the names of those they mourn. It’s a profound and powerful choice, entwining the reader’s losses with those of the writer as well as emphasizing the many nameless souls dying every day in conflicts too horrific to entertain:

the pomegranates woke once the longest path weaves through
the backroads of my country’s ribcage they say and, despairing
deep inside, they will be saying tonight, my [ ] was wounded
tonight like the yeast of sorrow, like the angel of death’s
shadow, made of blood and steel oh, my sweet boy [ ],
oh, wretch, dress in black and drive the wilds and the settlements
it’s three days and nights today since Shingal’s sky fell
and broke [ ]’s wing, oh, wretched mother’s son

I return to the phrase “the yeast of sorrow,” mourning how it keeps rising, every day. Temo’s poetry, even as it examines broader issues around historical prejudice and wars, is intimate and tender. This collection gathers the sounds and experiences of a people who embrace and maintain their culture, despite often being sequestered and forcibly melded into the larger environment of where they may reside. Couple that with actual aggressions and massacres, and one understands the stakes in preserving minority languages, as a way to exist into the future, and take our ancestors with us.

Am I different when I’m speaking Persian rather than English? I think I am. I can’t entirely explain what parts of me are reflected in those conversations, in my heart, in my soul, regardless of how many English words I might toss in. This collection, both in content and visual form, speaks of that experience, that shedding, and the resolute desire to be seen and heard.

There’s a reverberation of contrasting themes—isolation and scattered collectives, hidden languages and lasting rituals, individual and cultural devastation—through this collection. This layering of complex emotions, unbound by time or location, invites readers in, the way a stranger might ask you to join the family meal, where each recites a verse. Despite loss, loneliness, and a threatened present, the communality persists, and is the only bridge toward the future.

In the poem entitled “loneliness,” Temo writes: “there night says: / loneliness is a choice until / it becomes inevitable / but i can’t forget / she said: / is anyone among you alive?” Through the talents of Zêdan Xelef and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse, Selim Temo’s evocative Nightlands is a consequential start to a necessary series, emphatically declaring that this multifaceted culture, these languages, are very much alive, thankfully so.

Nightlands by Selim Temo, translated from the Kurdish by Zêdan Xelef and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse, edited by Öykü Tekten. (Pinsapo Press, 2024).

Copyright © 2024 by Mandana Chaffa. All rights reserved.