Three Poems

Venus Faiq

The First Blossom
My Fingers

I will break my fingers if they even think
of another path
if they even imagine another country
I will chop them clean off if
they vanish in the dark hair of some other man
I will burn my fingers to ash if
they defy me and leave me alone
to dance in the presence of your fingers
I will grind my fingers down if
the little insomniacs won’t rest in your palm


Fifth Blossom
Greetings

Greetings, oh rusted grief abandoned in the dregs
of a coffee cup
Greetings, oh luck blackened in the palms
of a story
Good day to you all, political prophets and politicians
of the dance-and-sword mosques
Greetings to the broken-winged doves
of bilingual skies
I surrender to walls of questions and
rooftops of fictitious answers and
windows of rotted imagination
The trash can in front of the doorway
I contradict speech   
The stench of meaning, sewage
I surrender to walls of ice 
to a pitch-black mutiny
I pass through. I leave behind
a tall silence, a deep cry


Sixth Blossom
Meaninglessness

Death turns on and
death turns off
knits together borders across great distances
makes no distance great
all these cottoned agonies It spills inside me
all these shards of exile It plants in my eyes and
I pile up a country of sand
a country of colorlessness
of fading away and colorless colors
I don’t understand the meaninglessness of meaning
I can’t figure out the meaning of meaninglessness
in this nonexistent existence
Death means life and
Life means death

translated from the Kurdish-Sorani by Sarwar Taha and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse

Read the original in Kurdish-Sorani

Listen to the original read by the translator:

Venus Faiq, like her fellow Iraqis, has lived through perpetual wars, the effects of which can be felt in her poetry. The Middle East has never been a safe haven for women to breathe the same air men do. Venus, transcending her fellow countrywomen, composes poems not only to express her grief, but also to challenge the politicians who rule life, prophets who preach fixed doctrines, and even motionless rooftops which she likens to “fictitious answers.” She writes her distress into a sort of feminist justice that, unlike the conventional discourse, advocates for basic women’s rights. A feminist in the West deals with issues of The First World, like the pay gap, whereas Venus contends with issues such as honor killings and the issues that most concern women following a genocide. While Venus imagines a better world for women, her rebellion does not fully escape the classical allegories and poetic features used by orthodox poets manifested in lines such as “I will chop them clean off,” or "I will grind my fingers down.” Her ideas go beyond the conventional, while the poetic features that convey them often coincide with those of her opponents. 

Venus, who writes in both Kurdish and Arabic, speaks to audiences of ethnicities besides her own—a fact which itself challenges the established, rotten norms of tribalism and injustice. I, in between her rebellious poems, acting as a translator, wander from one challenge to another. I am a man torn between injustices my countrymen inflicted upon women that Venus defies, a man whose only path to hold Venus’s hand is to translate her poetry and hopefully more feminist poems of other inspiring women like her.

Venus Faiq (1963), from Iraqi Kurdistan’s city of Sulaimani, is a poet and activist bringing awareness to issues of genocide. She has worked in TV, radio, and as a print journalist for more than twenty-five years. She earned her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Baghdad (1989). She has published eleven books, including two books of poetry in the Sorani dialect of Kurdish: Beautiful Sins (2001) and The Last Samurai (2013). In addition to Kurdish, she writes fluently in Arabic and German. She has lived in the Netherlands since 1996. Some of her works have been translated into French, Spanish, and Italian, and the present work is the first attempt to bring her poetry into English. Venus has received many local and international awards. She is an active member of the international poets’ movement, an international syndicate for journalism, and an organization for immigrant journalists in the Netherlands.

Sarwar Taha is a native of Sulaimani, Iraq. He currently attends the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). In addition to his classes, Taha works as a textbook reviewer for AUIS’s Center for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS). He is helping the CGDS develop the first multilingual, gender-balanced curricula for primary, secondary, and undergraduate courses in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq. At the outset of 2020, Taha will be working for Kashkul, Center for Arts and Culture at AUIS, as a project coordinator for the city of Sulaimani’s application to be designated a UNESCO Creative City of Literature. In 2017, Taha’s essay, “The Enlightenment,” received first prize in a university-wide competition. He speaks Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish, and English.

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a translator, poet, and professor who has lived and worked in Iraq since 2011. Levinson-LaBrosse completed a Ph.D. in Kurdish Studies on nineteenth-century poetry from the University of Exeter. Handful of Salt (The Word Works, 2016) and Dictionary of Midnight (Phoneme Media, 2019) introduced the poetry of Kajal Ahmad and Abdulla Pashew, respectively, to English. Her writing has appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, The Sewanee Review, The Iowa Review, and World Literature Today. She currently serves as the director of Kashkul, the center for arts and culture, at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani.