Translated from the Kurdish by Tyler Fisher and Haidar Khezri
Night Story As night draws near the bird of my verse turns trudging to her nest ... as midnight tarries at those moments when city and village spread the dark veil over wounds, my wounds ignite and scatter slumber from the hollow of my eyes till dawn arrives. In the chamber corner of my night-cloaked loneliness, the wounds have lodged as guests and hosts to soothe the broken-hearted. My outlaw friend, my closest confidants, my words go hand in hand across the page, and blaze the trail to the untraveled and the strange As night draws near the stateless, parched, and famished children, splintered, mournful lovers of this homeland, all become my guests. At dawn’s first gloss with hearts awash with the musk of fritillaries, with warm laughter, hand in hand they cross the threshold of my verse. Question My mother’s ragged headscarf heavy-handed clasps my head and says, “I am your grandmother’s,” then handed down from grandmothers before, it seems. My head is like a window open wide to greet the sky and loves to host the sun by day, the moon and stars by night. My mother also left a pair of dark glass spectacles, which sigh, “The world is only what you see.” With every thunderbolt, a mushroom of a hundred questions old and new swells from my eyes.
The Kurdish poet and activist Jhila Hosseini (1964-1996) was born in Saqqez, Eastern/Iranian Kurdistan. Immersed in her father’s extensive library, she developed a passion for Kurdish and Persian poetry from childhood. In line with traditional patriarchal Kurdish, Iranian, and Islamic society, she married a cousin at age fifteen, a brief arrangement which ended in divorce. During this period, Jhila wrote darkly lyrical Persian and Kurdish poetry. Later she wrote exclusively in Kurdish and in opposition to the totalitarian regime of the post-1979 Islamic Republic of Iran. Jhila was the first Kurdish female poet in Eastern/Iranian Kurdistan to use what is called she’ri-now (new poetry), free from the strictures of classical Perso-Arabic prosody. In 1996, while travelling to Tehran to meet with the poet Sherko Bekas, Jhila and her daughter died in a car accident. She remains a symbol of resistance among Iran’s marginalized Kurdish community, especially for women.
Tyler Fisher completed his doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He is now an Associate Professor in UCF’s Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, where he directs UCF’s Latin American Studies degree. With Haidar Khezri, he has published collaborative translations of Kurdish poetry in The Bangalore Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Poet Lore.
Following his PhD in Comparative Literature at Damascus University, Haidar Khezri has taught at universities in Iran, Syria, Turkey, and the US. In 2019, he became the University of Central Florida’s first Assistant Professor of Arabic, a key role for building the university’s capacity to teach Middle Eastern languages and cultures. With Tyler Fisher, he has published collaborative translations of Kurdish poetry in The Bangalore Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Poet Lore.