A numbed world…

New order, a one-sided pistol!

Pictures, photographs, and a few streams of words

On the walls, on the bunk bed, at the foot of the rising mountain, in the wind…

The curving riverbed is a cheap harlot

Purple cocaine on her lips, a chest full of songs

Someone said;Accept the pain

Accept it, and reject it!

Then I separated everything that happened

People were thin lines of dialogue

Spreading from palate to palate

On a stage, the accordionist was playing the kaval

A hundred times I memorized your name in this chaos

A thousand times I memorized it!

The hiss of an old record on the radio

A Kurdish elegy following right after

Then Mem u Zin, the aching pain of my heart

I woke up one morning in a language I never knew

Ghosts on the windows, tar tears, a strange selfishness

 

Umbrellas, carnations on the balcony, national news…

Ruins…

Someone said something in a language I never knew

A drunken rush

My inner self being bombed, the smell of diesel and asphalt…

 

The suddenly ceasing rain pricked my hand

Ra, the Sun God, struck my brain three times

To live! he said, it was something like this

Like love… Torn to pieces!

On the brink of death

A city descending from a cliff

Said something:

“Jiyan bareki girane”

Like love… Torn to pieces!

 

“Jiyan bareki girane” (To live is a heavy burden)

 

(Mem û Zîn )

The 17th-century Kurdish national epic and a masterpiece of Sufi-inspired literature. It

is the story of Mem and Zîn, whose pure love is thwarted by social status and treachery.

While it shares a universal resonance with Romeo and Juliet, it adds a profound layer of

Sufi metaphysics and a struggle for identity, turning a tragic romance into a cosmic one.