Poem of the week: The Kurdish Musician by Mimi Khalvati

An émigré player’s artistry sings through a London street, rising over many barriers

Carol Rumens

Mon 11 Nov 2024 11.00 GMT

The Kurdish Musician

She is swaddled in pink, sky-blue and veiled
in a gold hejab that with every chime
of her santoor dangles its fringe where trailed

on her cheeks hang coins that bob in time
to her nods, throb in a pause, sway to tremor
and echo. Poised on thumbs, twin hammers mime

a flurry of wings, two thin furred tongues that stammer
at strings, streaming a swarm of rising notes
not through field and hedgerow, blossom and clover,

but through space and stars to the huge black throats
of gully and scarp where all music is stilled,
hived in a dome, as she is, rapt, remote,

impervious to the here and now, hands filled
with flightpaths winging home. Through her who knows
what trails might meet or where pollen has spilled

strange hybrids take, scrub thrive or desert rose;
groundcover prove alive, on five dark grounds
now train its greening shoots? Or who’d suppose

in a London sky, pink, sky-blue, that has wound
itself in the sun’s hejab, in fold on fold
veiled its own dark grounds, she too could be found,
head in the clouds, while ours are fringed with gold?

***

From a fine Collected Poems representing all Mimi Khalvati’s major publications from 1991 to 2019, The Kurdish Musician represents that mysteriously timeless realm of all the best “Collecteds”, the selection of undated poems never previously included in a book.

Khalvati’s poetic achievement, recently recognised by the award of the King’s gold medal, has been shaped by her profound imaginative relationship with her home country of Iran. The musician in the poem is a kindred spirit; exiled from the neighbouring regions of western Asia that comprise Kurdistan, she transfigures her own loss into re-possession, and makes a gift of her presence to those under the “London sky” who witness her artistry.

The instrument the woman is playing is a hammered dulcimer, its tonal complexity suggested by the terza rima weave of the verse-form the poet has chosen. The woman’s relationship to her instrument is evoked by the keenly observed rhythmical movements of her body, while the soft organic colours of her clothes, “gold”, “pink” and “sky-blue”, harmonise her with the sunset. The hammers she wields both “mime / a flurry of wings” and are “two thin furred tongues”. The tongues “stammer at strings” in a flickering movement which is nevertheless productive, “streaming a swarm of rising notes” – finally bringing wings and tongues together, and suggesting birdsong. This is birdsong with resonance beyond English pastoral, however; the music bypasses “field and hedgerow” with their seasonal markers of spring blossom and summer clover. It ascends “through space and stars” and its reach seems both topological and cosmic. The “huge black throats / of gully and scarp where all music is stilled” seem to indicate a partly metaphysical space which is not only the musician’s mountainous homeland but an ideal realm above the earth. The interplay of images comes briefly to rest in the idea of absolute mental concentration (another way of being “hived in a dome”) and the still-active culmination of the “flight” metaphor in the beautifully imagined “hands filled / with flightpaths winging home”. The musician is “remote” from her surroundings, but fully present to the music and the double sense of location it sets free.

Now the focus is literally brought down to earth to be re-grounded in its subsoil. The vitality of multidirectional movement expresses itself through the pollination and proliferation of plants, perhaps to produce “strange hybrids” or basic but essential “scrub” and “groundcover”. The metaphorical landscape is tightened by questions, the first concerning what “trails” may have accrued from the musician’s trials of emigration. Perhaps the “five dark grounds” represent areas geologically inhospitable to life, and there may be implications of the politically “dark grounds” which the welcoming sky veils in “the sun’s hejab”. The final question affirms the arrival of the musician as enrichment and challenges negatives of exile and emigration: “… who’d suppose… she too could be found, / head in the clouds while ours are fringed in gold?” The delicacy and versatility of words such as “fringe”, “trail” and “veil” heighten an impression of what we might call, narrow-mindedly, other-worldliness, but the poem knows that the musician’s seemingly transcendental power is earthed. Like the sun she touches the heads of the gathered crowd with gold.

THE GUARDIAN

 

Poem of the week: Phoenician by Angela Leighton

A chilling double sonnet finds the echo of ancient ritual sacrifice in modern ‘collateral damage’

Carol Rumens

Monday 19 July 2024

Phoenician

by Angela Leighton

They build and spoil, raise and raze, sandgrain

castles to edge the shore — an advancing standstill.
Nothing of them will remain to meet the new day.

We who are old gaze seawards, where black sails make
moveable As on the horizon, calling a name:

Alpha, Aleph, an ox head, letters that spell
our dimly literate past in a Phoenician place.

But all I remember’s a mask, its grimace or smile

like an old man’s wrinkled face — ironic, set

in the crazed rictus of a grin at something hidden.

Hard to relate if they burned their children alive

all smiling, smiling in masks to pleasure a god
who’d thus not see their terror or hear their cries

but accept the sacrifice: the life’s soft parts
disguised by that hard laughter baked to last.

We dream and stare — drowsy, late historians,

wise, after our years. In the day’s museum

çsuch gleeful trophies wink. Keepsakes, you’d think?

each terracotta, twice fired to save its face.

These Tophet memorials haunt within our walls,
sardonic casts recording no name or age,

a comic strip we cannot conceive or face
outfacing us. (Their alphabet is ours).

Collateral. (Think — a smokescreen.) Are we blind, by half?
The drones we make explode elsewhere in fires.

So many children … their lives. Earthenware survives —
and these mad masks. Is theirs (listen) the last laugh?

+++

A new unpublished poem by Angela Leighton, poet, critic and author of the recent Carcanet collection Something, I Forget, Phoenician discovers the fusion between ritual child sacrifice in a distant culture and its practice, differently named, in the present.

In a note describing the significance of the “grinning mask”, Leighton writes: “The museum on the Phoenician island of Motya (off Sicily) contains a curious mask from the Tophet – the burial site where children and animals were probably sacrificed, by fire, to the god Baal. Numbers are uncertain and the whole issue has been much debated among archaeologists, but some have suggested that parents or victims wore these masks to hide their anguish from the god. Whatever the facts, the poem figures the mask as a cover of a more contemporary kind.”

Before it reveals the mask, the poem weaves other timelines, moving from a view of the children to be sacrificed building their last sandcastles, to the present day where “we who are old” watch from the shore the “black sails” out at sea. Itself a time-travelling image, “black sails” are associated with the legend of Theseus. Currently, they’re favoured by the owners of luxury yachts: the blackness protects the carbon fibre sails against UV damage, and extends their durability.

Introduced in the fifth stanza, the mask is shown to be disturbingly ambiguous. Its “grimace or smile” seems to reflect the true horror of the situation. What’s described as “the crazed rictus of a grin at something hidden”, designed “to pleasure a god”, rearranges the contorted anguish on the living face beneath. The mask ultimately extends far into time “that hard laughter, baked to last”. A potent idea for the poem, longevity is signalled again in the reference to “each terracotta, twice fired to save its face”. This idea of literal face-saving reforms into the metaphorical kind. It floats us closer to the present, where children’s death in the fires of war is too often face-savingly presented as “collateral”.

Leighton also time-travels via the alphabet, from the movable A-shapes of the yacht sails, through the Greek “Alpha” to the Semitic “Aleph”, thought to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph for an ox head. The poem connects us to “our dimly literate past in a Phoenician place” and reminds us, through a further pun linked to the word “face”, that the masks, perhaps museum-shop mass-produced, are “a comic strip we cannot conceive or face / outfacing us” and that, in a gentle, parenthetic reminder, “(Their alphabet is ours)”.

The line that forms the vital hinge between the dimly lit, “dimly literate past” and current political responsibility asserts “the drones we make explode elsewhere in fires”. The “elsewhere” doesn’t signal western arms sales alone; it points to the fact that the technology its engineers may first intend for human benefit can be co-opted elsewhere.

That familiar sad irony that “things” so often live longer than the people with whom they were associated is heightened at the end of the poem in an elision, which, on the page, provides a typographical image of brevity: “So many children … their lives.” It’s chilling, then, to imagine hearing the children having “the last laugh” as the poem asks us to, again in parenthesis, but in the imperative voice, “(listen)”. Are we being asked to imagine the children resurrected, restored to what they were at the start of the poem? Or is it that now, somehow, inhabiting the “mad masks”, the children have become equally sardonic, laughing at us now because our sympathy remains so limited, our humanity so under-achieved, because “civilisation” resembles the “advancing standstill” of line three, still ready and able to sacrifice children to the national war gods?

Perhaps both kinds of laughter are indicated, another telling ambiguity in a poem whose only borders are those derived from the verbal patterning of line and stanza, the subtle 14-couplet, doubled-sonnet design.

THE GUARDIAN

Carol Rumens's poem of the week

Poem of the week: Sudanese Saying by Pierre Joris

Short, stinging lines convey the pain and injustice of the 2016 demolition of the Calais refugee ‘jungle’

Carol Rumens

Monday 12 August 2024

Sudanese Saying

One of the non-
bourgeois of Calais
on one of the last days
of the Great Emptying
I.E. the Shameless Hiding
of the “eyesore”
Calais refugee camps
called “the jungle”
where “jungle” is a translation
of Pashto “dzhangal”
meaning “forest”,
one of these non-
bourgeois of Calais
reported
a Sudanese saying
to object to their,
the refugees’ dispersal,
a saying that says
solidarity
alleviates pain,
& this is how
It goes:
“if we die all together,
death is a feast.”

This week’s poem is from Pierre Joris’s Interglacial Narrows, published in 2023. Joris is a writer whose work I knew, before reading this collection, only from his Paul Celan translations and scholarship. Part III of Interglacial Narrows is indeed a poet’s journeying with and around Paul Celan, “the man who brought me to poetry,” Joris writes “when I heard his most famous work, Todesfuge, recited in a high school class in in 1960 or 61 in Luxembourg” But for the Celan homage, you’ll have to get the book. Sudanese Saying is from another part of this richly varied collection, Loess & Found, where I met an unexpected facet of the Joris persona, both politically idealistic and urbane.

 The encampment whose “Great Emptying” is at the protesting heart of the poem, was built on a once-polluted landfill site, and opened in January 2015 to house refugees and immigrants hoping to travel from France to Britain. Known as the Calais Jungle (from the Pashto “dzhangal”, as Joris explains), the encampment had the support of a range of writers and artists, among them, Banksy, who painted one of the walls with a telling image of Steve Jobs. The inhabitants numbered about 10,000 when they were evicted and the camp demolished in October 2016.

Joris converts an artistic allusion, based on the verbal connection between “bourgeois” and “burgher”, into what might first seem an ironic understatement, designating the refugee-protagonist “one of the non- / bourgeois of Calais”. The reference is to the Rodin sculpture, The Burghers of Calais.

The repetition in lines 12 and 13 of the subject of the poem’s single sentence (“one of the non- / bourgeois of Calais” is grammatically useful, but also a marker perhaps for the Rodin sculpture perhaps to be reconsidered. The Sudanese “saying” that “one of these non-Burghers / of Calais” has reported (note the shift to the greater immediacy and collectivity of the demonstrative pronoun, “these”) concerns the “refugee’s dispersal” (again, note that it’s a “dispersal”, to remind us that displaced shelterless migrants would still be scattered along the Calais shores).

Resisting the rhetorical in its diction more determinedly than ever as he begins to unpack what the saying “says”, Joris concludes with six resonant lines, first explaining the aphorism’s interpretation, “solidarity / alleviates pain” and then, at last reaching the aphorism itself, ringing all the stronger for its quotation marks: “if we all die together, / death is a feast.” And so a quality of heroism enters the character of “these non- / bourgeois of Calais,” now closer to Rodin’s Burghers than we first realised. Text from the Rodin Museum explains the events behind the sculpture. “In 1346 the English king Edward III laid siege to the French port of Calais. Eleven months later, Edward demanded the surrender of six of the town’s leading men, or burghers, in return for sparing its citizens. Rodin’s sculpture commemorates this episode and emphasises the internal struggle of each man as he walks toward his fate wearing a sackcloth and rope halter. The burghers were later spared thanks to the intervention of the English queen, who feared that their deaths would bring bad luck to her unborn child.”

The single, carefully nuanced sentence of Sudanese Saying controls the anger that almost emerges in the revision of “Great Emptying” into “Shameless Hiding” and in the borrowing of the inappropriate designation “eyesore”, just as it controls the choppy, rhythmic lines, and the amount of information they deliver. Poems that put the case for the rights and dignity of refugees often adopt a refugee’s persona. It’s remarkable that Joris’s carefully distanced manner and elegant precision are able to make a statement as powerful – one at whose climax the translated “Sudanese saying” burns into the mind like Rodin’s masterpiece.

THE GUARDIAN