Sherko Bekas, poet
Sherko Bekas (Kurdish: Şêrko Bêkes) (May 2, 1940 – August 4, 2013) co-founded contemporary Kurdish poetry and is widely regarded as the greatest Kurdish national poet of the 20th century. His writings r
esonate with themes of love, and nature, and freedom, even as, according to his translator Choman Hardi, he“established himself as the poet of resistance and became the face of the liberation movement.”
Early life
He was born on May 2, 1940, in Silêmanî, Başûr (South Kurdistan). As a child, his mother would tell him Kurdish stories, while his father, Fayak Bêkes, a pioneer Sorani poet in his own right, influenced his life choice. Bekas would later say, “My father left a profound psychological motivation for me, inciting me to write and excel, especially because I was welcomed into society as a poet’s son.” But when he was eight, his father died, and Bekas fell into extreme poverty. Only with difficulty did he complete high school.
At seventeen, he published his first poem in Zhin newspaper. Its editor, the prominent modernist Kurdish poet Abdulla Goran, seems to have mentored Bekas, imparting ideas of stylistic freedom, literary boldness, and social commitment.
In 1965, at twenty-five, Bekas joined the Kurdish liberation movement. He worked for the radio station Dengê Şoreşê, whose name means “Voice of the Revolution.” He joined the Peshmerga and fought in the mountains. Writing poems about labor, enlightenment and hope, he described himself as “a poet of resistance.” He developed into a nationalist poet, writing about Kurdish values, identity, history, and struggles. But his poetry often reflected the daily experiences of the Kurdish people, including romantic love.
Early publications
In 1968, he published the first collection of poems, Tirîfey Helbest (Moonlight Poems), still in a traditional style that relied heavily on strict rules of rhyme and meter. But by 1971 he broke with tradition in both form and content as he introduced the “Rûwange” (vision) element into Kurdish poetry, which, according to his translators Reingard Mirza, Shirwan Mirza, and Sherzad Hassan, “allows the poet to let his fantasies soar and even overcome the boundaries of language. The poet has nothing more than words to illustrate his philosophy. The same words must lend a melody to his thoughts, because ‘a poem without music is like a bird without song’, says Bekas. . . . A poet can open windows to the spring of life for us so that we can flee the chains of the present moment to those special moments of eternity, moments full of inspiration, which may even be beyond our imagination.” With such an approach, Bekas infused “tales of heartache, and struggle with the fervor and fire of life and a revolutionary vision, a vision that he deemed essential for poetic sensibility and aesthetic transformation.”
Four years later, in 1975, Bekas introduced the “poster poem,” a concept that has its origins in sculpture and painting. Poster poems are micro-poems, brief in length but concentrated in focus; they are based on small or seemingly insignificant trivial or mundane objects, whose hidden realities are revealed through surprising and sometimes shocking twists, rendered in visually rich imagery. They were published in 1975 in a collection that would be translated, in the 1990s, by Reingard Mirza, Shirwan Mirza, and Renate Saljoghi as The Secret Diary of a Rose in 1975,
Exile in Sweden
In the mid-1980s the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, impressed by Bekas’s work, asked him to write an epic that praised him—he offered Bekas an award if he did. But the poet refused, and he had to flee, ending up in Sweden in 1986. There he lived in exile for years. In 1987 the Stockholm PEN Club awarded him the Tucholsky Scholarship, and this award he accepted, as he also accepted the Freedom award of the City of Florence.
Still, missing his homeland, Bekas told an audience, “I love Sulaimaniya, my birthplace, I will never stop loving Mehabad, Diyarbakir (Amed)… I consider myself the poet of all Kurdish nation, the poet of revolution and Peshmergas, flowers, Kurmanji children of the South and North, I consider myself the mother poet of Kurdistan.”
In the following years he published books of poetry in Sweden, including Awena buchkalakan (Small Mirrors, 1988). This collection of poems, writes one critic, voices “despair and struggle in a desolate and depleted yet hopeful world.” Here “the poet confronts a barbarous world of oppression and boldly and vividly represents the natural geography of plants, people, and places he has left behind. He is uprooted from his land, but his senses are deeply rooted in the memories of its landscape and the struggle and songs of freedom he composes for and as a Peshmerga“
Butterfly Valley
In 1988 the Saddam regime mounted more than 40 chemical attacks on Iraqi Kurdistan. The Anfal campaign destroyed 3,000 Kurdish villages and killed 100,000 Kurdish people. Hundreds more died later of exposure to chemical weapons. The attack on the town of Halabja instantly killed over 5000 people.
Bekas, in Swedish exile, was stunned by the atrocities—and by the world’s silence. In response, he wrote a long epic poem Derbendî Pepûle (Butterfly Valley); it was published in 1991. In this book-length poem, he longs to go home and mourn the victims. He laments the repetitive cycles of upsurge and repression in Kurdish history, and in his despair invokes other exiled Kurdish poets from the past. The poet draws his homeland — mountains and forests, rivers and villages, meadows and flowers – juxtaposing them with scenes of death, destruction and suffering. He “uses repetition, a dense layering of metaphors, and a circling around the issues, as if he cannot settle or come to terms with events,” writes reviewer Katrina Naomi.
In 2018 the poem was translated into English, in abridged form, by Choman Hardi as Butterfly Valley (Arc, 2018). It was published in a bilingual Kurdish-English edition. It is the most extensive example of Bekas’s writing in English.
In 1991, the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq was established. So the following year returned to Basur and was hired as the KRG’s first culture minister. But with his progressive ideas about freedom and human rights, he soon clashed with the new government. His poems were censored again, and a newspaper he worked for, Welat, was shut down for terrorist propaganda. In 1993 Bekas resigned as minister, saying he would “not exchange a single line from my poems for 30 ministries.” He returned to Sweden.
A Man of the World
Sherko Bekas held poetry readings in Italy, Russia, the UK, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Norway, and Switzerland, among others. He was made an honorary citizen of the city of Milan. His works have been translated into Arabic, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Italian, French, and English. Bekas also worked as a translator himself, translating, among other things, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and García Lorca’s Blood Wedding into Kurdish.
From 1990 to 1995 Bekas’s collected works were published in Sweden, in three volumes of almost 1000 pages each. Published under the title Dîwanî Şêrko Bêkes (Sherko Bekas’s Diwan), they contain his poetic works up to 1995, in Kurdish. Here, as one critic described the oeuvre, “one see his gigantic endeavor to capture the entire history, epic heritage and struggle, and life of his people whose tragic fate and rich literature and culture, was disgracefully ignored by most Middle Eastern and Western intellectuals and authors, an issue that tormented the poet’s mind for whom ‘poetry could not be detached from humanity.’ However, he knew that in the name of Kurds, with the elegance and nuance of his verse and vision, he would make the world see the splendor and power of the language in the midst of holocausts of Anfal and Halabja.”
In 2011 Bekas was awarded the Pîrêmêrd Gold Prize, given out by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The award is named after Pirêmêrd, another famous poet from the Silêmanî region.
Sherko Bekas died of cancer in Stockholm, Sweden on August 4, 2013.
Books of Poetry
Titles of Bekas’s books in Sorani orthography are listed here.
Tirîfey Helbest (Moonlight Poems) (Iraq: Salman al-Azami, 1968)
Qasida Koch (The Ode of Migration) (1970)
Kawey Asinger: Dastanêkî honrawayî sar shanoye le no tabloda (Mahabad: Saydiyan, 1971).
The Secret Diary of a Rose (1975), translated into English in 1997.
Marâyâ saghírah (Damascus: Al-ahâli, 1988).
Dall: çîrokî şê’r (Stockholm: Apec, 1989).
Awena buchkalakan (1988) (Small Mirrors)
Små speglar: dikter 1978–1989 (Small Mirrors: Poems, Swedish translation) (Norsborg: Pub. House of Kurdistan, 1989).
Derbendî Pepûle (Butterfly Valley) (Stockholm: Apec, 1991)
Les petits miroirs : poèmes (Small Mirrors: Poems), trans. into French by Kamal Maarof (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995).
Dîwanî Şêrko Bêkes (Collected Poems), 3 vols. (Stockholm: Sara, 1990-95).
Gulbijêrek ji helbestên (Selected Poems) (Stockholm: Apec, 1991).
Geheimnisse der Nacht pflücken : Gedichte (Picking Secrets of the Night), trans. into German by Reingard Mirza, Shirwan Mirza, und Renate Saljoghi (Zürich: Unionsverlag, 1993) (available here)
Mêrgî zam-, mêrgî hetaw (Stockholm: Kurdistans folkförb., 1996).
Xaç û mar û roj-jimêrî şa’êrê (Stockholm: Apec, 1997.
The Secret Diary of a Rose: A Journey Through Poetic Kurdistan, trans. into English by Reingard Mirza, Shirwan Mirza, and Renate Saljoghi (Ashti Bibani, 1997).
Bonname : Şê’r. Binkey Edeb û Rûnakbîrî Gelawêj (Silêmanî, 1998).
Çirakanî ser helemût : pexşan (Silêmanî: Sardam, 1999.
Piyawî la-darsew : Şê’r (Silêmanî, 2000.
Qesîdey Rengdan (Silêmanî, Xak, 2001)
Ezmûn: 1985–2000, ed. Yasin Umar (Silêmanî, Sardam, 2001).
Jîn û Baran (Silêmanî Library, 2001).
Ji Nav Şêrên Min (From My Poetry), trans. into Kurmanci (Istanbul: Avesta, 2001).
Xom ew water balindem! (Silêmanî, Sardam, 2002)
Kukuxîtya bizêweke (children’s poetry) (Silêmanî: Sardam, 2003)
Easta kechek nishteman mena (My Homeland is Now a Girl) (2011)
Poems online in English
These websites contain some of Bekas’s poems in English:
“Answer, “Gods,” and “Clothes,” World Literature Today.
“Butterfly Valley” (excerpts), Katrina Naomi, “What Generous Pain,” Modern Poetry in Translation.
“Counting,” “Soil,” “Separation,” “The Wind,” “Now My Girl Is a Homeland,” “Last Testament,” in Dr. Amir Sharifi and Ali Ashouri, “A Tribute to Sherko Bekas, the Kurdish Poet of the Century,” Rudaw, November 12, 2013,
“Counting,” “Soil,” “Tunnel,” “Different,” “Separation,” “Love,” “Hope,” poems from Secret Diary of a Rose,translated into English by Reingard Mirza und Shirwan Mirza and discussed by Hawzhin Azeez, Kurdish Center for Studies
“From now on I am Halabja,” trans. Choman Hardi, Daily Poetry.
“Love,” “Euphrates,” “Visit,” “Desire,” “Butterfly,” “Flag,” “In My Homeland,” “Rain,” “Festival,” “Novel, “Measurement,” “Mother,” translated into English by Ednan Bedreddin, Medium.
“I Break My Thirst with Flame,” Asymptote.
“Seeds,” “Statue,” “Storm Tde,” Poem Hunter.
“Separation” and “Storm Tide,” Kurdish Institute, Belgium..