Description

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The author of these collected poems, Goran Meriwani, is an integrated part of the stories that he tells. He was born and brought up in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah and he was barely 20 years of age, when he had to seek international protection.

My second oldest brother Goran Meriwani and my oldest brother Dilshad Meriwani were both poets. Goran survived to tell the story of his Kurdish people and also deliver the stories from his second home country, Sweden. Dilshad did not have Goran's luck, because he was executed by Saddam Hussein's regime, for several reasons, one of them being that he was a teacher who taught his students Kurdish using Latin scripts. He was detained in February 1989 and executed on 13 March 1989. He was never seen again, dead or alive. His body was never given back to his family.

Meriwani's story speaks volumes. It is the story of intellectuals, writers and activists who escaped Saddam Hussein's regime for international protection. In fact, many who did not leave Iraq, just like his brother, became victims of the regime. Meriwani knows all about this. He possesses first-hand experiences.

Meriwani's life is a narrative for his generation of intellects who were not tolerated in Iraq. Saddam's regime engineered society to give life to those who served himself and his regime.

His departure from Iraq to his second home, Sweden, silenced him for years, as he was engaged in finding a new voice and of course a life for himself. He returned to poetry with a fresh breath that was different from Kurdish, Iraqi or other Middle Eastern poetry. He writes in the Kurdish language, albeit with a different style which is neither fully Western nor Middle Eastern.

Meriwani has been in exile for over four decades, almost three quarters of his life. During this time, the regions of his homeland were stormed by socio-political changes, some of which influenced him directly, for example, the execution of his older brother, the death of his parents, joining six members of his siblings in exiles, losing numerous friends and extended family members in conflict adventures of the Iraqi regime.

As Meriwani possesses no published collection in any language, I have selected the upcoming body of poetry mostly form his Kurdish manuscript that he provided to me. I have given this selection a name. I believe "Departing" is a suitable title for it. Meriwani's poetry is overwhelmingly infused with "departure" whether it is his own departure from his friends and family, or the eternal departure called death that we will all face eventually, or the shift from one place to another, or an individual displacement or a mass embarkment into absence.

I have then translated these poems from Kurdish, my native language, into English. Here I need to clarify the nature of my work: I have not re-created the poetry in English. I have done my best to keep the soul of the original poetry alive and intact. Often, I had to change the structure of a poem - shift the line breaks or divide the stanzas to adjust it to the English language. However, despite my dedicated efforts, I will always believe that translation is inherently "unfair" as it certainly and necessarily dilutes the original poetic language and rhythm, and is often rid of its firstborn magic.