"Stream To Ocean: The Poems of Nazand Begikhani," originally published by Richard McKane in Bells of Speech in 2006, explores the powerful poetry of Nazand Begikhani, a Kurdish poet whose work reflects her exile and the Kurdish struggle. McKane highlights Begikhani’s role as a voice for Kurdish women and her ability to write in multiple languages, translating works of T.S. Eliot and Baudelaire. Despite personal tragedies, including the loss of family members to Saddam Hussein's regime, Begikhani remains a staunch advocate for human rights. McKane argues that Begikhani’s poetry combines philosophical insights with a quest for identity and justice, making her an essential literary figure who bridges cultural divides. Due to the article's significance and McKane's esteemed reputation, we seek to republish it with Nazand Begikhani's permission, as she holds authority over its content.

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Time flows through Nazand Begikhani’s poems like a river: the stream of her childhood becomes the mighty Tigris, then she finds herself washed up in exile on the Atlantic Ocean, or by the banks of the Loire Rive 

But she is not prepared to just float with the current of tradition. In her poems, she rages against the Anfal Campaign, the genocidal operation carried out against Kurdish civilians at the end of the 1980s; she fights against honor killings, and she fights for the perception of the Kurds in the West. These are painful poems, but pain expressed, of women, of the Kurdish peoples, needs to be witnessed above all by poets and their readers. Politicians of all hues, around the world, have let down the Kurds. 

It is to the exiled Kurdish poets Sherko Bekas, Nazand Begikhani and the younger poet Choman Hardi that we must turn for the true voices – now in English – of the Kurds. They represent a moral philosophy in a world that is without it, in the same way that Osip Mandelstam’s work outlived Stalin.

Writing in exile is always a double-edged sword, involving not so much nostalgia as sharp longing, not so much sentimentality as twin – or, in Nazand’s case – quadruple mentalities. Born and raised in Iraq, she is fluent in Arabic and both her French and English are strong enough to self-translate – hardly surprising since she studied in the Sorbonne and has lived several years in France and translated T.S. Eliot and Charles Baudelaire into Kurdish. 

She seems to have learnt from Eliot’s sense of time; her statement on the Loire river, “This is a dry time,” seems to me to be Eliotesque. One can only imagine the sheer concentration and cultural awareness necessary to translate Eliot and Baudelaire and how it would enrich Kurdish poetry and Nazand’s own.

I was surprised to see that her first dissertation in 1987 at Mosul University was on men-women relationships in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly's Lover. Earlier, she obtained her MA on the influence of English romanticism, particularly Shelley, on modern Kurdish poetry, and her Ph.D. on the image of Kurdish women in European literature from Sorbonne University. 

Nazand is a survivor of genocide; two of her brothers were executed in Saddam Hussein’s prisons and her third brother, who managed to flee, was killed in Germany. Her father was one of the first victims of the Ba’athist regime in 1968. Nazand fled death in 1987 but did not give up hope; she obtained a scholarship from the French Foreign Ministry and continued her studies at the Sorbonne. According to Nazand, “you can only overcome your pain and anger through artistic creation, through poetry.”

When you meet Nazand, she is a tall, elegant, soft-spoken, and calm person who can slip with ease between French and English. Her gentleness does not so much conceal her burning passion for human rights as accentuate it. She is that rare person who believes in dialogue and somehow retains respect for and from the many sides of the Kurdish question. She is one of the leaders of the campaign against honor killings and is an activist for the status of Kurdish women.

It was at a meeting of Exiled Writers’ Ink that first I saw the film of the poison gas massacre at Halabja, shot by an Iranian journalist. The silent camera captured fresh corpses in multicolored clothes and zoomed into rooms where whole families lay freshly gassed. After the film, the poets’ and writers’ words, our words, seemed so inadequate to express our horror at one of the most barbarous massacres of the 20th century, perpetrated by the perpetrator of the lesser known Anfal Campaign: Saddam Hussein.

Reader, I am not making politics – these are the universal symbols against which all modern Kurdish poems are written.

In the poem “My Body is Mine” we find Nazand defending the female body against the sinister them. The poem concludes “but I was one and they were all,” which has a macabre, clashing ring with the musketeers’ refrain: “One for all, and all for one.” 

But in reading Nazand’s poems it is easy for us to stand in solidarity with her. In “Dreams” she offers: “I reconcile God and the snake / in my dreams / I cleanse Eve’s sins / and return Adam to paradise.” How poignant are these lines when we think now of what is happening in Iraq, where the Garden of Eden – let alone the Tower of Babel – is meant to have been. I will not reveal the secrets held or withheld in the poem “Prayer,” but they are startling and quite revelatory to those who attempt to right the world with human rights.

Although Nazand’s poems contain many mentions of frontiers, I think she should be an honorary poet of Doctors Without Borders: she is treating human souls in acute conditions, calmly under the fire of recent events in these elegant poems. There are many poems dedicated to her mother. The end of “God is not dead for my mother” is a brilliant example of language having two equally powerful meanings:

when you can trace the white wings of your dead children

flying over the path of light in the azure of the sky

you don’t need God to die

In the short poem “Journey,” Nazand indicates the powerful search for herself – and for expression:

I went on 

Beyond things

Beyond words

Beyond the body

Beyond the wind

Then I came across myself

But it is in the shortest poems that the poet is often at her most philosophical:

… Knowledge is not about knowing

but about looking through a smiling window

reflecting a different image

Even personal happiness becomes a steep climb in “Voice”: 

Happiness is a ladder 

Let’s climb it together.

Richard McKane (1946 – 2016) was a  British poet and translator. 

Published in Bells of Speech, Ambit, London, 2006