| Sunday, April 29, 2007 1:45PM | | | | Nabeel Yasin and Jo Tatchell | Posted By: Mindy Aloff
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| Tags: Nabeel Yasin, Jo Tatchell, poetry, Iraq |
The Instituto Cervantes, on East 49th Street between Second and Third Avenues, turns out to be a small, brick-and-ironwork haven, with a cloistered garden and, on the basement level, a little theater with what may well be the most comfortable upholstered seating of any theater in New York. Some 30 persons gathered there on Friday to hear Nabeel Yasin, the soft-spoken, silvery, and, once, grimly persecuted Iraqi poet who came of age during Saddam Hussein’s 1970’s regime. Although Mr. Yasin was the star of the panel, the principal spokesperson there was the young British journalist Jo Tatchell, whose book, Nabeel’s Song, a biography of Yasin and his middle-class family in their native Baghdad, will be published in this country in June. She met Mr. Yasin a few years ago, when she was writing a story about Saddam Hussein’s romantic novels for the newspaper al-Hayyat [sp?]. A colleague suggested that she interview Mr. Yasin about his experience with Hussein, and, as Ms Tatchell put it, “our original professional association led to a wider conversation.”
Owing to Mr. Yasin’s comparatively reduced English and Ms Tatchell’s comparatively reduced Arabic (the poems in the biography have been translated by Fadel Abbas Hady), the event was necessarily lopsided. Ms Tatchell spoke alone for about two thirds of the session, her speech hurtling along in an effort to bring us up to speed with Mr. Yasin’s life, which was marked by childhood harmony in Iraq of the 1950’s (Ms Tatchell: “a time of immense hope in Iraq, before the Ba’athist regime created an oppressive stranglehold on the country”); prodigious achievements and recognition for his poetry while he was still very young; imprisonment and torture by Hussein for Mr. Yasin’s refusal to serve as a praise poet and for his critical epic, Brother Yasin; and a flight into exile, in 1979, with his wife, Nada, and their young son, Yamam. For ten years, they lived in Hungary (the only European country that accepted them, Mr. Yasin says: “The people were very kind, very helpful”), and then they traveled to London, where he and his family currently reside.
When Mr. Yasin did comment, in English, he spoke slowly and emphatically, yet his tone of voice retained its songlike luster. “I discovered very early that poetry is one of the life tools to express myself,” he said, “to understand the relationship between the bird and the wood, or what is the love between the tree and the root. At 15 or 16, I wrote my first short poem, about a tree in a garden. I talked to that tree and hoped the tree understood.”
Recently, Mr. Yasin returned to visit Iraq for the first time in 28 years. He said that he “looked at many things, trees, colors, spires, rivers,” but he never found his early natural confidante. “I hope I can find that tree again,” he added.
It’s a tree that only listens to poets, apparently: “I like novels,” Mr. Yasin said. “The novelist tells us a story. But it’s not the real story. He should create something else above and behind the story—he should make a poem! He needs music, history, memory, and something to give people a rhythm, meaning, the why they are on this earth.” Ms Tatchell set a context for this view by explaining that “poetry is the senior, superior art form in Iraq. The novel is newer; it has a place. But in Iraq, poetry is performed. You read with a musical accompaniment, with singing and talking. It feels like a show, actually—more like street poetry or poetry rap sessions. There are three layers to Brother Yasin: one is a mythological layer. The area has had thousands of years of culture, and the poem reminds people of the many civilizations that have been there and been destroyed and sprung up.” After she spoke, the poet read briefly from the epic in Arabic: it did sound like a song-chant, in large part because of the rapid and continuously flexible changes in pitch. The melismas that animated an occasionally prolonged vowel gave the passage the character of a call to prayer.
Mr. Yasin still speaks of hope for his homeland, and he believes that the seed of it is in poets’ expressions of truth in the Arabic language, which is spoken by all sectarian factions in Iraq:
“All dictators are afraid of the word,” he said. “I think in poetry, we can defeat, really, the unjust and the unfair of the earth. Saddam Hussein destroyed the heritage, images, feelings of Iraqis. Our task is to rebuild the spirit of Iraq. In Baghdad [on his recent trip], I faced destruction everywhere. But the deep destruction, I found inside the people, in the angle of their spirit, their hearts. Saddam Hussein put a suicide bomb inside
every Iraqi. Now, you can publish everything. There are between 400 and 500 books published in Iraq, including books by girls. The problem takes on other elements. There is violence, occupation, chaos. The former Ba’athists are using this freedom to affect the situation.”
If there is a hero in Iraq today, Mr. Yasin said, “it is the Iraqi woman. She has lost so much: husband, sons, brothers. Yet she is still hoping that something [better] will happen.” In fact, Mr. Yasin is working on a sequel to Brother Yasin that opens with a moment “about a woman sitting in her house alone, putting on her makeup, putting on the coffee, waiting for her neighbor to come, but also waiting for her sons. Suddenly, everything is put off, dark. . . .”
From the audience, someone softly said, “Riders to the Sea.”
For Mr. Yasin, “We [i.e., poets] can help by sending our poems, give the correct meaning of the word and . . .then let the people use this feeling and this word to explain themselves to themselves.” This is not simply wishful thinking: the poet’s idealism is rooted in the experience of particular persons. One was a tailor he knew who was also a political figure. He learned to read and write in jail and, on getting out and opening a tailor shop, he turned it into “a secret bookshop,” where the tailor “handcopied poems and articles.” Ms Tatchell also told us that, in the 1990’s, Mr. Yasin had published a book with a small press in London, in a print order of 1,000. Copies were taken to Aman “by a poetess from Jordan, and, through Kurdistan, one or two worked their way down to Baghdad. People copied them by hand, as they were also copying Tolstoy, Hemingway, Shakespeare. . . .”
“Literature for children, also,” Mr. Yasin added.
“They were passed around in a clandestine way,” Ms Tatchell added. “Nabeel didn’t know that there was this very little flame being kept alight all the way through Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
A member of the audience asked Mr. Yasin whether, in the time he has lived in exile, he has felt at home outside Iraq, and could he imagine living in Iraq again?
Answered Mr. Yasin: “The trees, the windows, things from Baghdad come into my poems without permission from me.”
The Instituto Cervantes, on East 49th Street between Second and Third Avenues, turns out to be a small, brick-and-ironwork haven, with a cloistered garden and, on the basement level, a little theater with what may well be the most comfortable upholstered seating of any theater in New York. Some 30 persons gathered there on Friday to hear Nabeel Yasin, the soft-spoken, silvery, and, once, grimly persecuted Iraqi poet who came of age during Saddam Hussein’s 1970’s regime. Although Mr. Yasin was the star of the panel, the principal spokesperson there was the young British journalist Jo Tatchell, whose book, Nabeel’s Song, a biography of Yasin and his middle-class family in their native Baghdad, will be published in this country in June. She met Mr. Yasin a few years ago, when she was writing a story about Saddam Hussein’s romantic novels for the newspaper al-Hayyat [sp?]. A colleague suggested that she interview Mr. Yasin about his experience with Hussein, and, as Ms Tatchell put it, “our original professional association led to a wider conversation.”
Owing to Mr. Yasin’s comparatively reduced English and Ms Tatchell’s comparatively reduced Arabic (the poems in the biography have been translated by Fadel Abbas Hady), the event was necessarily lopsided. Ms Tatchell spoke alone for about two thirds of the session, her speech hurtling along in an effort to bring us up to speed with Mr. Yasin’s life, which was marked by childhood harmony in Iraq of the 1950’s (Ms Tatchell: “a time of immense hope in Iraq, before the Ba’athist regime created an oppressive stranglehold on the country”); prodigious achievements and recognition for his poetry while he was still very young; imprisonment and torture by Hussein for Mr. Yasin’s refusal to serve as a praise poet and for his critical epic, Brother Yasin; and a flight into exile, in 1979, with his wife, Nada, and their young son, Yamam. For ten years, they lived in Hungary (the only European country that accepted them, Mr. Yasin says: “The people were very kind, very helpful”), and then they traveled to London, where he and his family currently reside.
When Mr. Yasin did comment, in English, he spoke slowly and emphatically, yet his tone of voice retained its songlike luster. “I discovered very early that poetry is one of the life tools to express myself,” he said, “to understand the relationship between the bird and the wood, or what is the love between the tree and the root. At 15 or 16, I wrote my first short poem, about a tree in a garden. I talked to that tree and hoped the tree understood.”
Recently, Mr. Yasin returned to visit Iraq for the first time in 28 years. He said that he “looked at many things, trees, colors, spires, rivers,” but he never found his early natural confidante. “I hope I can find that tree again,” he added.
It’s a tree that only listens to poets, apparently: “I like novels,” Mr. Yasin said. “The novelist tells us a story. But it’s not the real story. He should create something else above and behind the story—he should make a poem! He needs music, history, memory, and something to give people a rhythm, meaning, the why they are on this earth.” Ms Tatchell set a context for this view by explaining that “poetry is the senior, superior art form in Iraq. The novel is newer; it has a place. But in Iraq, poetry is performed. You read with a musical accompaniment, with singing and talking. It feels like a show, actually—more like street poetry or poetry rap sessions. There are three layers to Brother Yasin: one is a mythological layer. The area has had thousands of years of culture, and the poem reminds people of the many civilizations that have been there and been destroyed and sprung up.” After she spoke, the poet read briefly from the epic in Arabic: it did sound like a song-chant, in large part because of the rapid and continuously flexible changes in pitch. The melismas that animated an occasionally prolonged vowel gave the passage the character of a call to prayer.
Mr. Yasin still speaks of hope for his homeland, and he believes that the seed of it is in poets’ expressions of truth in the Arabic language, which is spoken by all sectarian factions in Iraq:
“All dictators are afraid of the word,” he said. “I think in poetry, we can defeat, really, the unjust and the unfair of the earth. Saddam Hussein destroyed the heritage, images, feelings of Iraqis. Our task is to rebuild the spirit of Iraq. In Baghdad [on his recent trip], I faced destruction everywhere. But the deep destruction, I found inside the people, in the angle of their spirit, their hearts. Saddam Hussein put a suicide bomb inside
every Iraqi. Now, you can publish everything. There are between 400 and 500 books published in Iraq, including books by girls. The problem takes on other elements. There is violence, occupation, chaos. The former Ba’athists are using this freedom to affect the situation.”
If there is a hero in Iraq today, Mr. Yasin said, “it is the Iraqi woman. She has lost so much: husband, sons, brothers. Yet she is still hoping that something [better] will happen.” In fact, Mr. Yasin is working on a sequel to Brother Yasin that opens with a moment “about a woman sitting in her house alone, putting on her makeup, putting on the coffee, waiting for her neighbor to come, but also waiting for her sons. Suddenly, everything is put off, dark. . . .”
From the audience, someone softly said, “Riders to the Sea.”
For Mr. Yasin, “We [i.e., poets] can help by sending our poems, give the correct meaning of the word and . . .then let the people use this feeling and this word to explain themselves to themselves.” This is not simply wishful thinking: the poet’s idealism is rooted in the experience of particular persons. One was a tailor he knew who was also a political figure. He learned to read and write in jail and, on getting out and opening a tailor shop, he turned it into “a secret bookshop,” where the tailor “handcopied poems and articles.” Ms Tatchell also told us that, in the 1990’s, Mr. Yasin had published a book with a small press in London, in a print order of 1,000. Copies were taken to Aman “by a poetess from Jordan, and, through Kurdistan, one or two worked their way down to Baghdad. People copied them by hand, as they were also copying Tolstoy, Hemingway, Shakespeare. . . .”
“Literature for children, also,” Mr. Yasin added.
“They were passed around in a clandestine way,” Ms Tatchell added. “Nabeel didn’t know that there was this very little flame being kept alight all the way through Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
A member of the audience asked Mr. Yasin whether, in the time he has lived in exile, he has felt at home outside Iraq, and could he imagine living in Iraq again?
Answered Mr. Yasin: “The trees, the windows, things from Baghdad come into my poems without permission from me.” | | |
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2 Comments | Add a Comment |
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| 5-9-09 6:46AM: Reil said...
"That's right," the man said. "I couldn't remember the word." He was the only t, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 175 million active users in amount of visitors, making Facebook the most popular social network, followed by MySpace and Twitter.other human at the loading dock this morning. The man didn't have a name, just a number, like the rest of the robots. Paris, at Night.
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| 2-24-09 11:18PM: Brenden P. said...
The new President of the United States unveiled his economic stimulus plan he calls the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. Democratic leaders have proclaimed their opposition, stating that the tax cuts outlined in the plan will not encourage spending. The stimulus checks that were sent out last year during the Bush Administration made little difference, and many argue that this plan will be just the same. Nonetheless, President Obama is determined to restore some good in the economy by also putting restrictions on some business tax breaks. Read this article to find out more about this political conflict on the payday loan blog at PersonalMoneyStore.com.
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