Kevin Rushby joins poets from Sudan, Afghanistan and Somaliland on a tour of the UK, and discovers that years of repression and exile have left scars, but also nourished strong literary traditions

London, October 15, 2005 (The Guardian) – It's an unusual accolade for a poet, a death threat: Maxamed ‎Xaashi Dhamac "Gaarriye" got his in 1980 and it came via the Somalian president, Siad Barre. "He even ‎said anyone caught selling a particular poem [of mine] on audio cassettes would be executed," Gaarriye ‎recalls. ‎
The power of verse to cause social upheaval is not something we're very familiar with in the UK, but in ‎Somali culture it's taken for granted. One poet starts a theme, others take it up, then a chain develops, ‎drawing people into the arguments. "I wrote something against tribalism that became an attack on the ‎president," Gaarriye explains. "Within four months the chain was more than 70 poems long." And that was ‎when the secret police came to visit. Shortly afterwards he fled to Ethiopia and an exile that lasted until ‎‎1991. ‎
Gaarriye is currently touring Britain with five other poets. Each is expected to find an audience among the ‎communities of migrants from their home countries who have settled here - communities that have often ‎been ignored or vilified. In three cases - Somaliland, Sudan and Aghanistan - they are countries that have ‎seen recent or ongoing conflicts. These are also places where poetry has a particularly important role. ‎
Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, a 35-year-old Sudanese writer, lives in Khartoum and is already a veteran of many years ‎of artistic repression - one of his hands bears the scars of a vicious prison beating. Partaw Naderi, an Afghan ‎poet who writes in Dari, spent time in the notorious Pul-e-Chakhri prison in Kabul, then five years in exile. ‎The poetry these writers produced during such periods of hardship reflects experiences shared by many of ‎their compatriots now living in the UK: ‎
‎"I come from a distant land‎
with a foreign knapsack on my back
with a silenced song on my lips." ‎
‎(from "My Voice", by Partaw, translated by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari). ‎
For Al-Saddiq, years of enforced silence when he was barred from public readings left him with a feeling that ‎each poem might be his last. ‎
‎ "I had somehow to hide‎
‎ the frail, blood-stained shoots of April
‎ inside me; I had to allow the crimson night-sky
‎ its majesty; I had
‎ to learn how to stain
‎ the space of the present
‎ with what seeps from a forgotten wound." ‎
‎(from "Weaving a World", translated by Mark Ford and Hafiz Kheir). ‎
For Gaarriye, the years when he was spied on and monitored were suffocating, but poetically his most ‎productive. "I can't escape that experience," he says. "And it's a shared experience - that's why the ‎community listen to me." In 1978 he wrote a poem to mark Nelson Mandela's 60th birthday, which ‎coincided with the release from prison of his friend, the poet Hadraawi, after five years' solitary confinement: ‎
‎ "This poem is a gun.‎
‎ This poem's an assassin.‎
‎ Images mob my mind ...‎
‎ This pen's a spear, a knife,‎
‎ A branding-iron, an arrow
‎ Tipped with righteous anger.‎
‎ It writes with blood and bile. ‎
‎(from "Mandela", translated by David Harsent, Martin Orwin and Maxamed Xassan "Alto"). ‎
In Afghanistan, as in Somalia, poetry has played a decisive role in recent history. "The mujahideen sang ‎poems going into battle," Partaw says. "The communist government tried it too. Then when the Taliban ‎arrived in Kabul, they were reciting poetry." He stayed for a year under Taliban rule, watching as they closed ‎down publications and locked up artists and writers. Finally he fled to Pakistan where he found others who ‎were expressing themselves in verse, drawing on traditions that reach back to the 13th century and the Sufi ‎mystic, Jalal al-Din Rumi - himself a refugee who fled his home in northern Afghanistan ahead of the Mongol ‎invasion. "We say poems are part of our mother's milk," Partaw says, "and that all of our culture came ‎through poetry." ‎
English readers have long had access to Persian poems with 19th-century translations of Omar Khayyam, ‎Hafez and Rumi - a recent translation of the latter was a bestseller in the US. But the lack of a written Somali ‎tradition has closed it off from outsiders. The language did not have an official script until 1972 and even ‎now there are no adequate dictionaries for literary translation. ‎
Martin Orwin, a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and the only British ‎academic fluent in Somali, points out that this creates an enormous barrier to study. "If you can't speak ‎Somali, it's impossible to study the poetry - you have to learn the language and that's difficult without the ‎right tools." ‎
Isolated though it may be, the Somali community in Britain has found in poetry a source of strength. ‎Abdulghani Sabban, who works as a community support teacher in London, points out that recitals are ‎common, "especially during qat sessions" - a reference to the mild stimulant leaf much liked by Somalis. But ‎some young Somalis have little or no idea about their own heritage. "With one group I had to use English ‎translations of Somali poetry," Abdulghani says. "Only then did they began to grasp the implications of it." ‎
Gaarriye's role in the famous chain poems has made him something of a legend among the Somali diaspora - ‎on his second day in the UK his phone is ringing constantly with invitations to lunch or, more often, chew qat ‎‎("I write all my poems while chewing it," he grins). His fame clearly delights him, but he's aware that it rests ‎on an historical accident. In the mid-70s just when he began writing poems, tape-players arrived in Somalia. ‎‎"Students started copying my poetry on to cassettes. That idea really spread like wildfire. We're a nomadic ‎oral society in which poetry is the most important art form - cassettes were perfect for us." ‎
The use of cassettes maintained poetry's central role in Somali society - and also kept refugee communities ‎in touch with latest developments - but it was when Gaarriye came to write down the rules of poetic metre ‎that the art form's future was truly secured. He now teaches Somali literature at Hargeisa university in ‎Somaliland and translations of Somali verse are beginning to introduce new readers to this previously hidden ‎tradition. ‎
Sarah Maguire, founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre, believes that British poetry can benefit ‎hugely from the infusion of foreign influences. "Think of how modern European poetry was effected by Ezra ‎Pound's work on Chinese poems, or how my own generation were deeply influenced by translations of east ‎Europeans like Akhmatova," she says. ‎
Gaarriye, the man whose very public poetry helped shape his country's history, is in full agreement. Somali ‎poetry is already changing, he says; the memory of days when revolution was kicked into life by chain poems ‎is fading, to be replaced by more peaceful concerns. "We're starting to develop an aesthetic side," he grins, ‎as he slides out to an engagement with another Somali social group and, no doubt, a few leaves of qat to ‎tickle the muse. ‎
‎

Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac "Gaarriye", Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi and Partaw Naderi are touring the UK for the ‎Poetry Translation Centre's World Poets' Tour with events at Ilkley Playhouse tonight, at Glanfa Millennium ‎Centre, Cardiff, on Wednesday; and at the Scottish Poetry Library on October 26. ‎www.poetrytranslation.soas.ac.uk/tour

Fad Galbeed (1978)

O setting sunlight

Which falls away

In the fading light of the late afternoon,

Darting down into the burrow –

Drop dead! Hey, are you a coward?

What’s all the rush?

Is it those rays of light flickering from the clouds

Or those small spears springing out

Like a lion about to pounce?

Or has the house where you spend each night

Sent news to scorch you?

Or is it that girl with the beautiful teeth?

Or the rainy season gathering its garments to move with ease?

Or that cumulus enticing you westwards with a promise of rain?

Or could it be that moment when you saw her this afternoon

That’s dimmed your bulb

And made you take off like a coward.

You’re all churned up

By this afternoon.

Remind yourself to warn the moon

Before he too arises in vain.

The clouds roll by like waves,

With the graceful gesture of a beautiful woman,

And the procession of graceful swinging arms

With the elegance special to

The sun trailing clouds of glory,

Guarded by the ranks of the clouds

Which surround you on all sides,

The bullets that you fire

And the target of the arrows

That hit the clouds in the chest,

Turning them red with their blood.

Their blood rains down

And dyes them through.

Once they would shoulder their arms

But something happened today.

Are they worried about you?

Or did they halt because of

The charisma of Gobaad

And the missiles

Bearing love

Launched by her eyes?

But be that as it may –

What I still remember is

That woman veiled loosely with a fine-woven scarf,

Picking ripe mangoes,

Whose marriageable age

Came as a surprise in this setting

And that stirring breeze

Which guessed my intentions

And suddenly took her,

Exposing her nakedness,

Uncovering her breasts;

Then the cloth which she

Wrapped round herself rapidly

With swift modesty,

Her vulnerable head she hung like a gazelle,

Revealing the shyness of her virginity.

Translation By: Workshop

Madax Goodir

Once one afternoon

as a child I gathered

from my father who used

to sit beneath a tree

a story. He said:

'Years before there lived

a king with horns who decided

from then on the blemish

would not be known.

A coward follows his ways;

so constantly he checked them

and wrapped a turban to hide them

but a servant found the secret out

and with this knowledge

outrage welled inside him.

They said he was mistaken

and if he didn't stay quiet,

he heard he would be killed.

Anxiety rose but he was barred

from passing on what he knew.

He understood his predicament:

food stuck in his throat

the knotted news kept him awake

he wandered from place to place

knowing to hide it from all

the people with hungry stomachs

and all this set his bed alight.

Then in the middle of the night

when sleep was missing he leapt

from his home and village

and headed for the dark, the forest,

the pools of the wild animals;

in the gloom the eagle and gazelle

fled away and he took up

the shield of remembrance

and compassion for the poor.

Aimlessly he wandered, then, when

the dawn glowed, he dug,

like a beast burrowing a den,

deep beneath a tree

and placed his chin and beard

upon the soil and whispered with

the hole alone passing on his knowledge

'that the king, Goojaa,

has the horns of a kudu'.

Now, don't interrupt me;

what you've gathered here

is a story once passed to me:

when the news of those horns

flew from his shoulders

everything became light

and from that place of burial

he dusted himself off and left

to travel on his way.

And later in that place

they said that when rain fell

horns grew out of the ground.

Translation By: Workshop

Notes:

This poem was composed by Gaarriye in 1980 and is a political allegory

The kudu is a species of antelope. It is a large animal and the male has long twisting horns.

Watergate

Suspicion has entered me, Carter, regarding you as a companion
What I have seen from experience and the books that have informed
Humanity still groans from the confusion you have caused
A question I ask you is of fundamental importance to me
The brotherliness I used to praise, who made it tight?
While following segregation who was two-faced?
A striped hyena is a danger to the driving which livestock are lost from.
Each time a woman wears a mourning scarf having lost the one who married her
I was aggrieved by the death of Malcolm X, by God
Which one was it who skinned that combatant who stood up?
When a hero becomes furious, who watered him with aloe juice?
Who led the men who cut Luther King's throat?
Who struck the Red Indians killing them in great numbers?
By God, the calamities you've set down are beyond comprehension
Nixon seems easy to me, if you are concerned with shame
Admit it. The Watergates are more than the ones you've told about

A man who knows the grief of the Palestians becomes thin with gloom
When their country was plundered, saddled by desperation
They are wanderers in foreign lands like [animals] told to shoo
They do not enter a hut or yard from what winter has in store
Who has forced that, put out to dry nation in that way
Does someone not share the infamy and shame of the Jews?
By God, the calamities you've set down are beyond comprehension
Nixon seems easy to me, if you are concerned with shame
Admit it. The Watergates are more than the ones you've told about.

All the world wonders at what you have caused in Vietnam
At dawn you attacked with heavy weapons
Aeroplanes holding deadly danger brought in disarray
Bullets exchanged places like winter rain drops
A man who has sought information understands the stress of Saigon
When a hyena has butchered the limbs of a first born
The barking and wailing of the mothers comes together
I still weep for the men you have hit with the spear
The oldest man will never leave me
Woe! At the death of Ho Chi Min my pupils have run dry
By God, the calamities you've set down are beyond comprehension
Nixon seems easy to me, if you are concerned with shame
Admit it. The Watergates are more than the ones you've told about

The war(?) of Angola has exploded and the noise of war has called
They wanted to stop the Portuguese who had brought harm
When it touched the heart they got on their horses [to fight]
They struggled and struggled to the day when the flag was hoisted
The rain clouds and clouds thundered, the rivers burst their banks
When victory was named with Neto had struggled hard for
That a representative go to the UNO set up(?) committee
I don't understand the position of weakness, your clear duty
Shame! Why did you throw in the sling of the veto?
By God, the calamities you've set down are beyond comprehension
Nixon seems easy to me, if you are concerned with shame
Admit it! The Watergates are more than the ones you've told about.

You drank your fill from us before, as from a well full of salty water
Your industry is watered by the blood I spit
The person who takes sides with `wabiin' has no wisdom
(I became aware of ?) the spoken wallaahis and the lying mutterings
I hold the worry of Zimbabwe, the one like Weris
Men have cordoned off the river beds of Namibia with wire
If it weren't for you support, Ian Smith would not throw the sling
By God, the calamities you've set down are beyond comprehension
Nixon seems easy to me, if you are concerned with shame
Admit it. The Watergates are more than the ones you've told about

Translation By: Martin Orwin

Notes:

The translation of this poem still needs some work in a few details. If you can help please have your say through our interactive website.

This poem was composed in 1976 after the United States used its veto in the UN Security Council against the entry of the newly independent state of Angola under Neto.

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