The Kurd poetry

Popular poetry and author poetry, in Kurdistan, feed themselves mutually. The cultivated poetry always takes force from the folklore, first from the Kurd author Ahmedi Khani, with “Mam and Zin”. However, author poems loved by the popular soul, are handed down orally, the refined quatrains of Baba Tahir in the X century and the contemporary lyrics of Goran.

In Kurdistan, travellers and ethnologists of the last centuries noticed that women, rather than hiding themselves under the shapeless veil used in the other Islamic states, wore (as today) wonderful coloured dresses that set off the femininity. They noticed also that the popular dances of men and women together, feature of the social life, caused scandal among neighbouring countries. Originally one of the most known among the popular poems, the “Laùk”, typical of several areas of east Kurdistan, was composed and sung only by women, but not because they were musicians. Women, especially on the occasion of war events, sang their husbands’, sons’ and brothers’ glories, or they celebrated their memory in front of their family, their village, their tribe’s assembly. In some aspects of the Kurd culture and language, traces of matriarchy emerge; some rests of a remote but strong civilisation that has put up with the Koran antifeminist offensive: the Kurd woman has maintained an important role as leader of clans and states, in case of war and peace, in the independence movements and in the resistance.

Wondering

I’m wondering at my home
Be it Arabia Persia or Turkey
That I’m well dressed and powerful
Or miserable and beggar
That I live in a highest house
Or in a dump under the rubble
That I sit in the bench of the wises
Or I go wandering along the way
That I’m free happy rich or that I’m
Chained for the throat in a corner of a jail
I’m a Kurd and for the Kurds and the Kurdistan
I’m ready to give my own life
As a Kurd I will live as a Kurd I will die
In Kurd I will answer from my grave
As a Kurd still I will to return to life
And in the other life yet
For the Kurds I will fight.