Social fascism- the tragedy of women killings and deaths in Kurdistan Region: reality, reasons, solutions - IV
Kurdishaspect.com - By Dr Kamal Mirawdeli
Part IV: The poetic case of Begard Husein who saw her coffin before her death
The case of woman journalist and poet Begard Husein is one of very few cases that attracted some sporadic attention and reaction especially by young journalists. The reason for this attention was more because she was a journalist than she was a woman. She was not the other but ‘one of us’, but just to a certain degree. Perhaps her being female and having made the sin of behaving as one had prevented her from qualifying as ‘one for us’, one whose death should not only provoke pity and pain but should ensure real action to do justice to her and the cause she was fighting for.
In any other civilised society, except the party jungle called Kurdistan Region, Begard would definitely have become a community leader and a role model for women that a society moving to modernity desperately needs. When I was in Kurdistan last year this time, I was invited by the owner, editor and the editorial team of the leading independent paper Hawlati to a dinner meeting in Sulaymaniyah Park. I was shocked when I found that even in such courageous critical paper among 15 editors and journalists that were present, there was only one woman and she had no editorial role just an administrative one in spite of being a brilliant independent-minded intellectual woman. When I asked why this was the case, my shock multiplied when one of them answered: “Women are nothing (hich nyin)”, meaning there is not much to them and they are not achievers. How can women be achievers when they are marginalized and discriminated against instead of being encouraged, trained and supported to develop?
Yet, here is a woman like Begard, comes forward from an early age as a free intellectual interested in reading, writing, expressing herself and engaging in finding solutions to the problems not just of women but of her society at large, because Begard knew very well that women’s problems were not separate from the socio-political context and tragic history her generation has been experiencing, and she is not protected even when she faces slaughter.
Begard was aware of the dangers of death and discrimination facing women in her brutalized impoverished party-controlled society and therefore she never sought and enjoyed any personal happiness for herself focusing all her attention, work and struggle on the issue of women killing and the problems that women are facing hoping that through her feelings, writings, and journalistic activities she would be able to influence at least some not-yet brutalized officials and contribute to putting an end to the tragedy of social fascism that women in Kurdistan region are facing every day and minute of their lives. Unfortunately in spite of the wider interest that her death attracted, there are only few lines that describe her life. Even for Begard, though she has not been denied name and face (photographs) of her, we have yet to read a feature article telling us who she was, how she felt, how she lived, why she chose this role for herself and why she died. We do not hear, as is the case in any civil society, from her relatives and friends and colleagues stories and memories telling us about an aspect of her biography. The important thing we know is that through her work as a promising poet, story writer and professional journalist Begard wanted to both assert her own identity as a young woman and struggle to make her society more humane, civil and just. She had talent, ability and restricted will to do this.
Her death
The site of Gulan weekly magazine for which Begard worked as a social correspondent published the news of her death (on 20th March the day) in this way:
Her full name is Begard Husein Amin. She was born in 1981 in the village of Qalat in [the district of] Ranya. She is an active member of the syndicate of Kurdistan journalists and the correspondent of Gulan [magazine] for social affairs. In addition to journalism, she also had a delicate sense for poetry and story writing. While the staff of Gulan were busy preparing the issue no 680 and celebrate the 14th anniversary of the magazine, a sudden and unexpected event shocked many of the friends and colleagues of Begard Husein when on the evening of 19th of this month (March 2008) a black hand targeted the mother of Kajal [her little daughter] and in a most brutal way tore her body to pieces with knife stabs. In her journalistic life, Begard had made the issue of women’s rights and the massacre of women one of her main questions. She was courageously and selflessly dedicated herself to these issues putting her life on her hand. Her journalistic sense always attracted her to the cases of [women] killings and tragedies that represented that bitter reality for her without realizing that one day she would too become a victim of woman killers and criminals. In her journalistic time which extends over ten years, Begard worked for more than one newspaper and magazine. She is an active member of syndicate of Kurdistan journalists and for the last five years she has been working as the social affairs correspondent of Gulan weekly. Her courage and efficiency in her work were her most salient characteristics. Actively and fearlessly she was investigating the social incidents especially the massacre practiced against women. In addition to journalism Kajal’s mother was also a sensitive and talented poet. Her prime poetry work is a collection called “Boni Sutan” (The Smell of Burning).
Then Gulan weekly publishes social investigative piece work of Begard which , the magazine states, “Begard had prepared for the magazine only 24 hours before her death”. The piece is entitled: “Three disabled persons in one family: the story of the life of the woman who refuses to remarry in order to support her sisters and brothers.”
Example of her social investigation work
It is a sad chilling typical story of the daily life of Kurdish citizens and an example of the issues and stories that Begard was looking for in her entire journalistic work. I just translate Begard’s introduction to her topic to illustrate the extent of humanism and conscientious commitment of Begard to the cause of the marginalized and oppressed strata of Kurdish society suffering immensely under the barbaric party regime. She writes:
“Often a sight or an incident attracts our attention and puts us in a world of sorrow and suffering that shakes our conscience. Many times a whole family disintegrates because of poverty. An example of this is a family in Bnaslawa [in Arbil]. We visit a family who are seven members, four are girls and three are boys. Three of them have been suffering from genetic disease since their birth. They cannot speak and act as normal healthy persons. For ten years this family had lost their father. Their mother who is called Husniya Abdulla and a sister takes care of them and provide them with food and clothing. What attracts attention is that this sister cannot get married as long as her brothers and sisters are in this condition. Their mother, too, has been ill for some time and cannot take care of them as she used to.”
Begard’s death, as all other women deaths, did not feature on various party-owned TV stations. Although she also worked for KDP’s Kurdistan TV stations they broadcast her murder as a short normal piece of news and this perhaps only because she had been working for them:
“Arbil: The journalist Begard killed: KTV: After a period of ongoing problems, our journalist co-worker was stabbed to death by her ex-husband at her own home. The mentioned had for some time asked for separation from her husband but the latter was always threatening her and asking her for money because he was unemployed and she was the only sustainer of herself and her child. Sometime ago Begard had registered a complaint against her husband at the centre for the elimination of violence against women. It is worth mentioning that our co-worker Begard Husein was working in the field of journalism and worked for several newspapers and magazines. It is not known yet whether the murder has been arrested or not.”
A Reading of Begard’s first poetry book “Boni Sutan”
Only last year Begard published her fist collection of poems. Two things attract attention in this: She published the book herself through the support of a friend, rather than having it published by one of the tens of party-controlled publishing houses, and more importantly the title and content of her collection. The title of her collection is “ The Smell of Burning” . What a romantic title for a beautiful aspiring young woman in a region considered by criminal hypocrites as a ‘model of democracy! Begard felt the smell of burning all around her, burning of desire, of hopes and aspirations and burning of flesh, real live female flesh and the smell of burning filled her mind and soul frustrating and suffocating her, wondering why all those people around her, males and powerless females, stand by, engage in their trivial daily pursuits and are not bothered by the daily murder of love and smothering smell and smoke of female flesh?
Begard introduces her poetry to: “the delicate flowers of spring, the rose in the garden of my life my heart Kajal and to my family and all those who acknowledge the beautiful laws of life!” (p 4). Kajal is her three year old daughter.
These three introductions paint the beautiful delicate heart of Begard. She loved simplicity and beauty: delicate spring flowers and the delicate rose she made from her own flesh and soul: her little daughter Kajal. She was looking for love and the laws of beauty in a region that has been transformed through barbaric party rule into a jungle of ugliness, corruption and cruelty the most salient aspect of which, inter alia, is the daily massacre of beautiful hearts like Begard, increasing murder of children by their own families and increasing suicide rates among men.
The collection is introduced by the known Kurdish woman poet in Sulaymaniyah Kajal Ahmad. The date of Kajal’s writing is 22 May 2001 while the small collection was published in 2007. This means she had to wait 6 years to find someone to help her to print her book. Kajal describes Begard as “breeze of talent from a town” and commenting on her poems she says: “Today I open a window to the talent of a female poet coming from a poor area who with a remarkable courage has blown in the world of Kurdish poetry like a cool heart-comforting breeze. This [poetic] breeze is called Begard Hussein. If we compare her poems with an experienced mature poem we may not find much interest in the experience of this girl. But if we give up our conceit for a while we see in Begard’s poetry the glittering of a talent that might in future become a shining star. It is strange if we look at the emergence of a poet like Begard in our society as something odd and surprising.” (p5)
Perhaps Begard found in the female or feminist voice of Kajal Ahmad a model for herself and that is why she asked Kajal to write a preface to her poems. Alas, the glittering talent that Kajal describes which guided lost souls to the mysterious and dangerous world of love and beauty was slaughtered before it could find a space for herself in the broad horizons of a humane society.
Begard’s poetry
The title given to her book is the title of her first poem “the smell of burning”. From the first line Begard identifies the act of love with the smell of burning body. Thus her writing, her poem, represents the journey of this smell through her senses, desires, hopes and fears:
In your love the smell of burning gets into your body
Take a pen and express this desire
That you have never forgotten
I know your romantic wish is a passenger
Pining for a sight
Visiting you from a remote land
Flying to the nest of your soul
Your breath smells of loneliness
That is why the breeze of your desire fills my heart
There is a crazy dancing going on at the foot of the mountain of love
It comes to you
There is a desire standing in front of your will
To embrace the celebration of light
I like the rain
All the celebrations like to read the issues of your soul
It is not strange that this is romantic
It is not strange that you are the rain
That escapes from the clouds because of alienation
The spring spreads its flower scent for you
Pray to the guiding star of conscience
I know it is time to pray
Prayers feel your palm
Dear God fulfill his desire quickly
I know that with this beautiful innocence
You created a world of green leaves
They fill the street of ugliness
Begging is a word from the verse of loneliness
Even though for a while, don’t let darkness occupy your heart
We will count the tragedies after we see the ruins of our heart
Happiness leaves life
And memory plays the game of oblivion
There is voice of a stranger nightingale used to miss love
Senses do not know the home of happiness
The breeze of comfort entangles in the breath of autumn
The smell of burning and the smell of wine become two paintings
Hung on the wall of the plight of innocent love
We are all full of tears
The smell of burning
Fills life with the wine of truth
Your lips drip smiles
Love has become the bird of boredom in the sky of weeping
Sea is full of love
Water is full of tears
Waves are full of migration
Bermuda port is full of schools
The smell of burning
Has reached there
The smell of burning.
This poem represents the tragic reflection of the barbarism of the party-controlled society in the feeling and desires and then the life chance of an innocent young woman. Love, even in its most beautiful innocent expressions, is entangled in the mechanics of a cruel socio-political order. From its very initiation the process of love is fused with and controlled by the smell of burning. On the one side, there is innocence, desire and love of beauty and rain. On the other side, there is loneliness, alienation, the ubiquitous smell of burning and desire for an impossible escape beyond death:
It is not strange that you are the rain
That escapes from the clouds because of alienation
Rain leaving clouds is like soul leaving body: that is how Begard felt every minute of her conscious life even when she was alive. That is how most alienated women in Kurdistan feel. In fact in identifying the whole process of love with the process and smell of burning, burning inside with love and smothered from outside by the repressive party system, Begard describes in very deeply-felt vivid words charged with irony and symbolism, the frustrating and repressive experience of love for young conscious Kurdish girls.
We are all full of tears/ The smell of burning / Fills life with the wine of truth / Your lips drip smiles / Love has become the bird of boredom in the sky of weeping/ Sea is full of love / Water is full of tears /Waves are full of migration
Even a mature male poet cannot express the metaphor of repressed love in such powerful few visual phrases.
Love here is sea, water, wave and tears. It is in eyes, in lips and in hearts. It is fluid, restless, moving, seeking self-expression, normal destination and self-determination. It wants to move, to pour, and to become the source of enjoyment of life like wine. But it is the smell of burning, metaphorically and physically, that ‘fills life with the wine of truth”. Love is universal vast, natural like the sea. But when Begard wants to take and taste some of its water, it is nothing more than her tears. When she wants to take a wave of sea’s freedom, she can only do that as a migrating wave leaving the sea of love perhaps to melt away and disappear. The sad experience of Kurdish women, under a repressive party regime that has deprived them of humanity, justice and equal opportunities for young men and women to get jobs, own their own homes and business and be able to love, find fiancés and get married, is graphically expressed in this powerful expression:
Love has become the bird of boredom in the sky of weeping
Again love as feeling is associated with free movement like the wave. Here the image is of bird. But because this bird cannot fly ‘to the nest of your soul’, it is caged. So daily life is nothing but boredom and all these fantasies of free flying in the broad sky of love, friendship and free movement and exchange ends up in exhausting the soul in the sky of weeping. Contemplate this beautiful expression:
Happiness leaves life
And memory plays the game of oblivion
Thus life become full of tears and the smell of burning reaches even to the port Bermuda.
[To be continued]
___________________
 | ||||
MENU
July 8, 2008
NEWS
| ||||
| ||||
Sponsors
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
Don’t you think that in this rough whirlwind
I am drowned forever?
If this is not the case
Why did I see the coffin of my death
Before my dying
And for ever I sing a black-clad song?
[Begard Husein, Boni Sutan, p. 47]
