“I wanted, just like all children, to play study, learn and spell my firs letters in my mother tongue. Instead I found myself in a aze of languages, in front of a language where I didn’t know one letter from another: Arabic… (but) the child who grew inside me day after day asked himself ‘why are you studying and learning this strange language instead of the language of your mother, father and grandfathers?”

–Hussein Habasch, born in 1970, writes in Kurdish and Arabic, was born in Kurdistan and currently lies in Bonn, Germany.

Thus begins a wide-ranging collection of poems by Hussein Habasch, a poet whose Kurdish culture was forbidden and persecuted in Syria growing up, and whose keen sense of resistance, loss, exile and resolution (aka the ‘Exile of Languages’) informs many of the pages of his selected poems.

Where is my foot? I want to run after the birds. Where is my hand? I want to clap for the butterflies…
The confused child
lost in the planes’ bombardment…
…is lying in the field hospital
running in his dreams

First released in 2021, A Rose for the Heart of Life remains compelling testimony and a precious glimpse into a minority world culture that may not be in the headlines much these days, but constitutes an archetypal example of the stubborn pride which exists in small, threatened nations around the globe.

I love the daisy flower that resembles the whiteness of my heart
and these tulips that fraternize with blood,
I love these mud houses,
and tents, fluttering on the outskirts of forgotten village…
I love my land
from top to bottom
and from bottom to top,
just as a Kurd would love his stubbornness.

And as if authenticity was not sufficient cause to shine a light on this important volume, Habasch is in possession of an overwhelmingly winning aesthetic and linguistic charm — something he quite completely recognizes as having fundamental importance. “Poetry is like a scream in the face of wars, jails, killing, violence, cruelty, racism, exile,” he writes, “(but) this poetic scream should be written well in a powerful imagination, in a charm, miracle love, and insanity; otherwise, it will fall in the well of antipathy.”

Fitting words to those weary of the prototypical preoccupation with rant and recrimination, victim cosplay, and pious political witness, yet toad-squatting in far too many sectors of the Western poetic sensibility.

Not that Habasch’s poetry lacks in witness, testimony, and first-hand experience at the heart of cultural survival. But in a profoundly reflective way, in the face of overwhelming oppressive forces, he celebrates the very existence of artistic expression as a weapon
toward survival;
Our madness to draw
our madness to write
our madness to leave every day
A rose for the heart of life
Our madness won’t win, my love!

We will be defeated, my love
I know that.
They will conquor, my love,
You know that.

But regardless, we will draw,
Write and leave every day
A rose for the heart of life.

This book is top shelf material, a rare accomplishment, a rose worth picking.
tr Munad Zanati, Sinan Anton, Azad Akkash, Nordinne Zouitni, Jawad Wadi, Hewa Habasch, Mohammaed Helmi Rishah, Margaret Saine, Solara Sabah