Dream State: A Commonplace Book

by Alana Marie Levinson-Labrosse  

(Unnamed Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Alan Ali Saeed

Unusually, a useful place to start with this genre-subverting lyric poetry collection is the title.  A commonplace book is traditionally a thinker and writer’s highly personal collection of items of knowledge from books, conversations, experiences and other sources which can be used later to create written texts. The subtitle, a ‘commonplace book’ suggests two meanings. First, that Dream State is both a poetry collection based on Levinson-Labrosse’s time living and working at a university in Iraqi-Kurdistan and a series of translated narratives and memories from named Kurds about Kurdistan. (While Iraqi-Kurdistan was recognised officially in the Iraqi constitution of 2005, it has existed since the 1970s as a de facto, partially autonomous area. The unrecognized Kurdistan is rather more complex to imagine and would include parts of the current states of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.) Levinson-Labrosse, however, did more than just teach at a university in Iraqi-Kurdistan, she is highly regarded as a translator of Kurdish to English. She co-translated Farhad Pirbal’s The Potato Eaters and she helped found the Kashkul center, an important Kurdish arts and cultural center in Sulaimani, Iraqi-Kurdistan. Levinson-Labrosse is determined to ensure her poems don’t elide or overpower the voices of actual Kurds which is part of the ethical and political framework of the volume.  

Second, the subtitle A Commonplace Book, refers to the fact that the future Kurdistan often talked about by Kurds, is itself a kind of commonplace book, made from the dreams and hopes of forty million odd stateless people about becoming a nation and which they have been working towards it seems for centuries. In that sense, Kurdistan is describable as an idealized "dream state," albeit in a highly positive sense, functioning in a broad mythic fashion within the Kurdish people’s vast imaginary. It is also a "dream state" for the poet, due to its uncanny strangeness to her own culture. Levinson-Labrosse informs us in her prefatory note (i) that the middle eastern equivalent of a commonplace book is a kashkul, named after the wandering Sufi dervish’s traditional alms bowl, so this volume is also to be seen as a Kashkul. The working practices of writers across the world’s borders are surprisingly similar, despite differences in language and culture.

While this review focuses on the author’s own poems, the Kurdish authored material is interesting and often striking in its own right and plays a significant role in the organisation of the volume, insofar as it puts Levinson-Labrosse’s poems in dialogue with the Kurdish people that directly inspired her. The volume shows considerable variety to match what her interviewees discuss while exhibiting Levinson-Labrosse’s own personal poetic voice. She is always conscious of being in dialogue with the Kurds, sometimes even silently. "The Book Men" is a moving poem, one which dramatizes how the speaker feels while being watched by Kurds when examining their precious archival poetic material, which they risked their lives to preserve against an oppressive regime intent on destroying both their language and culture:

The book men have been 

jailed and beaten

for their libraries, 

used as evidence at trial 

then burned.

[…] 

They read 

as they went blind and after 

whatever they had

learned by heart.

She is acutely conscious of how valuable texts are to these wary, secret librarians who share them with a stranger whose plans they do not understand. The poem concludes with lines suggesting these unresolved tensions and the librarians’ measured fears, which also symbolize the unspoken anxieties that all Kurds have about the continuation of American involvement in their world as "They wait to see /  what I can become."

Baghdad features prominently as it was traditionally the cosmopolitan home to Kurds, Sunni and Shia Arabs, and Assyrians. In "A Series of Suggestions," a visit to photograph the ruins of Baghdad garners an "amused" comment from their driver, a detail reminding us of the huge cost in human life that permitted the overthrow of the Ba’ath regime:

our driver laughs. What were you photographing?

the body 

was on the other side.  

The end of the poem is somewhat equivocal in terms of how far an American poet can appreciate the gulf of distance between America and Iraq. Mulberries are ripe in both countries at the same time, and she picks a few which in turn remind her of the Iraq she has recently left:

I pinch the stamen and pull

until a single bead

hangs at the opening. I hold

the open flower steady

and sip

An untitled prose poem vividly brings to life both the world of the camps for Internally Displaced Person (IDP), and the considerable gender gap in rural Kurdish society:

Her daughter crawled onto my lap. Some camp sickness crusted round her           

nostrils. She wouldn’t stop touching my pen as I wrote, as her mother spoke. […] Hanna kept apologizing. She’s never seen a woman write before.

"The Plains of Nineveh" recounts the aftermath of the war with Daesh [ISIL or Islamic State], with the burning oil wells set on fire as Daesh retreated, through the use of another strange detail:

This is the season of narcissus, wild and delicate, growing into the miles of trenches the Islamic State dug. Villagers will cut the narcissus in handfuls and take it to the city, standing at intersections, asking 1,000 dinars—75 cents—for each. Drivers will stop for a moment, buy a bunch, and carry it throughout the day, giving each person they meet a few stems until the bouquet is gone.

The imagery here turns on the contrast between the pale yellow of the spring narcissi and the notorious black flag of Daesh, as well as the fact that sociable Kurds buy them to give away as presents to acquaintances and friends. There’s also an implied contrast to the solitary poet amidst the daffodils in Wordsworth’s "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Other poems in the book similarly recall memories of the plenitude of Kurdish life and the poet’s experiences of this. "Glass Tangerine" recalls a morning swim in a mountain lake with a local friend under a Kurdish moon:

We swam our makeshift course

across the vast lake and back.

On our drive home, snacking

on dates, Nab tells me 

how he never really learned to swim, how he 

only wanted to see the seagulls 

hatch, how afraid he was.

Again, in contrast to the episode with the "troubled pleasure" of the stolen skiff in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Book 1, the emphasis is on sociability rather than the lonely experience of the sublime. The form of the volume overall, with Levinson-Labrosse’s poems in continued dialogue with the words of Kurdish interviewees, shows how she wishes to subvert expectations of both lyric poetry and expatriate writing. Her position as poet is always liminal, neither quite inside nor quite outside of Kurdish society, wishing to speak of Kurdish subjects but not to simply incorporate them into her experience as lyric poets often have done with their subjects, from Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads (1798) until now. 

While Levinson-Labrosse clearly understands the Kurdish situation as well as many Kurds (she also has a PhD on 19th Century Kurdish poetry), she is still acutely conscious that she isn’t a Kurd. The cover design of the volume by León Muñoz Santini is based on a photo taken by Hawre Khalid in 2015 of a child, Abdullah Hazbar, seen through the fabric of a tent, at an Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camp near Kirkuk Iraq. The translucency is a good image of the inevitable distance between poet as observer and the Kurdish people. I understand and appreciate Levinson-LaBrosse’s ethical and political stance and her "deconstructed" commonplace book is a gracious gesture, suggesting she wishes to involve both an international and a Kurdish audience. She is genuinely interested in listening to our narratives and memories to write sensitive, lyrical poems for everyone to engage with.

Alan Ali Saeed is an associate professor of English literature at Sulaimani University, Iraq. He has a BA from Sulaimani University, an MA (London University), and a PhD on Bergson and British modernist stream of consciousness women's writing (Brunel University). See his publications here: Sites.google.com/a/univsul.edu.iq/ alan-ali-saeed/publications.

Women’s Voices from Kurdistan: A Selection of Kurdish Poetry

Edited by Farangis Ghaderi, Clémence Scalbert Yücel & Yaser Hassan Ali

(National Press London, 2021) 

Reviewed by Steven Barfield & Alan Ali Saeed

This slim, elegantly presented bilingual volume of Kurdish poetry translated into English and created by the Exeter Kurdish Translation Initiative is likely to appeal to anyone interested in women’s lived experiences and how they has been woven into the memorable lines and resonant images of poetry. It is worth noting in advance that it also includes two male Kurdish poets, who wrote positively about Kurdish women’s experience and served as important proponents of feminist values: Hêmin (1921–1986) and Fayeq Bêkes (1905–1948). If Kurdish women’s lived experience is often distinguished by a sense of oppression, then it is also one that engenders female solidarity and fortitude. This is perhaps summed up in one of the final poems in the volume, “The Secret,” which moves deftly between the metaphorical and the literal. 

Gulîzer (1979–), a Turkish Kurd, uses a deliberately non-patriarchal pseudonym and has published several collections with Avesta in Istanbul. She remarks in her lyric “The Secret” (“Raz”): 

    I entrust each of my broken parts 

    To a woman close to me 

    I know 

    Women always have a chest 

    For the safekeeping of these parts cherished and broken. 

The book is innovative, covering a wide selection of diverse Kurdish poetry from the 19th to the 20th centuries that has been translated for the first time. Usually, the poems were written originally in one of the Kurdish dialects (the book covers work in Gorani, Sorani, and Kurmanji), as well as Arabic. There are nine poets represented in the volume. It makes no claim to be representative in the broader corpus of Kurdish poetry as its focus is only on the work of women or those male poets who advocated for women’s rights and value. It is pioneering in highlighting women’s poetry, rather than the more familiar work of Kurdish male poets. 

For those interested in assessing this marginalization, Ghaderi and Scalbert Yücel’s useful introduction offers notes to various PhD dissertations and critical essays on the subject of Kurdish women’s poetry for the English reader. The volume demonstrates not only the poets’ attention to issues such as war, conflict, and oppression (an unavoidable aspect of the Kurdish experience), but also a focus on gender discrimination, as well as themes drawn from everyday aspects of female experience, such as family, intimacy, fantasy, and romantic love, which are arguably less predominant amongst the concerns of Kurdish poetry written by men. 

Kurdish is a minority language. It has only relatively recently become recognized as an official state language in Iraq. Little has been translated into English and, in addition, literary translation is hindered because its native speakers fear they lack fluency in the target language of English. Ghaderi and Scalbert Yücel organized workshops around a co-translation model in which Kurdish native speakers of different dialects worked with a translation editor or a co-translator to polish the English versions of the poems produced. This is a productive model for the translation of literary texts from minor languages into major ones and where the number of native bilingual speakers is restricted. 

The collection is a broad selection of Kurdish female voices that presents poems of real quality and distinction. We suspect readers will find themselves wishing for more poems from the poets anthologized here. Many featured poems excel in their lyrical depiction of personal experience while also speaking to general aspects of human experience. For example, Mestûre Erdelan (1805–1848), who wrote in Gorani, is represented by a beautiful and moving elegy for her husband, Khosrow Khan. The elegy’s final lines, “How I wish the throngs of blossoms would be destroyed / and poppies would yellow with aching hearts,” remind us how grief often involves unhappiness and anger that the world goes on despite the loved one’s death. The poem’s setting in spring, a time of yearly renewal, seems especially cruel to her, because her late husband loved this time of year. Hêmin (1921–1986), a celebrated Iranian Kurdish poet, is represented by “Memory of Shirin,” which manages to start as a seeming love poem to a Kurdish woman but becomes a bold, anthemic argument for female empowerment and education: 

    Even if we have thousands of clear-watered rivers like Zê, Gader and 

    Lawên, life’s springs will be muddy if women are not free. 

    Slavery is outdated, dear Kurdish girl! 

    Rise, awaken—it is not the time to sleep! 

    Break the door, rip the veil, run to school. 

    The remedy for the Kurdish malady is education, education. 

Fayeq Bêkes (1905–1948) was from Iraqi Kurdistan, near Sulaymaniyah. In the poem “Nasrin,” the speaker addresses a woman he empathizes with because her subordinate position fills him with a burning sense of injustice because the Kurdish project of inclusive nation-building cannot simply ignore and leave women behind. The speaker warns Nasrin that she is “chained, your life is oppression-filled” and implores her to “throw away the veil, there’s no shame in that.” He views the Islamic veil as an emblem of her oppression by patriarchy. 

Jîla Huseynî (1964–1996) from Iran wrote in both Persian/Farsi and Kurdish and is 

represented by both a dream poem about a man she loves, or could love, “When I Dream About You” and “Question,” a poem about what it means to be a woman across the generations: 

    My mother’s worn scarf 

    Does not leave my head alone. 

    It says: ‘I am your grandmother’s.’ 

    It might have been her grandmother’s too. 

Diya Ciwan (1953–present), was born in Turkey and moved to Syria in 1975, but she now resides in Iraq. “The Needle” is a humorous poem, seizing on an object associated with women’s work (by implication the so-called trivial nature of such domestic work in men’s eyes), which Ciwan turns by an extended argument into a powerful symbol of affirmation. The needle for her is empowering and more valuable than one of the famed Damascene swords traditionally beloved by male warriors: 

    

    For as long as there is light in my eyes 

    I shall never leave her, 

    or swap her for the Sword of Damascus.

Tîroj (1959–present), a pseudonym of the Iraqi Kurdish poet Hana Mohamed, has written in both Arabic and Kurdish. She is represented here by two passionate love lyrics that depict the speaker’s state of mind and challenge the idea of the woman as being only a passive, decorous object of love for man. In “From the Glow of Imagination” the speaker remarks: 

    I broke my pen 

    I tore up my pages 

    And set them on fire 

Trîfa Doskî (1974–present), also from Iraq, writes in Bahdinani Kurdish and offers daring and often passionate lyrics, several of which are represented here. However, she also channels love poems into elegiac depictions of the grief and survivor guilt that inhabit Kurdish culture after the Anfal and the calamity of the wars against Saddam Hussein’s regime. In “Widow’s Hopes,” a woman laments her dead lover: 

    The homeland has become a mass grave, 

    and I cannot put down by my foot anywhere, I fear I’ll step 

    on your head; oh, you who once slept in my arms. 

    So I panic. 

Viyan M. Tahir (1983–present) from Duhok Iraq, is probably the most contemporary of the Kurdish poets represented here, as her first volume was only published recently in 2020. Her two poems are visceral explorations of the conditions of love from the woman’s point of view and the difficulties and passion of amorous relationships. The female speaker is caught in the tumult between the desire for amorous surrender and the preservation of her identity. In “Ego,” she remarks to her lover: 

    Every second of my life 

    Is clogged with your colour. 

    I try so hard to empty myself of you, 

    I want so much to rob you of myself, 

    So you get drunk on my cupful of love. 

The book is a fine sampler of Kurdish women’s voices, that in the end will leave you wishing there were more from each of these poets. As readers we can only hope this anthology will inspire a publisher to commission a significantly lengthier volume, allowing more of the work of these and other Kurdish poets to be read by English readers in translation. 

Steven Barfield was a British academic for most of his career, teaching

principally at the University of Westminster, London. More recently he has been

an educational consultant, and has taught, mentored, and advised throughout the

Middle East. Now largely retired from teaching, he remains a researcher and is a

visiting research fellow at London South Bank University.

Alan Ali Saeed is associate professor of English literature at Sulaimani

University, Iraq. He has a BA from Sulaimani University (2004), an MA (London

University, 2009), a PhD on Bergson and British modernist stream of consciousness

women's writing (Brunel University, 2016), and a PGCHE (Falmouth, 2021) in

university teaching. See his publications here: Sites.google.com/a/univsul.edu.iq/

alan-ali-saeed/publications.