BookNight with Bejan Matur

Bejan Matur is the most illustrious poet among a bold new women’s poetry emerging from the maelstrom in the Middle East.

Bejan’s poetry is certainly engaged in her people’s struggles, currently spilling across borders that ill-define ravaged eastern Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. She has been jailed by the Turkish regime, and – with other writers – faces continuous menace and harassment. She writes dissident journalism and a prose work based on interviews with Kurdish men and women became an instant bestseller in Turkey.

Her first book of translations into English, In The Temple of a Patient God, refers in stark terms to an Exodus by stateless people who “… walked with touches of the moon / veiling our pain / but still we were tired”. And more vividly: “My mother shows the dead / to my brother / and has become the journey. / They weep together”. 

And yet there is always this palpable mysticism in her writing, close to nature, imagining dragons and leopards, meditating on creation – a dialogue with God. Or what her translator calls “an endless spiritual quest to understand the nature of being”. And this is what propels a second translated volume, How Abraham Abandoned Me, which Matur wrote after being impelled to abandon a trip to Lebanon and listen to the poetry in her mind inspired by her native Diyarbakir. The result can only be likened to Coleridge’s Kubla Khan – visionary, as though dictated from some outer world, writing of: “A long sleep in the garden / and before roses / and birdsong / the serpent, / his body unfamiliar with earth / would slither along / and steal heaven away from us.” Or: “Where poets / and prayers / and words cannot reach / a lover’s breath / and his throbbing breast / will be the guide. / A lover’s swelling heart / watching the river at night / will summon the tiger”. 

For this very special BookNight, Bejan will talk about her work and people, but – here’s the difference – sections of Bejan’s poetry will be read first in translation, and then by her in Turkish or Kurdish, according to the original.

Recommended reading: In The Temple of a Patient God, and How Abraham Abandoned Me, both published by Arc.