_{This foreword appears in Dilawar’s complete poetry collection, Here and There Rain, a Far-flung Sunshine.}

I moved to Slemani in the fall of 2011 because I had heard the streets were named after poets. As soon as I arrived in the city, I began learning Sorani and working to understand the landscape of living poets around me. I caught Abdulla Pashew’s reading that year at the University of Slemani. I met Sherko Bekas and hosted a reading with him the next year. When, one day, I had the honor to sit down one afternoon with Dilawar Karadaghi, I was struck by the quiet that seemed to hang in the air around him. The lobby of the Slemani Palace Hotel echoed with the hum and honking of afternoon bazaar traffic, but he himself sat still, composed, peaceful. It wasn’t until years later that I would see more fully how hard Dilawar had worked to achieve and maintain this peace – for peace is not self-sustaining, especially not for a Kurd.

Born in 1963, Dilawar came of age alongside the Kurdish struggle for semi-autonomy within the Iraqi state. His formative years as a poet and a person were marked by Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds, Anfal, which resulted in mass forced relocations of Kurds, the emptying of entire Kurdish villages, the disappearances of Kurdish men of military age, the chemical bombings of Kurds, most notably Halabja, the Kurdish uprising, the Kurdish Civil War, and the formation of the Kurdish Regional Government. That is an exhausting catalogue of upheaval that only carries us through the first thirty years of his life. Dilawar’s poetry reflects the chaos and disruption around him not exactly, but slant. His verse shows readers the realities of suffering and hope that exist past reporting, past fact and into the vast subjectivity of the true individual. In “Father, open the window / A word remains in my heart / I must speak” (2002), he writes,

Father… father

Close the curtains

Help me cry

Help me warm up

encourage me to narrate a thing,

Full of snow, silence,

And pulsing heart

Tell me

Where is this story’s beginning and

Where its end?

In “A Long Day” (2018), he asserts that each day is only another part of one never-ending day. Time, as story is in “Father,” has no beginning or end, only endless cycles. The poet finally says, almost as a sorrowful confession, “I take no part in place, / still howls in my ears.” In the same poem, Dilawar imagines people standing in a fog, raising their hands, unsure if the gesture is in greeting or farewell. Time, narrative, even a sense of place remains elusive for the poet, for Kurds. Dilawar turns to poetry to record the emotional realities of living Kurdishness.

Part of the peace Dilawar practices comes from his insistence on imagining an alternative world for himself and, by extension, his people. His “In That Village” (1993) envisions a village in which doves run for public office, in which the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, in which “Fate is wheat-colored man / who whistles in the afternoon / as he passes beneath / the pomegranate trees’ shadow.” The people of that village, knowing nothing of even the simplest modern mathematics use calculus of breath instead to measure the approaching bloom of qarsili flowers. When disaster hits, when “people of that village / […] become guests of an earthquake / insignificant and of great magnitude,” they “fill their pocket with shadow, cloud / and sunlight” – they pack the “embrace of stars.” As in Dilawar’s lived world, there is violence in his poetry, violence and melancholy, but the poet does not allow his reader to rot in that state.

He invites his reader instead to the state of imagination, where even the greatest depravity can be reimagined, where even the worst suffering can be transformed. In a recent poem, “New Air,” the poet speaks to an undefined “you.” This “you,” who could be Saddam, the Ba’thists, the international community, Trump’s United States, or even Kurdish leadership, attempts to deprive the speaker of what the speaker needs to survive: bread, air, sunlight. But over and over, the poet laughs at “you,” “you,” take my bread, forgetting I live on air as well. You take my air, not knowing I breath sunshine, too. You plunder sunshine, not imagining I write with rain, too. No matter what action you take, I can imagine my way forward by invention, resourcefulness, and conviction. Take my wings, and I fly with imagination. Take my fire and I warm myself by storm. The enemy in this poem is too literal-minded to understand his own poverty. The poet can afford absolute rebellion because he lives not by earth’s sustenance but by the soul’s substance.

Just one word, the poet assures his reader in “Just a Word Was Enough” (2011), is sufficient to create a peace that stands independent from the world, untouchable:

A word outside dialect,

outside rhetoric,

outside principalities,

outside slogan, chant, the masses,

procedure, and program…

A lovely word,

like your small name, raisin, cicada,

hedgehog, greengrape, rain.

Whole worlds live inside one word. Whole worlds exist within your small name, inside qshmsh.

Dilawar’s poetic eye, educated by the political vicissitudes of his lifetime, sees the power of imagination and language to create and tend peace. In Azad Subhi’s 1996 poem “For Dilawar Karadaghi,” he writes:

My friend… A butterfly is on your pencil

Take care of it

No path exists except darkness

No border exists except darkness

The teacher does not see your pencil

Where are you butterflies? Where are your Kurds?

You open all your darkness

So as not to lose the last door…

Subhi recognizes, though Dilawar’s teachers do not, the delicate balance that rests on the poet’s pencil. Subhi commands Dilawar: take care of your butterfly, tend to your balance and peace because your teachers don’t see your butterfly, they don’t see the balance you must strike to survive, even perhaps thrive. And Dilawar has indeed spent his years in poetry doing just that: keeping one eye on the darkness around him and the other eye on the peace and possibility within language. This collection spans over three decades of poetry and celebrates the poems and love as well as introduces the poet’s new work. Throughout these pages, the reader is warmly welcomed into the worlds Dilawar creates and encouraged to practice his or her own peace. May we all be guests of the perfect earthquake of poetry, which is both insignificant and of great magnitude. May we all take care of our butterflies. May we all be brave enough to open all our darkness so that we may keep our last doors.