Şêrko Bêkes

Şêrko Bêkes (1940-2013) transformed the Kurdish poem the way Barzani transformed the Kurdish battlefield — by refusing every chain of the past and opening a future no one had yet imagined. Born on 2 May 1940 in the Goizha quarter of Sulaymaniyah, the son of the celebrated poet Fayeq Bêkes, he lost his father in childhood and grew up in hard poverty. But the pen passed to the son: at seventeen Şêrko published his first poem in the newspaper Zhîn, and before he was thirty he was hailed as the leading poet of his generation.

Şêrko Bêkes was a poet at war. In 1965 he joined the Kurdish liberation movement and became the voice of the resistance at the Voice of Kurdistan radio, broadcasting words of defiance to a nation under bombardment. When the Iraqi regime declared him an enemy of the state, he took to the mountains and lived and fought alongside the peshmerga. The poems of his resistance years are not mere literature; they are a chronicle of bombs, exile and massacre, and of the indomitable refusal of a people to beg for its own rights.

As an artist he was a revolutionary in form as in content. Together with his comrades he founded the Rûwange (Vision) movement, which broke the chains of classical meter and rhyme, and in 1975 he launched the poster poems — short, razor-sharp verses that carried the war and the dream onto the street walls of Kurdistan. His collections, from Tirîfey Helbes (Moonlight Poems) and Koleka Geriyan to The Secret Diary of a Rose, were carried by the resistance through the mountains and by the diaspora to the corners of the earth, and his poetry was translated into Arabic, Swedish, French, Italian, English, Dutch and Danish.

Forced into exile in 1986, Şêrko took refuge in Sweden, where the Stockholm PEN Club awarded him the distinguished Kurt Tucholsky Prize and the City of Florence award him its Freedom Prize; he was later made an honorary citizen of Milan. After the liberation of southern Kurdistan he returned home in 1992 and served as Minister of Culture of the Kurdistan Region, placing the power of the state in the service of the language he had served with his life. He died of cancer in Stockholm on 4 August 2013, and the whole of Kurdistan mourned the passing of its master poet.

Kurdish modernity in literature bears one great name above all others: Şêrko Bêkes. He proved to the world — and to the Kurds themselves — that a stateless people could still produce one of the boldest poetries on earth. His verse is the pride of the nation and its gift to the world.