A Kurdish poet draws on the figure of Satan in Paradise Lost to examine Kurdish exile, dance, and the politics of longing.
Be it so,
Since he who is now sovereign can dispose and bid
What shall be right; furthest from him is best
Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme
Above his equals…
Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, 245-249
In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan refers to God as a “matchless King… whom force hath made,” and later on as “heaven’s perpetual King.” Their relationship is embroiled in the language of colonialism, positioning the banishment from Hell as a violent birth of the nation Heaven — a place Satan and the fallen angels may never return to, despite it being their home. Satan seeks to find a way to endure what he has lost.
For me, Satan is a way to explore my own experience of statelessness as a Kurdish person. The endless abyss of Hell, which God himself never visits, mirrors for me the Kurdish diaspora, my hell which origin never visits. I linger along the fractures, as does Satan, and we both desire comprehension beyond borders.
Given my history of writing against the canon, Milton is an unlikely source of inspiration; yet I find it in the margins of his work. I recognize myself in the alleged villain of the story. I recognize my fears and anxieties, my terrors and joys, my broken but still beating future world I fight for. A future world that is not as far as it once was, as Kurdistan grows in both political power and consciousness.
The following is an excerpt from a hybrid work that draws on a blend of this dynamic between God and Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as my own experiences working as a dancer and how that opens a third dimension of exile. This combined framework helps me articulate the complex and sometimes shameful aspects of being in a diaspora where yearning for nationhood is enmeshed with our survival.
*
Where are you from?
He never comes here,
this hell on s/oil1,
oil the candy she tasted
that day,
turning the snake over in her mouth
like all of His stories, the Devil
is in the details:
xxxxxxxxnot an apple, but a snake
xxxxxxxxnot Adam’s rib, but his fist
in seven days nine circles are built,
the parking garage beneath divine
creation xxxxxxxxxxx?
like this parallel
beauty & xxxxxviolence
Syria–no, Iraq–no, Iran–no,
Türkiye–
origin intersecting, sutures
myth to land,
He gives life but takes souls
when they are done wandering,
why he never comes here?
*
thoughts on exile
When I dance, I come alive. This is an ancestry of tendons and joints and scar tissue. My great-grandmother was the story-teller in her village and she was also described as cruel. Only once did she save my father, the day he stole a pair of horses with his brother and ran into her arms as they were being chased by the farmer. He flung himself at her feet and cried out. She yelled at the farmer and took my father inside, or so the story goes. As a boy my father had many places to run and he would call them homes, but this word is a complicated one for a Kurdish boy.
I can’t dance home.
Still, I look for that one extra reason to linger past the last bus, to stay in liminal spaces where I can put a pause on who I am, and instead become this Am-less being that can touch and see and feel what is happening but not carry the prerequisites of Am. A transmutation of exile. Some would call that living in the moment but I don’t want a moment. I want a long stretch like a sunbeam through a windowsill, a thing that feels permanent because you can always picture it in your mind exactly as it is, without difficulty. Nothing like exile.
Sometimes I think what I really want is to feel no grief at all.
When I dance I want to be in the sunbeam’s warm glow, feeling sound like visits on your skin from insects or grass or pollen or wind. Something you are so attuned to that it takes your attention, but with one caveat; I don’t want to be overwhelmed by sound the way I am overwhelmed by absence. I want to feel merged. Sometimes I think what I really want is to feel no grief at all, and maybe being merged is the closest avenue to that. To approximate that, I should say.
When we do anything we are approximating other things. Language is the great approximator. What am I approximating when I make the natural world of myself a pain incubator? What did my father approximate the day he cast himself at the mercy of a woman who was cruel enough to be a threshold some farmer dared not cross? I don’t want to be abandoned, not even by a thing hurting me. Not even by the violent fantasy of a national identity. Cost is the true currency of my grief. What is the cost of a nation? Can I dance home without stepping over blood, without having my own blood checked for great-grandmothers and fathers and uncles and horses and enough soil in my veins to plant me?
The inverse of grief is worship, because the reverse of loss is faith. And it is faith alone that would motivate a bending of will to the thorn. There is faith that the thorn has something I need. Something so important or necessary to me that I would faithfully cultivate its comfort, its presence, while I cry in agony. To worship something is to agonize over it.
I agonize over every Kurdish word I do not know. My vastness is a curse that yields. What will I say at any funeral if not “I did not know enough”? Worship is a liminal space. I take back what was taken from me and I restore faith in the language of absence by approximating myself to an identity I should have: Kurdish, American, Woman, Dancer, Writer, Queer, Sex Worker, the list is a sieve. Approximation is what makes God and the Devil.
“Dance can be a conversation with the invisible.” – Mariana Hilgert
In childhood I was asked to imagine in English – sheep in the sky, backs on the ground, pieces of cake. Moving my exiled tongue to speak in these terms. The body cannot obscure in the same way language can. Language is the exonym and the body is the endonym. Which is to say, language is what you call me and my body is what I call myself.
The lineage of tendons is a living archive; women, beloveds, angels, feeling desired and desire, all the body’s negotiations.
The invisible is not so invisible in this lineage. If dance can be a conversation with the invisible, exile is a conversation with the shadow that is produced by lingering. An archive accessed in secret. Can a feeling interface with embodiment? Can you be so completely open and sewn shut at the same time? If I can dance, why can’t I dance home?
Migration is a shadow.
Can you ever leave hell?
Negotiable answers, like borders in that they are invisible and require enforcement. Like borders in that violence cannot be removed from the creation process. Shadows occur when an object is bordered. They reflect a reversal, a glimpse of the original object. They are referential, like an archive.
Heaven is referential to what came before it.
Nation or no nation, I am Kurdish now and I am Kurdish then and I am Kurdish in every sunbeam that touches me, shadowing.
*
Sovereign
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx I throw a plate
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxat you,
the relentless meter,
xxxxxxxxthe ache of my knees,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthe whisper of an ask,
forgive me–
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxlook at me when I speak to you.
banishment has its tender edges,
choke me, slam me into a wall
or a cliff
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxin Eden–
they exist, otherwise Eve simply
would have walked away,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxnot fallen,
fuck me or break the silence.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI don’t want forgiveness,
I want a banished throat,
a hurricane of cutlery,
xxxxxxxxof locusts
xxxxxxxxof judgment,
the door slam,
xxxxxxxxthe bitter crawl,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthe euphoria,
god will put you back together
in front of the people2 who broke you
but I am nothing without terror
*
the stripper doesn’t actually like you
as in
xxxxxxthe stripper is actually nothing like what you are
as in
xxxxxxthe nation isn’t actually a real place
as in
xxxxxxthe border is a violation
xxxxxxlike you are a violation on the veteran grounds of a stripper’s heel
as in
xxxxxxthe sun isn’t actually in love with the horizon
as in
xxxxxxit falls because it has to in your eyes
xxxxxxit falls because of your eyes
xxxxxxthe gaze you wind like a clock hand
xxxxxxmorning is one ocean
xxxxxxafternoon is the beginning of some history
xxxxxxby evening there is a national identity
xxxxxxin the waters
xxxxxxand the shells don’t actually hold their shape
as in
xxxxxxthe water doesn’t break against imagination
xxxxxxthe body is a real thing turned imagination
xxxxxxspotlight on the flirtation; me, laughing at your joke, hand on wrist
as in;
xxxxxxme, standing against the glass, pretending to bleed a flag,
xxxxxxthe body is a real thing turned,
xxxxxxprometheus regenerating its own fable,
xxxxxxthe afternoon story,
xxxxxxremind us again of how great this or that nation
xxxxxxremind us again that you have a wrist and i have a hand and there is a horizon at the end,
as in
xxxxxxthe nation is a fantasy we all pay for
1 say it again, say it again
2 country
