Adnan Al-Sayegh was born in al-Kufa, Iraq in 1955. In the 1980s he was conscripted in the Iran-Iraq war and in 1993 his uncompromising criticism of oppression and injustice led to exile in Jordan and the Lebanon. In 1996 he published Uruk's Anthem - a book-length poem, one of the longest in Arabic literature - in which he articulated deep despair at the Iraqi experience. On its publication he was sentenced to death in Iraq and took refuge in Sweden. Since 2004 he has been living in exile in London.
Ten collections of his poetry in Arabic, among them Formations, Uruk's Anthem and Carrying his Exile under his Arm have been published and a further one is in press. He has said that in poetry he 'found a motherland, a refuge, a friend and a journey-companion' as well as a form of resistance.
Adnan has received several international awards, including the Hellman-Hammet International Poetry Award (New York 1996), the Rotterdam International Poetry Award (1997) and the Swedish Writers Association Award (2005).
This year he read at the StAnza poetry festival alongside his English translator, Stephen Watts. We are most grateful to him and to Stephen for permission to publish the poems on-line.
The poems which follow are all taken from Pages From The Biography Of An Exile translated by Stephen Watts and Marga Burgui-Artajo and published in Long Poem Magazine Issue 5, 2010/2011. We also include a poem from his recent pamphlet in English, The Deleted Part (Exiled Writers Ink 2009) in the PENning Courage magazine along with biographies of his translators.
You can find more information about Adnan and more of his poems at http://www.exiledwriters.co.uk/writers.shtml#Sayegh
Poems from Pages From The Biography Of An Exile
(6)
I'll kick my socks toward the sky
in solidarity with those who don't have shoes
and I'll walk barefoot
feeling the muds of the street under my feet
staring at the faces of the glutted inside their
glass offices ... O
if human intestines were glass
so we could see how much they've stolen our bread,
O Lord
if You couldn't fill this starving stomach
where worms squirm & belch
why did You create me with these wolfing molars
And if You didn't flesh my bed with a twig-tender body
then why did You give me such burning arms
And if You didn't grant me a country to be safe in
why did You godsend my wandering feet
and if You became exasperated by my complaints
then why did You give me this mouth
gushed with screams night & day
Prague 1999
(7)
Where are your hands?
I forgot them waving to the departing trains
Where is your woman?
We argued in the first shop we stepped into
Where is your country?
Tanks have devoured it
Where is your sky?
Invisible from all the fumes and billboards
Where is your freedom?
Unspoken because I tremble so much
Amman 1996
(10)
I write & my hand is on the window
wiping the tears off the cheek of the sky
I write & my heart is in the suitcase listening to trains whistling
I read and my fingers skitter across café tables & library shelves
I write & my neck's tied from the outset of history to gallows ropes
I write & my finger's always on 'delete' for the tiniest knock
at the door
& I laugh with blunt irony at myself
when I open it to nobody
but the wind
Baghdad 1991
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