Anthology-Preface: Alison Mandaville, Shahla Naghiyeva
Translation: Αsimina Xirogianni
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Alik Alioghlu, Aysel Alizade, Εlshan Mehdi, Rashad Naghi Mustafa, Mahammad Turan, Nurana Nur, Farid Hussein, Narmin Kamal, Rabiqe Nazimqizi, Gismat Rustamav, Gunel Shamilizi
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Poetry has been at the center of life for residents of the region of Azerbaijan for at least a thousand years. The epic 12th century poet Nizami Ganjavi hails from north central region of modern-day Azerbaijan. To this day, Ashugs, or poet-bards -both men and women- skilled as both poets and musicians, travel to perform at life cycle events: circumcisions, weddings, funerals.
A dynamic, culturally and linguistically diverse region at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, for several centuries the Persian and Russian empires -and later the Soviet Union- fought for dominance in the region and left cultural and linguistic legacies to mix with indigenous traditions in the region and its literature. During the Soviet period, a robust period of publishing poetry was supported by the government. Today, young poets work in global forms and topics – yet this deep tradition of ancient forms, sounds, and themes still thread through the poems in this collection. Azerbaijani is a Turkic language, with vowel harmony in most of the words still used. In Azerbaijani, even free verse forms cannot help but work in a play of sonics that is hard to echo in many other languages.
The past three decades have seen the fortunes of poets fall precipitously. Where during the Soviet period the writers’ union was well-funded and able to support publishing (albeit primarily of works that echoed state-approved themes), the 1990s saw the complete collapse of publishing. In the 2000s, nearly every poet in Azerbaijan had to self-fund their book publications. Even now, although through work of arts and culture NGOs there is some supported publishing, most publishers are just printing houses, and self-pay is still the most common way to get published. Nevertheless, poetry persists and remains vibrant. The Writer’s Union is still an active body, and every time I visit I meet with remarkable writers, mostly poets, for whom poetry may not earn them much, but who find this work of words essential. Opportunities in publishing are slowly improving.
Importantly, half the poets included here are women. Azerbaijan was an early leader in the education of girls and women in the Muslim world and Central Asia. Many schools for girls were established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries throughout the rural regions as well as in the capitol city of Baku. As a result, beginning in the nineteenth century, women’s literary production blossomed and was often supported by educated patrons such as the Oil Boom poet Khurshidbanu Natavan, the daughter of the last Khan of Karabagh, who held literary salons in the late 1800s for both women and men in her home.
This volume offers a small taste of the poetry being created today by a new generation of women and men in this region, most with only a child’s memories of the Soviet period, if that. Topics today are both global and personal, traversing questions of national identity, culture, faith, oppression, love, gender, and, of course, the poet’s staple – loss. Often the poem works around contextual problems of writing and publishing in what is, effectively, a highly authoritarian state by staying very concrete, even deceptively simple, while obliquely referencing far bigger questions. The mother says to the daughter in Rabiqe Nazimqizi’s poem, ostensibly and narrowly focused on their immediate need to leave their home, but ghosting far larger questions: “We have no present, we have no past. / Our road lies together, there – in the future.” And, always, the challenges of making poetry in a world that evades, and even punishes those who speak up is taken seriously, as in Farad Hussein’s poem addressing an oppressive authority, when he says, “You have obliged our barefoot truths to walk on glass”.
Alison Mandaville, Shahla Naghiyeva