‘My Father Chased the Free Bird’

This poem appears in our latest issue, SYRIA: Fall of Eternity, ed. Ghada Alatrash and Fadi Azzam.

My Father Chased the Free Bird So Long, Feathers Began to Grow on Him

By Marwan Ali

Translated by Ghada Alatrash

Spring 2022

The Hawk

It is the free bird.

I know it by the beat of its wings—by their straight stretch, how they unfurl to stir the saliva of the Kurdish hunters and their traps. They gaze at it with longing as it glides low over rooftops, trees, old hopes, and lofty dreams.

It is the free bird—mine, waiting for me, and guarding the sun on its journey toward the mountains of Kurdistan.

Karsour 

At dawn, my father rose, tiptoed, opened the door, and lit his cigarette. He watched the sun quietly climb the sky above Karsour. Then, he gathered his traps, a flask of water, a single pigeon, and left.

Barefoot, I ran after him and cried, “Father!”

He turned to me and paused, then walked on as I caught up.

I walked behind him toward the hills of Tamoya, past fields of red watermelon. I watched the wild rabbits leap, then vanish into the air.

We walked, and I kept looking back.

The sky above Karsour was blue and clear. There were many birds, but my mind was fixed on my father’s bird.

He lay down on the grass and lit his cigarette. I watched the smoke rise slowly into the sky.

To this day, I still don’t know whether we were headed to Tamoya or Qutki (which was just behind it), and if it was the little Qutki or the big one.

These villages are a lot like us: they remain, unable to leave, yet still feel lonely. They stayed just as they were: small—and perhaps like us, they also fear the vast, faraway cities.

My father stopped and asked, “Do you want a sip of water?”

“No,” I said, and ran after a low-flying bird. My father laughed when I stopped and said, “A true hunter never gives up. Look at me. Even at your age, and still today, I wait for my free white bird. I will never lose hope.”

We didn’t go to Tamoya as I had thought. I looked back to see Karsour getting smaller and smaller. Villages must have once been small, then grew—and one day, they’ll return to being small again.

We walked among the hills and slopes for a long time, but we did not find the free bird. By evening, we returned. My mother was preparing dinner, talking to my little sister Eyshana, named after the Eyshana Ali in the song by Mohammed Aref al-Jazrawi, a favorite of my grandmother Kojiri’s.

My father lit his cigarette and looked up toward the sky—the home of the free bird.

He put out the cigarette and drifted into a deep sleep.

My mother covered him with a Turkish blanket with an image of a ram running toward the distant mountains woven across it.

Tears of the Hawk

One morning, my father left with his traps. He walked quietly. A few steps in, he stopped, lit his cigarette, drew in a deep breath, and walked on toward the hills of Qouji.

He did not return that evening as he always did. Nor did he return a month later.

My mother said, “Once, as I sat beneath the mulberry tree in front of the big wooden door of our mud house, I saw a beautiful bird fly low, hover near, then soar high. When it saw you playing with your sister, it came very close to the house and stared into your eyes for a long time. I saw a tear fall from its eye and land beside you, before it soared again into the sky.”

Some say they saw it over Qouji, others between Bira Bazan and Qoshani, flying low, then rising, disappearing into the clouds.

And every time I saw a bird, I called out, “Father!”

Partridge

At the bird market in Manama, I found a partridge, alone in its cage near an Indian vendor.

Before I could turn to Farid Ramadan to tell him about the relationship between this bird and the Kurds, the bird looked at me as if it knew who I was.

I bought it, set it free, and watched it rise, soaring high towards the mountains of Kurdistan.

Minefield

A minefield separated us from relatives who remained on the other side after the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

One cousin knew where the mines lay (back in the seventies). He’d amuse himself by defusing and removing them, clearing a path for smugglers and those deprived of passports to see their families and visit their relatives in Nusaybin and Mardin.

One day, a mine exploded in his hands. His body was scattered—half remained on the Turkish side, the other on the Syrian.

We dug him a grave on our side and buried him, and they dug him a grave there and buried him. On Eid, we’d visit his grave and wave to our family who visited his other grave on the other side.

Only the passing Turkish trains cut through our wailing, their passengers waving back—strangers like us, in their own land.

The First Poem

I wrote my first poem on the wall of our mud home in Karsour. I read it aloud to my mother, to my sister Eyshana, to the wheat field, and the sparrows in the courtyard.

Flocks of wild geese soared above Karsour on their way to the nearby hills in Bira Bazan and Kistak.

I watched them with burning sorrow, like a mother who sees her son in an old Russian truck hauling soldiers off to war.

I love the birds in Karsour’s skies, the flowers blooming among the wheat-covered hills, and those who return to it from distant cities—exhausted, yet sleeping in peace as they lay their heads upon its stones.

I love the shepherds in the nearby hills, and the sun in the sky of Karsour.

I love Fares, Bavî Firas, and lovers weeping behind distant windows in Garbawi, Saharmka, and Nif.

I love the cars that always break down midway between Karsour and Qamishli.

I love the kids who smoke like adults in Qadur Bek, blowing smoke in each other’s faces, then coughing with delight, raising their knives skyward, careful not to scratch the air.

I learned poetry from life—from walking behind my father in the hills of Qouji, from chasing flocks of starlings as they dipped low and then soared over wheat fields.

From the mud homes, from big wooden windows in Karsour, from passengers waiting for Husseino and his 1957 Chevrolet in Qamishli near Izzato’s corner store, from the dust kicked up by herds in the wilderness of Bira Bazan, I wrote my first poem on the mud walls of Karsour beneath September’s sun and left it there, so no one could say: “You did not leave anything behind for your people before you went far away.”

Clouds

The clouds leave their children among our fields in Karsour and head north, because they know well that we love guests and keep our daggers beneath their pillows.

Horses

They’d leave their horses at the edge of town, near trees and wheat fields in April, then walk barefoot through the city. On their backs, they carried sacks of flour, sugar, tobacco, and Eid clothes for their children who hated school and loved wolves.

They’d contemplate the tall cement homes, the clean balconies, the clotheslines. They’d run as they crossed the streets, then proudly exhale their cigarette smoke skyward near al-Fursan restaurant.

Just before sunset they would return, their horses neighing as if calling them.

Marwan Ali is a Syrian writer, poet, and journalist, born in 1968 to a Kurdish family in the village of Karsour near the city of Qamishli. He studied economics at the University of Aleppo and graduated in 1992. During his university years, his poems, critical essays, literary reviews, book features, and translations were published in some of the most prominent Arabic newspapers and literary journals. In the mid-1990s, he left Syria for the Netherlands due to persecution by the Syrian regime and security services, as a result of his activism in human rights and his outspoken defense of minority rights and opposition to authoritarianism. Since 2004, he has been living in Germany, and he is currently based in the city of Essen. Ali has taken part in numerous Arabic and international poetry festivals. His poems have been translated into several languages. Among his notable works are Yesterday’s Water (2009), Stranger… Nothing About You in Wikileaks (2013), The Road to Home (2018), How to Become a Kurd in Five Days (2019), and If War Were a Play (2019).

Dr. Ghada Alatrash is a Syrian-Canadian Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, and is also a researcher and translator. Before this, she served as an Assistant Professor at the School of Critical and Creative Studies at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Canada. She holds her PhD in Educational Research (Languages and Diversity) from the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. Dr. Alatrash’s pedagogy and research are grounded in anti-orientalist, anti-colonial, anti-racism, and feminist frameworks that interrogate and challenge Western hegemonic narratives through an intersectional, transnational, post-colonial lens. Her latest translation of the Syrian novel Huddud’s House by Fadi Azzam was selected by Kirkus Reviews as Best Fiction in Translation of 2024.