Tuesday, April 24, 2007

April 24, 1915 = two poems by Siamanto

From Carolyn Forche's "Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness"

This poem is by Siamanto, one of the poets executed on April 24, 1915 after witnessing the beginnings of what would be the first genocide of the 20th Century. My grandparents escaped these exact purges, my paternal grandfather becoming a warrior (guerrilla) and my grandmother becoming a nurse for the American missionaries in Mesopotamia. It is one of the first witness poems of the 20th century.

Siamanto(Adom Yarjanian)- 1878-1915

The Dance

Her blue eyes, drowned in tears,
the German witness to the horrors tried
to describe the ashfields where the Armenian life had died:

"This untellable thing I'm trying to say
I saw with my pitiless human eyes
from the hellish window of my safe house.
While I gnashed my teeth in terror and frustration
my eyes stayed open and pitiless.
I saw a garden city change into ash heaps.
Corpses piled to the tops of trees.
And from the waters, from the springs,
from the brooks and from the roads,
the roar of your blood.

It is the voice of that blood that still speaks
in my heart. Don't be disgusted,
but I have to tell this story
so that people understand the crimes
men do to men. Let all the hearts of the world hear.
That morning with death's shadows was a Sunday,
the first useless Sunday to rise over those bodies.

I had been in my room all night, tending,
from evening until morning, a girl I knew
stabbed by knives. I bent over her agony
wetting her death with my tears.
Suddenly I heard from a distance
a black mob of men, whipping, leading twenty girls.
Twenty young women, pushed into my vineyard
while the men sang lewd songs
'When we beat the drum, you dance!'

And their whips began to crack ferociously
against the flesh of the Armenian women
who longed for death. Twenty
of them, hand in hand, began their dance.
Tears flowed from their eyes, as if from wounds.
And I envied the dying girl
who could not see, but who cursed
with her harsh breathing, the universe,
poor beautiful Armenian girl
giving wings to her dove white soul,
while I shook my fists in vain against
the mob below. 'You must dance, faithless heathen
beauties. Dance, with open breasts, to death,
smiling at us without complaints!

Fatigue is not for you. Nor modesty.
All the way to death, dance, with lust, with lewdness.
Our eyes are thirsty for your forms and for your deaths.

Twenty handsome girls fell to the ground exhausted.
Stand up' the roar thundered behind the snakelike
whirling swords. Someone brought a bucket
then, of kerosene. Oh, human justice
I spit at your forehead. Then they
doused those twenty brides, shouting
'You must dance. And here's a fragrance
Arabia does not have.' And with a torch,
set on fire the naked flesh.

The charred corpses rolled toward death
through the dancing. From my fright
I shuttered the window as if against
a hurricane. And asked the dead girl in the room,
'How shall I dig out these eyes of mine. How?'"

(1909)
(translated by Diana Der Hovanessian & Marzbed Margossian)

.....and this evening before sunset
all of you will go back to your houses,
whether they are mud or marble,
and clamly close the treacherous
shutters of your windows.
Shut them from the wicked Capital,
shut them to the face of humanity,
and to the face of your god...
Even the lamp on your table
will be extinguished
by the whispers of your clear soul.

-by Siamanto

1 comment:

Frieda said...

Great tribute...May their soul live for ever

Frieda
www.racket-free.blogspot.com