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When the Kurdish Cultural Movement Loses One of Its Children
In a time when the need for free expression and inspired thought is intensifying, we face what resembles a profound cultural loss when one of those who once bore the burden of beauty and poetry, as well as the hardship of honest criticism, departs. It is a silent and painful moment, not because someone has physically left, but because a voice that could have enriched our intellectual lives has withdrawn into a labyrinth that does not resemble it.
Sometimes we lose our poets, not by death, but by transformation, when the pen changes from a tool of creation to a means of catharsis, and when poetry, which was once a mirror of the self, becomes a stage for shouting. This is a loss that is difficult to compensate for.
It is lamentable that the Kurdish literary scene, which already suffers from a scarcity of mature voices, loses over time those who were genuine intellectual and literary additions. This is not just a tragedy for an individual, but it affects an entire movement when one of its prominent members, who once constituted one of its pillars through his critical writings and poetic analyses that captivated us, is absent, prompting us to reevaluate his cultural output.
The real sorrow lies in this unjustified regression, not in the silence of the poet or the thoughtful intellectual, but in a clamor that is unbecoming of them, as though we witness before our eyes how ink loses its nobility, and how words drift away from their course to spaces that do not belong to them.
We do not mourn a person; rather, we mourn the absence of a role that could have continued and evolved, guiding the arena and enriching the dialogue, especially in a time when the Kurdish nation is enduring numerous setbacks and requires voices to correct its direction, not to stray along with it.
Literary loss is not measured by the number of published poems or the volume of articles, but by the impact they carry and the awareness they create. Those who are absent today from their poetic and critical sanctuaries could have been among those who shape our aesthetic consciousness and stir the stagnant waters of thought.
We do not have the luxury of losing those who possess the tools of writing and thought, nor should we treat this absence as if it were fleeting. Each poet has his place, each critic has his necessity, and each voice has its impact on the formation of collective memory.
These words are not an elegy but a call—a call for the Kurdish cultural scene to pay attention to those who are missing and to inquire about the reasons for their absence, and a call to all who have found the path of writing not to abandon it before they have conveyed their complete, sincere message capable of leaving its mark.
There is still hope within the letter, and we continue to believe that those who have departed can return—not to be as they were, but to be more aware of what the word means, and more committed to what we dreamed of becoming in a particular poem, and in particular criticism.
Dr. Mahmoud Abbas
