Mueyed Tayyab’s Poetry of Identity and Alienation in the 1980s

Main Article Content

Dr. Sherzad Shafie Barzan

Abstract

This research tackles the Kurdish poetry of alienation and its long struggle for identity. The poems have been chosen carefully from a collection of poems by Mueyed Tayyab (1957). Tayyab’s poems have been selected from his first book of poetry which is called: Songs, Snow, and Fire. It is written in the Kurmanji dialect which is one of the main dialects of the Kurdish language. The selected poet has lived under the Saddam regime and has composed his major and most popular poems during that hard times of estrangement and alienation. The alienation that the poet faced under the tyrannical regime was the strict censorship imposed on freedom of speech and Kurdish Freedom Movements. There are many symptoms of alienation present in his poems.    The research is limited mostly to the poems written in the 1980s the distinguished decade of the twentieth century when the most inhuman atrocities have been practiced against the Kurdish minority.  At the beginning of his career as the Kurdish poet, Tayyab tried to publish his work under self-censor through a metaphorical and symbolic language. Later on, they could not publish even a word in Kurdish and for this reason, he left Kurdistan and migrated to Sweden in the 1983. Almost all the poems in his first collection deal with the deep feeling of alienation and the struggle for identity to regain the lost Paradise. The following poems can be mentioned: as samples: “Siaband and Khaje,” “Our Village” and “A Song for Kurdish Kids.” Following the abstract and introduction, the study examines the psychological issues of alienation and identity searching in his vernacular language, followed by a conclusion and a list of references. 

Article Details

Section
Articles