This insightful analysis explores O’tkir Hoshimov’s powerful novel Lifes Passed in a Dream, highlighting how the tragic fates of its characters reflect the devastating physical and psychological scars of the Afghan war. Through their shattered lives, the piece exposes the deeper horrors of Soviet colonialism and totalitarian rule, where an entire nation’s existence was reduced to a state-controlled illusion.

By Tuliyeva Sarvinoz | Uzbekistan

O’tkir Hoshimov is one of the most prominent writers of Uzbekistan to have made a monumental contribution to twentieth-century Uzbek literature. His renowned works, such as Between Two Doors, The Affairs of the World, and Spring Does Not Return, have earned a permanent place in the hearts of readers. Among his exceptional literary contributions is the novel Lifes Passed in a Dream (Tushda Kechgan Umrlar), written between 1991 and 1992 and first published in the magazine Sharq Yulduzi.

The novel possesses a uniquely structured narrative, masterfully weaving together excerpts from the protagonist Rustam’s diary with cold, official information from investigation documents. The story opens and closes with the poignant imagery of autumn:

“Autumn is like a patient lying on his deathbed. The sick man groans underfoot… He looks at the world sadly, realizing that all his efforts have been in vain. A white fog covers the sky like a shroud. The inexplicable cry of crows echoes from the white darkness.”

This vivid personification of autumn—comparing it to a dying patient whose groans echo underfoot while a shroud-like fog rolls in—brilliantly foreshadows the tragedy, despair, and dark realities that unfold within the book.

At the center of the narrative is Rustam, a young man who drops out of school to join the army, only to be deployed to the raging war in Afghanistan. Tragically, he fights not for his homeland or his people, but to serve the aggressive political interests of the Soviet regime. He witnesses the needless, agonizing deaths of young compatriots like Temur and Hayriddin, while also beholding the immense suffering inflicted upon the Afghan people. Rustam returns home physically broken and deeply traumatized by the horrors of war.

The lives of the central characters—Rustam, his father Shomatov, Commissioner Soat Ganiyev, and Aunt Kurbanoy—are uniformly chaotic and unfulfilled, drifting by listlessly like a dream.

Rustam is entirely unable to escape the ghosts of his past. Although he marries Shahnoza, the girl he loves, and despite their deep mutual affection, true happiness eludes them due to the psychological scars left by the war. Witnessing consecutive societal injustices upon his return, compounded by a suffocating guilt over his inability to make his wife happy, ultimately drives Rustam to a tragic end.

Conversely, Commissioner Soat Ganiyev evokes pure revulsion. Following in his father’s footsteps to become a Soviet tool of oppression, Ganiyev is a man who spent his youth unjustly persecuting innocent people (such as neighbors Husan and To’lagan) and violating the honor of women. Even in old age, he feels no remorse, refuses to alter his worldview, and remains unrepentant. The Commissioner embodies the absolute tyranny of the 70-year Soviet regime; he is not merely a dangerous man, but a mankurt—a person completely stripped of his humanity, memory, and conscience.

Meanwhile, Aunt Kurbanoy represents the tragic, unrecognized casualty of labor exploitation. Even as her health fails and doctors forbid her from working, she remains perpetually trapped in grueling daily chores. Her existence passes away joylessly and without meaning, another life dissolving into the background.

Why did Hoshimov title this work Lifes Passed in a Dream? The poignant answer lies in a letter written by Shomatov to his son, Rustam:

“When I think about it, my past life was not a life, but a dream. It’s as if someone, without my knowledge, gave me a sleeping pill—and I just kept dreaming, sometimes sweet, sometimes dangerous dreams. Wherever that ‘someone’ dragged me, I followed; whatever they ordered, I obeyed… And I was afraid to wake up… Now, when I finally wake up and look around, I see that there are so many others just like me…”

In this devastating revelation, Shomatov’s eyes are finally opened to the profound injustices surrounding them. He realizes, too late, that their entire destinies were built upon a massive lie. This is precisely why the author characterizes their existence as a dream: it was a life governed by false ideologies, senseless warfare, ruthless political repression, and the persecution of the innocent.

Ultimately, this novel is not something that can be read lightly. The compelling conclusion to be drawn is that while the Afghan war inflicted immense trauma on individuals, the overarching policy of Soviet totalitarianism and repression was far worse. And what was the root cause of this collective tragedy? Colonialism. When a nation is stripped of its independence, invaders manipulate its people like pawns, wasting generations to satisfy their own imperial ambitions.

Read: Contemporary World Literature: Short Story from Uzbekistan

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Tuliyeva Sarvinoz | Uzbekistan

The post When Life is Merely a Dream first appeared on Sindh Courier.

• Rubina Abro emerges not just as a vital voice for the people of Sindh, but as a poet of deep empathy and global importance.

Naveed Sandeelo

​The deepest heart of literature lies in a simple truth: the more closely writers stay connected to their own native soil, the more their words can speak to the entire world. In Collage of Verses—a vibrant collection of sixty poems by the distinguished Sindhi poet Rubina Abro, translated into English by Prof. Muhammad Hashim Solangi—this truth comes alive. This collection is a beautiful, moving mosaic. It shifts gracefully between local folklore, honest feminist critique, a deep love for nature, and the modern loneliness of our digital age. What makes Collage of Verses so essential is not just how it preserves culture, but how it captures the universal anxieties of the human spirit while remaining proudly rooted in Sindh.

​Rubina Abro stands as a prominent contemporary alongside some of Sindh’s most reputed female writers and poets, including Amar Sindhu, Rukhsana Preet, Haseena Sand, Arfana Mallah, Gul Badan Javed, Nasreen Altaf, Sabhyan Sangi, and Rafya Bukhari. Together, this powerful generation of literary voices has inspired a massive section of society, challenging old norms and sparking deep cultural conversations. Within this brilliant circle, Abro’s unique voice rings out clearly as the voice of the downtrodden society and poor folks. She writes with immense empathy for those who are often left unseen and unheard, turning their everyday struggles into profound poetry.

​At the very core of Abro’s work is a deep love for the landscapes and history of Sindh. She frequently guides us through sacred places: the deserts of Thar, the peaks of Karoonjhar, the spiritual atmosphere of Sehwan, and the ancient ruins of Moen Jo Daro. She populates these spaces with historic and legendary figures like the freedom fighter Rooplo Kolhi, Raja Dahar, and the mystic saints Sachal Sarmast and Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. Abro does not treat these historical figures and places like dusty museum exhibits. Instead, she uses them as living symbols of resistance for the marginalized. Her approach feels very much like that of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Just as Darwish used the olive tree and the lost orchards of Galilee to talk about exile and identity for everyone, Abro turns the arid sands of Thar and the ruins of Moen Jo Daro into powerful symbols of collective memory and political endurance.

​Abro’s feminist voice is another cornerstone of this collection. In raw, deeply felt poems like “The Darawar Daughter of the Motherland,” “The Red Colour,” “Ancient Woman,” and “Saving Face,” she directly challenges the patriarchal structures that cause violence against women and try to erase their stories. Her portrayal of women’s experiences and historical trauma never feels like simple preaching. Instead, it connects her to a grand lineage of global poetry. You can hear echoes of Sylvia Plath’s sharp domestic discomfort and Audre Lorde’s powerful, revolutionary rage. By linking the “Ancient Woman” of history to the gender-based violence of today, Abro does something incredibly brave: she places the marginalized realities of womanhood right at the center of her nation’s history.

​On a philosophical level, Collage of Verses is a book of honest, open-ended questioning. Poems like “Neither You Nor I,” “Isolation,” “The Ego,” and “Hamlet” do not try to comfort us with easy answers. Instead, they explore what it means to feel isolated, fragmented, and weighed down by deep thoughts. Here, Abro bridges the gap between Eastern mysticism and Western philosophy. Her quiet questioning reads like the introspective work of Rainer Maria Rilke, where the poet stands open and exposed to the vast emptiness of life. Yet, this existential sadness is beautifully softened by her relationship with the natural world. Birds, rivers, clouds, and deserts are not just static backdrops in her writing; they are active characters. This spiritual intimacy with nature feels a lot like the poetry of William Wordsworth or Mary Oliver. As the Romantic poet William Words Worth once suggested, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” and nature becomes the very language Abro uses to let those deep, spontaneous feelings flow to express the soul’s hidden longings and grief.

​A genuinely refreshing side of Abro’s poetry is that she refuses to pretend the modern world doesn’t exist. She doesn’t just hide in an idealized, peaceful past. She looks right at the fractured reality of the 21st century—a world shaped by Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and emails. In poems like “Telepathy,” she asks an important question: are these technologies that promise to connect us actually making us lonelier? This specific tension—the clash between our ancient spiritual needs and our modern, tech-driven isolation—reminds us of the late Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who often worried that modern advancements could numb our capacity to feel genuinely present with one another.

​Translating a poet whose work is so filled with specific cultural meaning is a daunting task. There is an old saying that poetry is what gets “lost in translation,” but Prof. Muhammad Hashim Solangi has done something truly wonderful. He successfully captures the rhythmic energy and visual weight of the original Sindhi text. Naturally, a few highly local phrases and cultural nuances might make readers unfamiliar with South Asian literature pause for a moment. But this richness is not a flaw. It forces the English language to stretch and adapt to a completely different way of thinking. It achieves what the philosopher Walter Benjamin called an ideal translation: one that lets the beautiful voice of the original language shine clearly through the new one.

​Ultimately, Collage of Verses is a triumphant bridge between the regional and the universal. Rubina Abro emerges not just as a vital voice for the people of Sindh, but as a poet of deep empathy and global importance. Her work proves that if you dig deeply enough into your own native soil, you will eventually find the shared water of human experience that connects us all. This collection is essential reading for anyone invested in comparative literature, contemporary feminist poetics, and the enduring power of post-colonial verse.

Read: Tracing the Philosophical Roots

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Naveed Sandeelo is a poet, writer and critic, and Lecturer at Department of Philosophy University of Sindh Jamshoro. He is author of five books: three books are on the subject of philosophy. Doing PhD at the department of Philosophy University of Karachi.

The post Topography of Memory and Resistance first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Nguyen Quynh Huong Eira

Sherzod Artikov’s short story collection Luân Vũ Mưa, translated by Khánh Phương, plunges the reader into a deeply haunting setting of human suffering, where the structure of the book speaks just as loudly as its devastating content. Deliberately presenting as a collection of isolated narratives, the book brilliantly mirrors the alienated, disconnected lives of the protagonists, and Artikov’s work, including stories such as Bản giao hưởng mùa thu (Autumn Symphony), Chiếc mfiy tính xfich tay màu đen (The Black Laptop), and Vũ công Tango (Tango Dancer), are jigsaw pieces that show humans’ fragility.

Being a mixture of Franz Kafka’s existential alienation and Primo Levi’s sobering humanism, Artikov’s oeuvres carefully look at the causes of human hopelessness. He moves seamlessly from intimate suffocations of domestic abuse to the vast, generational scars of war and modern diaspora. Through the lenses of trauma theory, feminist critique, and Marxist socio-economics, Artikov paints a devastating portrait of survival in which people must keep on living in a world driven by apathy and violence.

To understand Artikov’s landscape of despair, one must first consider how he weaponises the setting to externalize psychological trauma. This theme becomes particularly apparent when examined through the lens of trauma theory, especially in Cathy Caruth’s statement¹ that trauma is an overwhelming experience that repeatedly shatters the victim’s sense of time and reality. The technique is masterfully applied in Bản giao hưởng mùa thu (Autumn Symphony), when Paris is divested of its romanticism and becomes an ironic cage. Reflecting the romantic disillusionment in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Artikov’s narrator coldly dismisses the myth of Parisian love as merely a baseless rumour (“một tin đồn không có căn cứ”). The city’s physical atmosphere, with its ever-clouded sky and continuous rain, reflects the “autumn” of the protagonist Maftuna’s traumatised soul. Despite standing in an open, beautiful city, Maftuna finds it suffocating here (“ngột ngfit ở đây”) because there isn’t enough air (“không có đủ không khí”), which demonstrates the nature of her psychological imprisonment and how she feels trapped in her own mind. Her suffocation is, in fact, due to the intangible, crushing weight of her abusive marriage, suggesting that trauma cannot be cured by a change of geographic scenery.

This theme, the feeling of being stuck, can also be found in Chiếc mfiy tính xfich tay màu đen (The Black Laptop), where a physically paralysed protagonist is trapped in his bed. Looking out the window at the gloomy view, he kills time by counting the raindrops that fell on the indo that day (“những hfit mưa rơi đậu vào cửa sổ ngày hôm đó”). The awful slowness of counting raindrops highlights how time is distorted for a person who is not physically capable. Outside, autumn is no longer just a season; it is an illustration of his rotting body and a tribute to a life violently stopped by an unforeseeable event (“bfinh ung thư chết tifit ấy!/that damn cancer!). If the hospital and the home lose their traditional meanings of healing and comfort, they are reduced to sterile geographical coordinates for mortality.

1. “…trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully assimilated or experienced at the time, but only belatedly, in their repeated possession of the one who experiences them.” – Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history. Johns Hopkins University Press.

However, the core tragedy of Artikov’s characters often results from forced powerlessness. A feminist critique of Bản giao hưởng mùa thu exposes a scathing indictment of patriarchal commodification. Maftuna’s suffering begins with her father’s insistence that she marry at sixteen, when he did not pity her youth (“không xót xa đến tuổi trẻ”). Being forced to stay at home, in this sense, signifies an intellectual death when the protagonist speaks of her unfulfilled dreams of studying law and learning languages. Furthermore, the tragedy is amplified by internalised misogyny, as her mother rationalises the marital transaction by saying that everyone does it (“mọi người đều làm như thế”). Artikov brilliantly contrasts Maftuna’s grim reality with her childhood dreams of marrying a noble literary figure like Mr Darcy (Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice). Her story also reflects a society complicit in the patriarchal takeover of women’s basic right to self-determination, turning the female body into male property.

This psychological erasure inevitably escalates into visceral physical violence. After years of numbness, Maftuna finds a replacement for her lost dreams through pregnancy, noting that the thought of motherhood spreads happiness (“lan tỏa niềm hfinh phúc”) throughout her body. The introduction of this hope makes the subsequent violence more horrific when her drunken husband beats her so severely that it results in a miscarriage. The bitter, grotesque irony of her life is expressed in her hysterical realisation that the man who killed the child in his ife’s  omb (“giết chết đứa con trong bụng vợ”) is the same man who brought his  ife to Paris to have fun (“lfii đưa vợ đến Paris để vui vẻ”). Through this juxtaposition, Artikov exposes the absurdity of an abuser attempting to cover his doings with the superficial veneer of a luxury vacation.

Following such devastating physical and emotional destruction, Artikov shifts his thematic focus to the role of art, literature, music, and dance as both a life-saving tool and a victim of modern capitalism. Viewed through a Marxist framework, Artikov’s stories investigate the “alienation of labour” in the realm of art. In Vũ công Tango (Tango Dancer), socioeconomic desperation reduces a highly trained artist’s passion for the consumption of the capitalist class. The dancer, in a restaurant full of drunk and distracted patrons, feels dizzy from the stifling atmosphere (“không khí ngột ngfit”). Having wanted to devote her life to tango, a discipline traditionally associated with deep passion and dignity, she now has to dance at restaurants, bars, and events for the rich to make a living and support her family. Similarly, in Chfiy theo giấc mơ (Chasing your dream), the actor’s devotion to his craft borders on self-destruction. He becomes obsessed with trying to perfect a monologue from King Lear, and he collapses physically, surrounded by scattered scripts alongside a bottle of ine and a syringe (“chai rượu và một ống tiêm”). Through these details, Artikov’s work demonstrates that while art can provide momentary sanctuary, consuming it within a harsh, commodified world can utterly destroy the artist’s body and soul.

As the collection continues, Artikov widens his lens to examine macro-level historical traumas, bringing a deep moral ambiguity that elevates the text. In a father’s recounting of a

Nazi concentration camp, Artikov strips human existence down to mud, starvation, and the constant threat of the gas chambers. However, rather than presenting a one-dimensional binary of good and evil, Artikov complicates the narrative. When the father is rewarded with a plate of white bread for cleaning a German officer’s car, he resists the biological agony of starvation, allowing his conscience to prevent a selfish act (“hành động ích kỷ”). He ends up sharing the bread with his fellow prisoners.

The German officer sees the scene and is now baffled, asking why the father would give away his only piece of bread. The fascist mentality, based on a strict hierarchy of power and survival of the fittest, cannot comprehend self-sacrifice. Artikov forces readers to face a stunning moment of ambiguity when the German officer mutters, “Got vergib uns,  ir sind alle Geschöpfe” (God forgive us,  e are all creatures). By giving the Nazi officer a moment of conscience and the realization of his dehumanisation, Artikov denies the readers’ simple judgements. Like Primo Levi’s reflections on the “grey zone” of the camps (The Dro ned and The Saved), Artikov has proved that human solidarity is indestructible. The sharing of the bread not only reclaims the prisoners’ humanity, but it also reveals the spiritual emptiness of the oppressors.

Moving from the horrors of the past to the insidious tragedies of the present, Artikov turns his attention to the modern diaspora and domestic apathy. In stories about migration, where the central theme is the concept of the “empty home,” the author critiques how globalisation hollows out families: Zarina’s father leaves for work in Moscow, leaving a void; his letters are obvious symbols of burden, requesting more cigarettes instead of offering connection; the old teacher Rasul Azizovich, who looks at the crowds rushing home for New Year’s Eve, laments a son who went abroad for a degree and is no far, very far a ay! (“giờ nó đang ở xa, rất xa rồi!”).

Finally, Artikov returns to the theme of alienation in the intimate space of the modern marital home, depicting modern domestic apathy as a kind of emotional starvation. In Căn hộ trên tầng bốn (The Apartment on The Fourth Floor), a wife, Nargiza, begs her husband to either scold her or divorce her instead of torturing her ith silence (“bằng cách im lặng”). In this story, silence is not just the absence of talking but a weapon to declare dominance and purposely cause harm. In addition, when a husband in business repeats toxic behaviours, shouting at his wife that he is disturbed by her affection for him over “trivial things” (những điều tầm thường) and scolding her for wanting to spend time with him, this behaviour reflects a modern man hurting his home by caring more about earning than about his loved ones.

In conclusion, Sherzod Artikov’s Luân Vũ Mưa is a masterful, heart-wrenching harmony of human endurance. The book’s structure reflects the broken lives of its protagonists. Whether it is the suffocating reality of a battered teenage bride or the agonising wait of a paralysed man, the alienation of a proud dancer or the quiet defiance of a Holocaust survivor, Artikov refuses to offer any neat or idealised resolutions. Instead, he makes the audience witness the deep scars of a lost sense of agency across generations. Yet, within this dread, there is a tribute to the indestructible nature of the human spirit. In the end, the collection reminds us of a universal truth: the world can be ruthless, tearing apart our bodies, our homes, and our art through war, apathy, or abuse. Still, the conscious act of reaching out to another human being, whether through a shared piece of bread or the silent understanding of shared grief, may be our ultimate and only salvation.

Read: World Poets meet at Artists’ Hill

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Nguyen Quynh Huong (Eira Nguyen) is a Vietnamese language lover and multidisciplinary art practitioner. Falling in love with poetry through her study of American and British Literature, she draws inspiration from Emily Dickinson and William Shakespeare. Her work often takes the form of storytelling, blending prose, poetry, bilingual wordplay, and performing arts. Beginning her writing journey in 2017, Quynh Huong found her way to poetry in 2022 before expanding into spoken poetry and experimental performance in late 2025. Writing in both Vietnamese and English, with most of her work composed in English, she also engages in bilingual poetry translation, primarily sharing her work through online platforms.

The post When Worlds Break, Radical Empathy Begins first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By: Raphic Burdo

Shaikh Ayaz is one of most celebrated poets of Pakistan. More importantly, Shaikh Ayaz is one of the most significant modern Sindhi poets, widely regarded as a bridge between classical Sindhi poetic sensibility (Sufi, folk, symbolic) and modern existential expression. His work often carries the emotional vocabulary of love poetry while simultaneously opening into political awareness, metaphysical questioning, and psychological depth. He writes in a tradition shaped by Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, yet his idiom is modern—urban at moments, fractured at others, intensely personal throughout.

Originally Shaikh Ayaz wrote in Sindhi. He has been translated in Urdu, Punjabi, Siraiki and English. Ayaz has been the poet of the rebels, lovers, revolutionaries and iconoclasts. His poetry immensely evolved during his active writing period between 1960s to late 1990s.  His resistance poetry has been as much popular among the youth as his romantic poetry. In later years of his life Shaikh Ayaz grew more otherworldly.

The poem by Shaikh Ayaz which follows, operates on several simultaneous planes. It has romantic, mystical, existential, and psychological undertones at the one same time without resolving into any single one. Its strength lies in this deliberate instability. The meaning is not delivered, it is rather experienced as shifting perception.

I would to invite the esteemed reader to sing the following ghazal of Ayaz.

اي دل نه کاءُ ڌوڪو، اچ پيءُ هي پروڪو

ساغر وچان ڏسي ٿو، هيءَ ڪائنات ڪو ڪو

گهر گهر، گهٽيءَ گهٽيءَ ۾، تون گهنڊ ٿو وڄائين

اي،ميفروش! تنهنجو هر هنڌ آهي هوڪو

اڄ رات شبنمي آ، ڇو جام ۾ ڪمي آ

هن وقت ڪا به ناهي، مون تي ميار لوڪو

هي ناز جون نهارون، تو اڳ ۾ به آزمايون

شايد جٽاءُ ڪن اڄ، اي عشق کاءُ ڌوڪو

هي تندُ تيز طوفان، مان پار ڪيئن پهچان

سوچو ته ناخدائو، آهي به آسرو ڪو

تيسين اياز هن کي، پورو پسي نه سگهندين

جيسين کلي نه جاني! ڪو جيءَ ۾ جهروڪو

Sāghar vichāñ dise tho, hī kāināt ko ko.

Ghar ghar, ghati ghati meñ, tūñ ghaṇḍ tho wajjain,

Ae mai farosh! tuhnjo har handh āhe hoko.

Aj rāt shabnamī ā, chho jām meñ kamī ā,

Hin waqt kā ba nāhe, muhn te mayār loko.

Hī nāz joon nihāroñ, to agh meñ ba āzmāyoñ

Shāyad jaṭāu kan aj, ai ishq khāu dhokho.

Hī tund tez tūfān, māñ pār keyañ pahchāñ

Socho ta nākhudāo, āhe ba āsro ko.

Tīsīñ Ayāz hin khe, pūro pasī na saghndīñ

Jīsīñ khulī na jānī! ko jī mieñ jharoko.]

Let me render it into English for the benefit of connoisseurs of poetry so that they are able to take deep dive into the poetic thought as well while enjoying the musicality and cadence of Shaikh Ayaz’s genius.

O heart! be not deceived,

come, drink the old wine;

Only few get the glimmers of the universe,

From the goblet.

House to house, from lane to lane,

you keep striking the bell;

O wine-bearer, your proclamation

echoes everywhere.

Tonight the air is dewy,

Let the cup be full to the brim;

At such an hour, O people!

I am accountable no one.

These glances steeped in coquetry,

you have already tested;

May sustain longer, O love!

suffer again a deception.

This fierce raging storm,

how shall I reach across?

Wonder, O Sailors!

is there any way out?

Ayaz, you shall never behold

the whole of  mystery

until, my dear, somewhere within the soul,

a hidden receptive window opens.

Now that you have read/sung or hymned Sindhi version and recited the English transliteration of Shaikh Ayaz’s given poem, let me make an attempt at the systematic critical appreciation of the poem.

Form and Architecture:  The poem is built as a lyric sequence of autonomous stanzas, rather than a linear narrative. Each stanza functions like a self-contained meditation. Stanza 1 expresses epistemic doubt and intoxication of perception. In Stanza 2 omnipresence of desire and call of the tavern is reflected. The Stanza 3 depicts emotional restraint and speaks of social judgment. Stanza 4 progresses the proceeds into skepticism in love and trials. The Stanza 5 is takes us logically into the domain of existential obstruction by using imager of storm. Finally, the Stanza 6 leads us to ultimate internal and spiritual revelation, much like self-awareness or self-discovery.

This structure is not accidental. It reflects a non-teleological experience of consciousness: meaning does not “develop” in a straight line; it accumulates in waves. The form itself enacts the poem’s philosophy: reality is not sequential, it is episodic.

Symbolism: The poem uses a classical Indo-Persian symbolic system but recharges it with modern ambiguity. Wine, Tavern, Wine-seller are traditional Sufi symbols of divine intoxication. Here these become psychologically layered. Intoxication stands for altered consciousness? The tavern represents omnipresence of places of self-discovery, not fixed spaces specified by other people. Here the wine-seller shows the omnipresent call of experience itself. Unlike purely devotional poetry, here the symbolism is unstable, meaning thereby, that it can be spiritual, romantic, or existential at once.

Dewy night (shabnami raat) is a key atmospheric symbol in the poem. It represents softness of perception, emotional vulnerability, sensory quietness before revelation or collapse. It is not at all decorative nature imagery. IT is a state of being.

The symbols of Storm, Boat, Crossing to other side introduce rupture. They present life as an uncertain navigation, knowledge as incomplete guidance, and the self as exposed traveler.  The boatman or sailor (Nākhudā)) motif subtly evokes classical metaphors of guidance, yet here even guidance appears uncertain.

In the poem, Inner window (jharoko) is the metaphysical pivot, showing that truth is internal aperture. The perception requires opening, not acquisition; knowledge is transformation of capacity. It is the poem’s final epistemological statement.

Diction: Shaikh Ayaz’s diction is surprisingly simple. He uses everyday verbs (see, drink, cross, open) and common nouns (night, cup, storm, heart). However, you will notice these words carry compressed symbolic density. This creates a dual effect. First, immediate emotional accessibility, and secondly, deep interpretive ambiguity. The language is deliberately non-ornamental yet highly resonant which a hallmark of modern classical poets is.

Sonic Texture: I have made effort so that even in translation, you can identify the musical architecture of the original poem of Ayaz. Repetition of address (“O heart,”. “O Love”, “O wine-seller,” “O Sailor”), internal echoing of sound clusters, and rhythmic alternation between soft and hard phonetics. The original Sindhi poem carries a sung quality, close to oral lyrical tradition. The poem is meant not only to be read but to be internally heard. Its music is not strict meter; it is emotional cadence, the expansion and contraction of thought.

Emotional Depth: In this poem of Shaikh Ayaz dominant emotional field is oscillatory instability: trust vs doubt, surrender vs resistance, desire vs. fear, and revelation vs. obscurity. This is not confusion. It is a structured psychological condition of modern subjectivity. In the poem, the speaker is not unified; he is experiencing the fragmentation of certainty itself. Thus the poem becomes a map of consciousness under pressure.

Philosophical Message:  Poetry, like art and literature, many say, must be enjoyed and appreciates on “as is basis”. This school of thought has long been the proponent of art for art. But there is no shortage of literary critics who strongly champion “art for life”. I would side with latter now and seek to take you to the central philosophical proposition of this poem of legendry Shaikh Ayaz of Sindh.

We gather from the poem that reality is partially visible. It is never fully graspable. The key implications are that perception is conditional on our inner state, truth is not an external discovery but an internal opening. Moreover, that love and knowledge are both experiments in uncertainty. This poem of Ayaz rejects closure. Even its final line does not resolve, rather it opens.

Romanticism Reconfigured: This is not romantic poetry in the conventional sense. Love here is unstable, dangerous, illuminating, and, above all, inseparable from existential risk. The beloved is not a person alone, but a force of perception destabilization. Here, romantic experience becomes a method of knowledge, not merely emotion.

The reader will surely realize that this poem of Shaikh Ayaz moves through the classic Sufi-symbolic landscape of Sindhi and Persian poetry. Wine, cup, tavern are not merely sensual images; they signify spiritual awakening, ecstasy, and unveiled truth. The wine-seller (may-farosh) resembles the mystical guide whose call resounds through existence itself. The final image of the inner window (Jharoko) (“جهروڪو”) is quintessentially mystical: reality cannot be fully seen outwardly until an aperture opens within consciousness. The translation of Ayaz’s poem aims not for literal equivalence alone, but for the cadence, inward luminosity, and metaphysical suggestiveness.

Shaikh Ayaz is ultimately not describing love or nature. He is describing states of consciousness in motion, where the self is continuously negotiating between illusion and revelation, desire and fear, world and inwardness. In that sense, the poem is not about what is seen. It is about what kind of being is required in order to see. If overall critical evaluation, the poem succeeds because it operates on multiple registers simultaneously. It uses classical symbolism without classical certainty. It has romantic intensity without romantic resolution. In addition to that, the poem employs mystical language without doctrinal closure. It also carries tinge of modern psychology without fragmentation into prose.

All in all, the achievement of poem lies in maintaining controlled ambiguity. Each image is stable enough to feel meaningful, unstable enough to remain open. In short, this poem stands within the modern Sindhi lyrical canon as an example of how traditional symbolic vocabulary can be transformed into a contemporary philosophy of consciousness. Its enduring strength is that it does not explain reality. It instead recreates the condition of encountering reality before explanation becomes possible. In that that sense, Shaikh Ayaz is not merely a poet of love or mysticism. He is a poet of perceptual thresholds, moments where the self is not yet defined by interpretation, but is still open to becoming.

Read: Shah Latif and Authentic Living

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Raphic Burdo is student of literature and psychology. He reads for pleasure and writes to share his take on things with the world.

The post LET LOVE LEAD YOU ASTRAY first appeared on Sindh Courier.

• When poetry becomes a passion with a poet, life begins to flow and flower through his pen and consequently life and poetry merge into one single whole.

Dr. M P Azad | Karnal, Haryana

Dr. Lalit Mohan Sharma, born in 1952, has served in Himachal Pradesh Education Department in various teaching and administrative capacities till he retired as Principal of Government College, Dharamshala. He is a prolific poet, translator and author.  A good measure of his creative passion and literary productivity is demonstrated in the publication of 15 books of English poetry, two anthologies of Hindi poems,  a monograph entitled as Another Gandhi, a freedom fighter and ‘A Three- Step Journey’, and English translation of Zahid’s Urdu poems.

His poetry, mostly in English, is comparable to the best of established writers in contemporary world of poetry. His extraordinarily creative sensitivity is so alive and quick that not a single thing around him goes unregistered on his keenly observing mental screen. His fertile mind and creative impulses couple together with electric speed in germinating, capturing and putting on paper the common happenings and events of daily life in the form of images in a way that the most ordinary things begin to glow under his lens and assume a significance of their own. Lalit’s mastery of English idiom, phraseology, skill and ease in weaving together into tapestries of varied ideas is marvelous. It is rare joy to watch a poet creating through words visual pictures of ideas and perceptions and forging a collage in beautiful colors on his canvas.

To evaluate Lalit Mohan Sharma’s literary talents and his place in the overall context in modern English poetry is an arduous task because we are generally tempted to judge a writer by placing him alongside similar categories of writers of the past and thus evaluate him with the yardstick of comparisons and contrasts on the lines of Matthew Arnold’s ‘touch-stone’ thesis. Instead we better look at a given poet objectively as an independent artist of unique talents who is writing in a particular age and milieu.

Though Lalit Sharma, as a poet, refuses to be categorized in such a bland manner, I find his poetry, in style and manner, closest to that of Robert Burns. There is a striking similarity between the two. In the introduction to “Poems: Robert Burns” (1907 Everyman edition), James Douglas writes “Robert Burns has no rival in the art of singing the soul into song and setting the heart to music. His poetry is pure passion….His note falls like the note of the lark straight from the throat of life. It is not an imitation of life, but life itself running into laughter and tears. Being life, it is not a grey moral thing, but a lovely riot of good that is not wholly good and evil that is not wholly evil.”

Life in all its hues and shades is what Lalit Sharma writes about. When poetry becomes a passion with a poet, life begins to flow and flower through his pen and consequently life and poetry merge into one single whole. Like Robert Burns Lalit Mohan Sharma does not care much about social and cultural taboos, nor does he give undue importance to the so called social morality if they come in the way of a direct unalloyed expression of life in the form of poem. For him the loyalty to the subject matter and the religion of art that serve life and its wonderful and human existence is supreme. His presentation of ideas and emotions reflects a strong affiliation to Burns’ methods when we look at his ease and spontaneity at handling the interplay between language and his art.

Let me take as sample a few of Lalit Sharma’s poems, picked up randomly from his more than a dozen of books/collections. This will sufficiently give us a clue to his stance towards life in general and a peep into the wide-ranging panoramic vision and artistic approach to his poetic world.

The poem entitled “Caught Between’, from his latest book, ‘On the Edge’, demonstrates the grip and power of the poet on all the levers of equipment that go into the making of great poetry. The opening line at once draws our attention to the creative urge stirring within the poet’s heart, gradually developing and gathering a momentum to the extent that he begins to wonder as to how he can channelize this irrepressible surge of emotions to write something appropriate to his feelings. The emotional stirrings agitating his inner self  want to flow out like a molten liquid of lava out of the narrow mouth of a volcano. He wants to write but the question that haunts is: to what purpose?

Thus poet caught between the dilemmas of ‘to write or not to write” ponders on giving a voice to his inner churning. As soon as he puts his finger on the keyboard the answer starts flowing spontaneously as if explaining itself:

“To write poetry like keeping a journal

Look at mind as the thoroughfare of ideas,

Record contrary demands each choice has

To negotiate, the breaking and billowing

Waves reach out to mind’s shore, leaving

A wetness which dries up rather too soon.”

With a single stroke of the pen, (metaphorically speaking) the poet unwinds with a calming ease the otherwise tightly held material in his mind and heart and begins to exhale his relief in the next lines:

“The act catharts the piled up sensations,

Restores equanimity in the felt- emotion”.

The poem not only displays its literary merits in its form of constitution and the weight of its contents but also sets out to be a sort of a lesson-guide on the art and craft of how to write a good poem. Like James Joyce’s self-reflexive novel ‘A Portrait of the Artist as an Artist’ in which Joyce narrates biographical details of the life of the protagonist Stephen while simultaneously showing to the reader the art of writing a powerful novel. With an artistic poetic knack Lalit Mohan Sharma’s poem “Caught Between” gradually develops as a self-reflexive piece on the lines of Joyce’s novel. It ends with a masterstroke of a quartet:

“Agony and ecstasy move on like the phases

Of the moon… the mind caught between”

Desire and the destined” like a swinging pendulum “from imagination to the actual”

The poet, as reflected in his the textual contents, has a laser vision to perceive the life around him deeply enough to make a meaningful sense out of the chaos.

There is hardly any aspect of life that remains untouched by Sharma’s creative imagination His roving eyes capture every activity of human life in thorough details. His aesthetics immaculately observes every movement of the object of his focus. If, for example, he looks at a beautiful human face a thing, every facet of grace comes alive in his description,. Without a hint of sentimentality or desire of possession of the object of beauty he graciously amplifies every nuance of the subject in hand.

Look at this poem entitled “Joy- in -Life” in his 2022 collection ‘There is No Death’:

Hair in gracious waves

And perfect lazy curves

As if frame her face

Eyes and nose are

In tune with rhythm;

Her lips do rhyme with

Ambience of her form.

What moves the poet to all of these details of facial and physical features of the gracious looks of the portrait being sketched here is reinforced by dynamic dimension in the body that enhances its overall physical impact:

“A tender tilt of her head

Tells of her life-in joy

Earrings, the nose ring

Lyrical ensigns of beauty.

Joy-in-life is nourished

With smiles in her eyes,

Nursed by a gentle laugh

In full bloom at her mouth.”

Lalit Sharma describes in a musical tenor and tone the facial aspect of the graceful lady, as if painting on the canvas a vivid image with a single move of long hand in charismatic colors. The poem recreates itself in the form a painting that you can safely hang on the walls of an art gallery.

To place this poem alongside a poem entitled “The Lass of Cessnock Banks” by Burns will instantly show a striking similarity between the two poets:

“She is sweeter than the morning dawn,

When rising Phoebus first is seen,

And dew-drops twinkle o’er the lawn,

An’ she has two sparkling roguish een.

She is stately like yon youthful ash,

That grows the cowslip braes between,

And drinks the stream with vigour fresh;

An’ she has two sparkling roguish een”

Written in the eighteenth century. Burns’s poetry has a rustic touch of the soil and air of the England of those years, while Lalit’s carries the scent and touch of the rural countryside of Himachal Pradesh. The portraits of the damsels in their poems sit comfortably with each other.

Another comparison with the poem “Life in Joy “can be Lord Byron’s celebrated poem, “She Walks in Beauty “:

“She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies …”

A similar effect of vivacious joy in beauty is reached in Sharma’s poem “Joy-in-life and “life -in-joy”

Another poem “Voids of Silence” from the book with the same title is worth a brief analysis. Imagination and language seem to be blended, melding and finally merging into each other to give the reader as if in a piece of cake of life. In just three compact, clean and complete stanzas the poet captures not only the intertwined subtlety of living life but also gives a peep into life’s magic in motion.

“Words pause at the threshold as if

A gesture tiptoes on my very tongue;

I look up, am pleased to usher them in

Setting in the rhythms of a sentence,

Meaning blinks and winks in mischief.

A sentence, a para, a stanza carry credits

For the truth suggested in the hints given,

Yet the fulcrum is held in the balance by

The natural piety of gathered syllables,

In the order of the emotion acclaimed.”

There is a mesmerizing rhythmic use of alliteration, consonants and vowels in the line “Call it scent, perfume or the fragrance “

Images float and dance on the waves of symbols and metaphors steaming out of Sharma’s poetic smithery as if an adept surfer dances effortlessly on the wild and cruising currents and waves of the sea waters.

“Call it scent, perfume or the fragrance,

Each word is ingrained with color and

Form, it’s journey with poets, prophets,

It’s resonance with the ear and breathing,

It’s stirring presence in the voids of silence.”

Nothing speaks louder than silence. Even perfect language can only capture only a fraction of rhythmic dance of life. No emotion or feeling can stand at the cusp of a void and summon courage enough to call out at a thing that invites man jump over and kiss staring vacuum.

The poem becomes that potent force that evokes all these layers of life.

Images float and dance on the waves of symbols and metaphors steaming out of Sharma’s poetic smithery as if an adept surfer dances effortlessly on the wild and cruising currents and waves of the sea.

The poetry of Lalit Sharma represents any number of topics that one can take from the stuff called life, but a few major aspects stand out in his motley mixture of themes and motifs. One prominent and recurring theme is the personal suffering versus the impersonal social turmoil. The poet is dogged and relentlessly pursued by his personal loss, pains, agonies, sufferings and bewildering feelings of desperate isolation caused in his own life by inevitable turbulences and ups and downs of personal life. In the following poem Lalit Sharma very effectively successfully uses his creative faculties to negotiate with these ship-wrecks and problems. During a hugely gruelling long struggle and fight with a fatal ailment of his spouse that left him completely devastated and shattered, the poet in him continued to draw strength by a minute chronicling of each moment’s pain. This creative process of expressing personal pain through art became for him a cathartic therapeutic means of surviving the irreplaceable loss and regaining strength to move on in life. Dozens of poems scattered in his recently published books is evidence of this chronicling and recording of the innumerable moments, hours and days of painful journey of life. A poem that subtly chronicles his daily battle of life is “Accepting Absences” (taken out from his recent book of the same title). Here we can see how the man in the poet deals and negotiates with the inner turmoil and how the poet in man at the same time transforms his suffering into an therapeutic art instrument to regain his hold on day to day life:

“Mourning demise of a spouse remains

A private matter, a happening never so

Common yet a part of the cycle of life.

What helps man not so much as the words

Of comfort from friends and the relatives,

But his own inner resilience and strength.”

And reconciling with the imminent truth of death, the poet in him goes on to muse:

“Death is like a fire no tears can douse,

Falls noiseless and yet leaves a void,

Not a shred survives its tornado impact”.

And finally the poet reaches the final surrendering and acceptance mode in the following words:

“Battle in the outer has to be fought within,

Not to seek the illusion of a presence but,

An absence one must settle and accept.”

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Read: Poetry: Icy chill in the Spine

The post Singing the Soul into Song first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Ruxshona  Rasulova, a young writer from Uzbekistan, reviews the short story ‘Helpline’, of writer Khayriddin Sultonov

“Helpline,” by our beloved writer Khayriddin Sultonov, is one of the most uniquely crafted literary works. The short story tells of individuals with diverse fates who, finding themselves in a dead end, call a helpline seeking a glimmer of hope, pouring out their woes to the operator.

In the story, we encounter those who have been unjustly victimized, as told by Maqsuda opa; those like Gulsara who have been deceived and crushed; swindlers like Qobilov; simpletons like Begmat; and those, like Telman, who are consumed by regret in their old age. This single work encompasses a multitude of diverse destinies. Some are heartbreaking, some are humorous, and some provoke anger.

While you may feel pity for individuals like Behruz, who is remorseful for his actions but too late, you might laugh bitterly at fools like Abduazim, who, due to his naivety, believed in a false inheritance and lost everything he had.

Through the character of Elzod Eminov, the author reveals the life of the entire artistic community, demonstrating the heaviness of this field and how challenging it is to make a living. Through Ilhom Soliyev, he seeks to explain that the medical profession has its own unique and difficult hardships, and that doctors who face such challenges every day are not valued enough.

Mahbuba’s sorrows are a separate story within the story. It is a tale of humanity, loyalty, and true love. Her life is a remarkable display of self-sacrifice. No one can remain unmoved upon hearing the mournful tale of a pure-hearted woman who wanted her beloved fiancé to leave this life content during his remaining days. You cannot help but exclaim, “Ah-ha-a, so such love still exists, even in the 21st century!”

You cannot help but get irritated listening to Begmat Rajabovich’s efforts in the poverty reduction program. As he himself puts it, he overexerts himself trying to “share what isn’t there.” We see in Begmat’s son, Khudoiberdi that trying to teach a hopeless, foolish, unresponsive person to catch a thousand fish is futile, as they will find fault with the fishing rod or the river, achieving nothing. The role of parents in a family is extremely important. If parents are inept, the same foolishness can be expected from the children. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree…

There once was a merchant. He traveled a lot and couldn’t come home for months. He had a beautiful wife whose life was spent waiting for her husband. Not knowing who to confide in, the woman would sit and tell her sorrows to a pumpkin. One day, the husband came home and saw his wife talking to someone. Suspicion entered his mind, and he thought she was cheating on him, so he killed her. He then realized that there was no one else there. Distraught by his actions, the husband struck the pumpkin in anguish. The pumpkin split in two, and pus and bile gushed out. The pumpkin had rotted…

The operator, Mohidil Ismatova, was like that pumpkin. Everyone would come and tell her their troubles. They would demand things from her. But no one would ask what her own problems were. In reality, the personal life of the girl who was providing solace to everyone else was not so good. She had been orphaned early, her sister had gone abroad, and Umidjon, the child her sister Oygul left behind, had been imprisoned for murder. On top of that, there were the threats of Qodir, a swindler of a boyfriend, who had shared intimate photos of the girl with the public… Finally, Mohidil’s heart, like that pumpkin, rotted away. She couldn’t bear the filth of this world.

People find comfort in each other, but the negative energy of the speaker’s sorrows and woes is also passed on to the listener. The same thing happened to Mohidil. If she hadn’t listened to the daily sorrows and shared in the troubles of strangers, perhaps she could have overcome her own problems? But who knows.

Everyone in this world has their own grief, worries, and problems. Often, the person who is silently listening to you and giving you advice has enough worries of their own. But we humans can’t help but pour out our sorrows and complain about something…

Read: Me – A Short Story from Uzbekistan

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Ruxshona  Rasulova, born on October 16, 2008, in Rishton District, Fergana Region of Uzbekistan, is a student. She is the recipient of the “Follower of Great Jadids” badge (2024). Her creative works have been published in the newspapers and magazines. Approximately 20 of her creative works have been published in foreign journals in Germany, USA, Kenya, and Great Britain.

The post Helpline – Story of Unjustly Victimized first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Angela Kosta

From the very first verses of the opening stanza of poem: FOR YOU, AMERICA, written by the Albanian author Emi Krosi, we find ourselves in a surreal, dreamlike landscape where the horizon blends with images full of metaphors: the “albinos of the land of the red Indians” perhaps allude to human or spiritual presences lost in time and space.

The “clouds like knights” suggest epic and mysterious movements. The “planets with nails that tear” present to the reader a tumultuous, almost hostile universe. In the “wasteland of Eliot,” the author connects us to modern poetics (as throughout the poem), emphasizing a sense of decay and loneliness. This work is rich in powerful cosmic visions, mingling mythology, nature, and our own lives.

As one reads, the reader sways between real and/or galactic visions, tracing a mental and universal landscape in each person fortunate enough to experience the poem.

The “gray horizon” stretching beyond the Atlantic symbolizes the loss of the author’s identity in an unfamiliar place—an unbounded border.

The “buttocks of the albinos” in the “land of the red Indians” merge men, races, and historical memories in a contrast that recalls colonization and alienation from that time, which still resonates in our era.

The “clouds like knights” bring dynamism to the “island-skies”, while the “planets” and time that limps—with crutches—clearly reveal the deteriorated vision of our planet. The desert (Eliot) highlights a deep sense of emptiness and disillusionment. Often, the author Krosi evokes the moon (as she does in several stanzas of the poem), with “lemon florins” and “planets with nails,” creating an enchanting yet unsettling atmosphere, where nature and the universe seem to be in conflict with each other, caught between chaos and all of humanity.

The poem immerses us in culturally and poetically rich verses of great professionalism and depth. The reader feels this in the “gray horizon” that stretches over “the buttocks of the albinos of the land of the red Indians”—a beautiful curtain opening for the poem—presenting a highly curious scene charged with historical and visual tension. Through metaphors, the author traces and leads the invisible thread of the violent encounter between cultures, between conquest and lost purity.

Through “cloud-knights” and “planets with nails”, Krosi renders the universe lively, restless, and at times cruel. The sun’s oscillation and time walking “with crutches” immerse us in a fragile, disharmonious reality, where progress is ill and cosmic balance shattered into billions of fragments.

Just like ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S. Eliot (published in 1922), one of the most emblematic works of modernist poetry reflecting the spiritual, cultural, and moral crisis of the West after World War I, Krosi—with her distinct pen—also represents a fragmented, sterile world devoid of humanity. Structured in various stanzas, the poet pours mythology, religion, history, and literature into a complex and disjointed mosaic—a text that is both difficult and simple, requiring a highly active interpretation in reflecting contemporary disillusionment. Yet, amidst all this aridity, Krosi allows the moon to bloom like “lemon florins”—a delicate symbol of life standing in opposition to darkness.

The second poem is a visionary fresco, in which the author combines allegories of mythology with contemporary ones to create a deep reflection—not only individual but also on our own fate.

In the first line, “I wake from the shadow of the cactus,” Krosi introduces a desert and solitary atmosphere, expanding into a world populated by generations—swans that “pollinate the water,” a fusion of grace and fertility.

The globe that “miscarriages immigrants” is not only a powerful denunciation of humanity’s failure to manage migration—turning life into filth—but also a juxtaposition of peoples and races in their complexity and suffering, seeking refuge on virgin margins (a clean world we all desire).

The Native Americans evoke a vanished spiritual past, as well as their original connection to nature and mystery, now suffocated, “denied and offended” by modernity.

The sunlit forests, horses, eagles that Krosi paints in the vivid picture of this marvelous poem are an ancient majesty, while “syllabicating the alphabet” becomes a metaphor for writing the destiny of the world, of her own land, and of the poetess herself.

With her exceptional pathos and uniquely deep introspection, Krosi revives the historical memory of the extraordinary Native American tribes.

In the third stanza, the reader joins the author on a journey into the heart of New York, through the gaze of her wandering soul, seeking itself among the ruins of the American dreams.

The verses blend urban figures and mythic symbols in a dreamlike flow that recalls Beat poetry (a poetic genre born in the USA around the 1950s).

Krosi’s language is raw, direct, and sometimes explicit, much like Ginsberg’s “America” (with two dollars and twenty-seven cents, January 17, 1956). Emi Krosi, however, finds herself on dusty streets, skulls on sidewalks, and struggling poplars (February, 2000).

The Statue of Liberty becomes an ambiguous symbol of freedom and sin, reflecting the modern era in which today’s women live in prosperous countries like America.

In these verses, Krosi offers a bold and sensual reinterpretation of the Statue of Liberty—a woman transformed into a temptress, full of desire and transgression. The “little lesbian Sappho” evokes queer identity and expressive freedom. The tone Krosi uses in her verses is quirky, provocative, raw, yet highly poetic. Female freedom takes shape and, rebelling, bursts into eros. Here, one must pause… with humble greatness, poet Krosi calls herself “little” before the great Greek Sappho, thus showing readers her deep knowledge of ancient Greek literature, rich in mythology and much more.

As the verses unfold, we notice the poetess confronting an unfamiliar city, searching for a resemblance to her distant homeland—poor and illusory but at the same time welcoming (where people already go to the beach, a contrast between cold and heat).

The language is rich with somewhat daring, bold metaphors and surprising images: “belly of fireflies,” “cold buttocks,” “glazed skulls.”

The entire stanza continues to oscillate between Krosi’s personal thoughts and concerns and the collective ones, between dreams and nightmares, between mirage and reality, accompanied by the alienation of her search, in a world now broken into pieces.

Also in the fourth stanza, Krosi continues to use the nuances of a city in constant motion, taking us to iconic places like Central Park and Grand Central Terminal, which become obscene settings with striking elements such as “traffic lights masturbating” and “cold buttocks,” boldly challenging linguistic conventions with the confidence of a very capable author, to convey deep emotions that linger long in the memory of many readers.

The entire poem offers a personal and intense view from poet Krosi, not only on the city but also on its inhabitants.

The presence of a “colored girl” at the station is a significant social critique by the author, highlighting inequalities and marginalization, the slavery of prostitution by those who exploit—this is a crucial point in these verses, a theme that cannot escape our attention. Krosi makes her the protagonist, a woman of color with curly hair.

The prostitution of African American women in the United States represents a complex phenomenon deeply rooted in historical, social, and economic dynamics. Black women are overrepresented in the sex trade, often due to social factors such as poverty, racial discrimination, and lack of educational and employment opportunities. Addressing this issue requires a holistic approach that considers the deep roots of racial discrimination and gender inequality, urging policies that protect the rights and dignity of all women.

All of this Krosi “denounces” and “declares” on the cold streets of America, with a pen that flows as smoothly as her thoughts.

In the fifth stanza, together with Krosi, we encounter the raw, visceral reality of Harlem, where the author portrays a marginalized and deeply troubled humanity, degraded as well, narrating the lives of most inhabitants consumed by drugs, sex, and poverty. Reading this, the reader feels the melancholy and despair that surround our poetic guide.

The smoked cigarettes and wooden ashtray symbolize old habits and a life that wears down the nonexistence of happiness.

By writing, “the cat tickles my bare thighs,” Krosi introduces great sensuality, while in “when the nights shorten like ‘sad whores,’” a deep sadness and disappointment emerge, caused by the death of a thousand loves.

“The moon took me through a late coffee” and the “gold teeth at the end of the day” create a quite regressive nighttime atmosphere.

The streets of Harlem become the stage for “drunkards with dark orgasm foam,” where drugs and sex dominate in a whirlpool of perdition. The “children full of dust with mad deafness” represent lost innocence and the total abandonment of the coming generation, as well as the uncertainty about where we will end up in a future that awaits us without much time.

The “whiskey stench” that erupts like volcanoes from the “colored dancers” until dawn closes the fifth stanza with a powerful and overwhelming sense of despair and disgust.

In the verses of the sixth stanza, “I got lost in the gardens of Babylon,” (as in the other stanzas), Emi Krosi weaves mythological, historical, and contemporary elements to explore and bring to light themes that the reader experiences through the poetess’s emotional journey, starting from the gardens of Babylon, then moving through epics and eras up to today, on the streets of New York.

The lyrical self of the author lost in the gardens of Babylon connects us with a mythical past, of rare beauty but unfortunately lost. The ascent on the “Divine stairs” and the encounter with the “giant colossi of peace” on the rocks of Mount Rushmore is her attempt to reconcile the past with the present, hoping to realize what would be ideal and real for a better world and vital era.

In the second part of the stanza, Krosi continues to focus on a harsh and painful reality, with metaphors that testify to the atrocities of the modern world and the loss of innocence: “when girls are raped, when children are killed, when nations are destroyed.”

However, despite this darkness, she brings forth what she desires inside herself, hoping for the salvation of a less tangled universe.

“A girl… an Albanian girl” – (Krosi).

The author’s verses, as I have highlighted above, often reach difficult transcendence, yet with her perfect syntax, she not only lightens the reading flow but also deeply engages the reader until the very end of the poem.

Through a fluid and understandable narration, in the seventh stanza, Krosi accompanies us and transfers us to the winter city of Manhattan, blending everyday life with dreamlike visions and real existential events.

The scene of the blonde woman feeding her dog with “purple skin” conveys not only the human-animal relationship but also the love and duty each of us has to care for them.

Observing the city’s frenzy while chewing gum, Krosi’s protagonist decidedly contrasts with the crowd, suggesting detachment as well as introspection of every particular subject that negatively influences our daily life or way of living.

The “snowflakes like chicken eggs” and the “hands with warm breath” highlight nostalgia for the Mediterranean climate of the author’s native country. This contrast between the American cold and the warmth where she was born underlines her feeling of estrangement in that unknown-yet known to her-land.

The citation of “America’s highway by Allen Ginsberg,” also in this stanza, introduces the reference to the Beat Generation, with its inner journey and profound search for vitality in a chaotic world.

The encounter with the vagabond murmuring “love, love America…” is a note of sadness, but also a great desire to live with dignity in that land, where she once believed it to be abundantly rich and not so tumultuous.

In the eighth stanza, Krosi presents herself to the readers with a fragmented and intense narration, rich in cultural and political references, reflecting the experience of a disoriented emigrant (many, I would say, lately), caught between the American dream and the reality of a lost identity. Krosi continues to move through the noisy New York, passing through well-known neighborhoods like Midtown, Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, creating a labyrinth where she feels so tiny, comparing herself to “a grain of rice,” small and invisible within an overwhelming social-cultural machine.

Krosi’s poetic language is sharp, ironic, and at times surreal (“I have no time to pick poppies / at the traffic lights with swollen eyes”), capable of transforming everyday objects, subjects, or elements into metaphors of alienation.

This is shown through references to The Times, Spielberg, the UN, the White House, Trump, Bush, Clinton, which she places before readers as symbols of power, media influence, and global politics – clashing with the migrant reality, Albanian memory, and the internal struggles of the diaspora community.

The verse where Krosi mentions the “spies of Enver” (Albania’s communist dictator) reveals how historical traumas persist in the present and absurdly reflect themselves even thousands of kilometers away.

Her closing line (“Will I meet Trump today?”) hides both helplessness and critique, revealing how distant great political figures are from individual truths and struggles.

In the ninth stanza, the reader also gets lost in the disorientation experienced by the Albanian poet Krosi in the vast American metropolis. With her pen, the poet expresses the difficulty of adapting to a different culture, highlighting the linguistic and cultural barriers that separate her from the surrounding society.

The entire stanza (like the poem) is permeated by frustration and rebellion against imposed social and cultural expectations. Firmly convinced, Krosi refuses to conform to female and cultural stereotypes, strongly affirming her Albanian and Mediterranean identity.

The scene at McDonald’s clearly shows this and becomes a fundamental element of globalization and cultural homogenization.

In the “cold streets” and the “snowfall,” Krosi portrays total loneliness and isolation.

The “ice” and “snowfall” represent emotional immobility and freezing, reflecting the difficulty of finding warmth, affection, and connection in a cold, distant environment—and this is why she “tells off” the Mexican waiter.

Krosi’s journey with the reader continues with her broad nocturnal vision—nothing escapes her keen optical focus, which captures everything that can help complete the picture with allegories and metaphors—this time aboard a train, an important passage between moods and inner places. The opening verses create a dense and claustrophobic atmosphere: “the marrow of the air is moldy,” “the insects’ antennas are asleep.” With this, the Albanian poet leads us into a different dimension between daytime chaos, a chaos suspended between reality and the surreal, where total darkness becomes both a refuge and an inevitable abyss.

Krosi also includes the Hudson River and satellites in her tableau, thus showing the contrast between nature, technology, and everyday solitude. The “nullity that becomes breath” and the “rusty rails’ rustle” amplify not only the sense of bewilderment but also the deafening silence.

The second part of the stanza becomes even more intimate. Krosi passes through, crosses, and jumps from fear to farewells, from embraces to skyscrapers. The “dusty amoebas” are metaphors for the dull, impersonal life of the metropolis. The repetition of “gray” reinforces the idea of New York City, which, although gigantic, stifles the colors of the soul’s vitality.

The final verse, “Goodbye, or Goodbye!”, reveals Krosi’s decisive purpose: her farewell is personal but also cultural, a confirmed, definitive separation or perhaps hesitation to find herself again between two worlds, two lands, between her mother tongue and a foreign language. Therefore, she prefers to live in her small homeland, which fills her days, life, and above all, her soul.

In conclusion, analyzing this particularly unique poem in the Albanian literary panorama, I want to underline how Krosi inserts herself into the tradition of the Beat Generation-a youth movement that also expressed itself artistically, poetically, and literarily after World War II, mainly in the 1950s in the USA-recalling the works of authors such as Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) and Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), as well as in contemporary Italian poetry, with references like the poet, writer, painter, and playwright Antonio Veneziani (born 1949 in Italy).

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Angela Kosta is an Albania-born Italian journalist, poet, essayist, publisher, literary critic, editor, translator, and promoter

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By Fatima Al-Zahra Hassan

As African cinema strives to transcend its continental boundaries — through its stars, directors, writers, or their works — its success seems to hinge on how authentically it addresses critical local issues. Here, we shed light on this idea through an exploration of three distinctive films.

Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, ranks as the world’s third-largest film producer after Hollywood and Bollywood. Named after Nigeria, this industry recently released a film hailed by both Nigerian and international critics as a timeless masterpiece set to redefine Nigerian cinema’s place on the global map. The film is “Dr. Bello.”

Shot in collaboration with Hollywood, the film features American stars, including Isaiah Washington — known for his role in Grey’s Anatomy — who plays the American doctor Michael Durant. The role of Dr. Bello is portrayed by Haitian-American actor Jimmy Jean-Louis.

Nigerian cinema often relies on modest budgets, with most of its themes revolving around envy, witchcraft, and jealousy — intertwining and contrasting with global cinematic classics.

On the Nigerian side, actress Stephanie Okereke and a host of Nigerian stars contributed to the film. Notably, the Nigerian government helped finance the movie as part of a national effort to uplift the seventh art. A budget of $200 million was allocated to support the cinematic renaissance in Lagos, with Tony Abulu receiving $250,000 as a governmental contribution to introduce the star of the global series Heroes.

The film’s events unfold between New York and Nigeria, narrating the story of the American oncologist Michael Durant, who strives to save a young cancer patient. In his quest, he seeks the help of Dr. Bello, a Nigerian herbalist. However, the police intervene, questioning Dr. Bello’s healing abilities, accusing him of sorcery, and arresting him in New York. As a consequence, Dr. Durant is dismissed from his job.

Developing countries need governmental support across vital and cultural sectors, coupled with their citizens’ efforts to achieve an economic renaissance that will undoubtedly reflect on all aspects of life. This is a path that many countries in Africa have taken, successfully making significant strides.

In a twist of fate, Dr. Bello is diagnosed with cancer while serving his prison sentence. He asks Dr. Michael to travel to Nigeria to fetch an elixir of healing for him.

The film is directed and produced by Tony Abulu, a renowned Nigerian filmmaker who stated that Nigerian films have a vast following in Africa but aspire to reach further and introduce their works to the world. Despite being fully aware of the costs of producing a film of this scale, Abulu insisted on both directing and producing it.

The film’s premiere in Washington was a remarkable success, with critics expressing admiration for its storyline, much like its sensational reception in Lagos, where thousands flocked to attend the first screening.

Nigerian stars have made their way to the global cinema screens, starting with minor roles and eventually becoming prominent figures in Hollywood. Actress Eve Eke is a prime example — an actress, writer, and media personality who, like many of her colleagues, returns to Nigeria, her homeland, now and then to collaborate on joint film projects or support charitable causes.

Some of her fans on Facebook expressed their disappointment, even writing messages on the walls of her house in the Nigerian capital, frustrated by her perceived neglect. In response, the star fired back, saying, “I don’t live in the sky of Facebook. I work on the ground in reality. If I’m not writing replies, I’m sharing my thoughts on my Facebook wall.

Kinshasa Kids Film

The film follows two parallel paths: one musical and the other social, embodied by the miserable children of Kinshasa. It does not delve much into the wealthy class of society, who view this impoverished segment as a way to grow their fortunes. Instead, the director replaces them with the police force, portrayed as defenders of their interests — despite the fact that a significant portion of the police force itself belongs to this crushed, impoverished class at the bottom of the Congolese social hierarchy.

There are more than 30,000 homeless children in the streets of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, pursued by the military forces who exploit, hunt, and abuse them. Their misery doesn’t end there; the residents of Kinshasa insist on accusing them of witchcraft, labeling them as “Shégués.”

In a remarkable cinematic experiment by Belgian director Marc-Henri Wajnberg, blending documentary with fiction, the film Kinshasa Kids was born. The director relied on real-life protagonists to tell the story of Emma, a talented boy who dreams of forming a rap music band with the help of his committed musician friend, Bobsan. Through this lens, the film explores the lives of street children and the misery they endure. Perhaps the reason for mixing documentary with fiction was the director’s desire to soften the harshness of reality and cast doubt on the existence of such extreme misery. According to film critics, the movie is “a cinematic work wrapped in the deceit of fiction,” suggesting that the director did not wish to diminish the severity of their suffering but sought to view it from a narrower perspective.

The children of Kinshasa retreat to their musical oasis, playing and composing in beautiful harmony, dreaming that their music might one day reach an audience beyond their makeshift neighborhoods. Their humanity shines in moments of peace and warmth, as they dream of becoming people of value in their own country. The film reveals the depth of their musical heritage, rooted in their authentic African spirits. Music flows through their veins, far from their miserable reality. It becomes their only alternative to the destruction of their souls, allowing them to forget their poverty and harsh reality as they open themselves to spiritual worlds untouched by the brutal harshness of their city.

The film concludes with a scene showing the music band founded by the children themselves. They invite police officers and street residents to listen to their musical creativity. Together, they share in the joy, moving to rhythms drawn from their rich history and heritage.

Wajnberg presents Kinshasa as a city torn to the point of fragmentation between its profound, inherent African cultural heritage and its attempts to catch up with technology — a goal that seems out of reach for a city so harsh to its own people. Music remains one of the most prominent elements of African cultural heritage. The film’s opening scenes depict rituals to exorcise evil spirits from the children’s bodies on the streets of the capital, serving as a powerful introduction that skillfully captures the relationship between the modern and the traditional — between what is new and what is inherently rooted in ancient African culture. This contrast embodies the bitterness of many African nations losing their identities in pursuit of technology, modernity, and progress.

This film was recently screened in Paris during the Francophone Cinema Days. Before that, it was part of the official competition at the Toronto, Venice, and Thessaloniki film festivals — some of the most significant cinematic events in Southeastern Europe. Thanks to this film, some of its young stars were able to escape their miserable reality and return to school after receiving substantial support from various organizations. Additionally, the talent of the film’s lead actress, Rachel, was discovered. She later starred in “Rebelle” (War Witch), the Berlin Award-winning film, which was also shot in Kinshasa.

Nairobi Half Life

A cultural and intellectual renaissance, perhaps absent from the Arab and global scene, is being experienced by the African continent. This revival manifested cinematically when the Kenyan film “Nairobi Half Life,” directed by David Tosh Gitonga, was officially nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The film, which focuses on the world of organized crime and the lives of gangsters in Nairobi, quickly topped the box office in Kenya upon its release.

Sensing this tangible and remarkable African awakening, the management of the Cairo International Film Festival (35th edition) ensured a strong and diverse presence of African cinema this year. The festival featured nine films addressing various issues from the reality of African society, including “Nairobi Half Life”. In addition, a seminar titled “The African Day” was held to discuss the role of African cinema as a medium for political, social, and cultural liberation, as well as its role in presenting Africa in a positive light that reflects its progress and the artistic passion of its people.

The screenplay of the film is a realistic narrative from the new generation of African cinema. It tells the story of those who left their small villages for the big cities, believing they could fulfill their dreams there. This is the journey of the film’s protagonist, Mwas — an ambitious young man who dreams of entering the world of acting. However, on his very first day in Nairobi, his belongings are stolen, forcing him to delve into the world of crime just to survive.

Nairobi Half Life is an attempt to add a human touch to the perpetrators of organized crime in Kenya, seeking to change perceptions or at least soften the impact of these realities on viewers and in everyday life. However, this approach was criticized by film critics, who argued that “crime remains crime, regardless of its causes and motivations,” according to their reports and opinions.

David Tosh Gitonga, the director of the film, who personally experienced the world of crime by spending time with gang members — such as car parts thieves — aimed to portray events truthfully and to deepen his understanding of the culture of crime. He remarked:

“Crime is wrong, no doubt, but have we ever seriously asked ourselves: why does crime happen?”

As for the Kenyan actor Maina Olwenya, one of the film’s stars, he believes that “Nairobi Half Life” represents a turning point in the history of Kenyan cinema. For the first time, there was a large team of producers and actors, along with a wealth of screenplays for a single film. From his perspective, the film serves as a reference and a model for African cinema.

Read: Review: Egyptian Film ‘My Girl’

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Fatima Al-Zahra Hassan is a Writer and TV Director in Egypt

The article has been published first by CAJ International Magazine | April edition

Courtesy: The Silk Road Today

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By Euisu Byeon

We want to see something new every day. We want to encounter new works. Even when writing poetry, I try to explore different forms after every five poems. This ensures there’s variety in the content. Like everyone else, I’m interested in newcomers because we crave new possibilities. When I come across such a newcomer or poet, I go out of my way to discover them. The same holds true for the Symbology Institute. We strive to find and introduce good works by new and unfamiliar poets rather than frequently publishing existing poems and poets in familiar forms.

Poet Byeong-Cheol Kang‘s poetry represent a form we haven’t attempted before. He made his debut as a novelist in 1993 through the Jeju Writers’ Association’s ‘Jeju New Writer’s Literature Award’ and appeared in Poetry in 2016 through 『Poetry Literature』, but his works have mainly been published in foreign publications rather than in Korea. In 2023, Kang published a collection of his poems in English and Korean, titled ‘Sounds of the Bamboo Forest’, which includes works published in overseas media. It was through this collection that I came to know his works in detail. His poems in this collection are based on the Buddhist ‘Yuma Sutra’ and explore maxims, aphorisms, and life wisdom.

To achieve novelty is to have a new star appear and shine in the night sky, which is what any poet or writer would desire. Experimentation for novelty can be seen in terms of both content and form. If both are new, that’s great, but achieving one or the other is rewarding enough as a poet. Usually, however, experimentation is approached from the perspective of form or technique rather than from the perspective of deepening thematic content or introducing new ideas.

To achieve novelty is to have a new star appear and shine in the night sky, which is what any poet or writer would desire.

The subject of a poem can be anything in the human world. However, it’s not easy for a poet or an artist to reach or surpass the level of inquiry that scholars and philosophers specialize in, and to translate such perceptions and knowledge into aesthetic works through poetry. Poets can only attempt to imitate them. The novelty in poetry then challenges the format rather than deepening or refreshing the subject matter.

This is where Byeong-Cheol Kang’s poetry is special: his novelty lies in the choice of content, not form. Poetry doesn’t find its value or significance in presenting intellectual recognition or enlightenment. Rather, the matter of such recognition lies on the other side of the poetry. The tendency of poetic experiments to focus on form rather than content is not unrelated to this problem.

Dr. Kang’s poetry presents a type of poetic aesthetic that hasn’t been seen in poetry literature until now: the poetry of the spirit world. It deals with themes and contents related to ontological and ethical aspects. Works with such content tend to focus on epistemological ‘isms’ or declarative assertions, similar to the poems of past spiritualists or social pragmatists, and thus fail to enter the realm of poetry aesthetics, remaining limited to the ‘enlightenment’ of ideology or wisdom presentation. This presents a challenge for content experimentation.

The challenge is to unite ‘the cognitive’ with ‘the emotional’. It must be accompanied by the phonological aesthetics and the beauty of concise connotation required by the art of poetry, and the finesse of the device called metaphor, which is common to all poetry and art. The former two are the most basic of poetic aesthetics and are within the reach of any long-term practitioner. The most difficult is metaphor.

For knowledge or wisdom of an academic, epistemological nature to be transformed into the world of art, it must go through metaphor, which is difficult to realize due to its nature. That’s why experimental works that deepen or change such themes are rare. However, the poet Byeong-Cheol Kang merges the awareness of ontological thought with emotional rhyme and metaphor. Again, for epistemological knowledge or realization to become poetry, it must first be transformed into the world of metaphor.

No matter how strong the wind blows,

The verdant forest does not collapse.

When the wind passes by,

The green forest regains its graceful appearance,

Inspiring admiration.

[Sounds of Bamboo Forest]

‘The forest isn’t falling.’ It’s not a stacked structure. The “forest” is a metaphor for ‘self’ or ‘fulfillment’, meaning ‘the self is indestructible’. “No matter how strong the wind blows,” the ‘self’ “regains its graceful appearance” when the wind passes. In such a “bamboo forest,” the ‘self’ is ‘inspired and admired’. In the first stanza, the self-metaphorized by the forest and the forest metaphorized by the self-form the work, supported by the rhythmic flow of the poem’s sentences and the concise implications.

Keep your eyes forward and walk

(Medium)

If you deeply love the past

And seek divine revelations from it

Then it’s okay to stay there

But if not, then live in this dynamic moment.

[The Reason why eyes are only in the front]

These lines are metaphors conveying a message of striving forward. What makes this enlightening exhortation impactful, rather than repulsive, is its connection to ‘this dynamic moment’. Furthermore, in the next stanza, it is metaphorized again as “The leaves of a silver fir tree, sparkling in the sunlight”, depicting the self ‘walking’ as “The silver fir tree” that “shows its back “. Metaphor is myth, leading to the world of magic and dreams.

It’s not easy for a poet or an artist to reach or surpass the level of inquiry that scholars and philosophers specialize in, and to translate such perceptions and knowledge into aesthetic works through poetry.

‘Letter to Son’ is, as the title suggests, a letter written in the form of poetry by the poet. This is possible when a poet has the freedom to use metaphors. A poet should be able to turn any type of writing into poetry, utilizing metaphors. In other words, a poet must excel in using metaphors.

The significance of ‘Letter to son’ is this. It becomes a poem even though it talks about a strictly existential relationship, because it compares reality to a “deserted island.” The poet transformed this one letter into a poem by the single poem word, “Desert Island.” Let’s look at another work.

Life is like a river flowing towards the sea,

A journey that’s unique for you and me,

But with resilience and courage, we’ll make it through,

And discover the beauty that life has in store anew.

Life is like a canvas with many colors to paint,

(Medium)

Crossing the bridge, we journey together,

Helping each other through stormy weather,

We lighten the burden and guide the way,

Transforming challenges into opportunities

[Journey of life]

This poem metaphorizes the “Journey of life” as “a river flowing” and reflects it to “a canvas with many colors to paint”. It seems to admonish us that “Complaining won’t get us anywhere” and that we should “learn” to be “grateful,” but it naturally substitutes these lives as the “Crossing the bridge” and “journey together”.

Fame and medals mean nothing,

Everything disappears as dust in the wind

(Medium)

As a youngster you have no respect for the laws of nature

Everything is in a state of flux

Everything is getting old

You don’t listen to wise man

When you’re engaging in meaningless conversation,

When you engage in argument,

Realize that you are disputing over something impermanent.

(Medium)

Be happy

Be comfortable

Keep the peace

There is greatness there,

Enjoy the joy of life with wisdom

(Medium)

May people be welcomed by people!

Lotus Flower hopes to ripe fruits,

[Blooming Lotus Flower]

The poet compares “fame and medals” to “dust” and the words of “wise men” to “the laws of nature”. He compares “meaningless conversation” and “argument” to “something impermanent”, and one’s love and respect for “people” is represented by the word “welcome” and metaphorized by the “Lotus Flower”. What makes the directive words of enlightenment such as “Fame and medals mean nothing” and “Be happy/ Be comfortable/ Keep the peace/ There is greatness there, / Enjoy the joy of life with wisdom” such deep reflection is because the use of various metaphors, such as the aforementioned analogies and vicarious metaphors, throughout the poem, which leads the whole into the illusion of a flower garden of thought.

Trying to realize beauty through the form of beauty is the general creative attitude of poets and the approach of new experiments. On the other hand, the attempt to show new beauty through the content of beauty is the creative attitude of the very unusual and special world. In ontology, there have been efforts to strengthen ontology through the form of existence, but it is rare to see an attempt to deal with existence itself in ontology. Until now, philosophical ontological thinking and thinking about humans and the environment have been dominated by semiotic and epistemological approaches and thinking, not content, even scientific approaches. This is because discussing human beings themselves may be more reckless than exploring or traveling to alien planets.

Religion explores the self and talks about God. In the world of science, scholarship, and the arts, however, God is always the problem at the starting line. It is quite unusual, but somehow necessary, for poetry to address issues such as knowledge of the self, practical enlightenment wisdom, and ethical maxims such as guidelines and codes for living, which have been considered objects of epistemological and semiotic inquiry. Just as it is not the Tao, the moment we speak of the Tao, the moment we speak of the self, the self is the other. The out-of-body occurs. Being may never be able to speak of being. But should we only deal with the world of form?

Religion explores the self and talks about God. In the world of science, scholarship, and the arts, however, God is always the problem at the starting line.

Byeong-Cheol Kang’s metaphorization of challenging reflections on humanity and existence is a very unusual and extraordinary field of poetry creation attitude. As someone has to take the initiative, Byung-              Cheol Kang is doing it. Rather than skepticizing his work, we should give him unlimited encouragement and support. Even if it looks like trying to roll up a huge mountain.

However, as this article demonstrates, his poems are masterful at translating issues of perception and wisdom into the world of metaphor. This fact is important. He knows how to elevate the problems of existence and ethics to the art of poetry. Now it needs a generalization of the constant repetition, which of course is possible. It will happen sooner or later, because it is an attribute and phenomenon of nature. It is also the “natural law” that Byeong-Cheol Kang talks about in “Blooming Lotus Flower”. May the “lotus flower” of the new world “ripe fruits” as the poet puts it.

Read: Sounds of Bamboo Forest – A Bouquet of Poems from Korea, the Land of Morning Calm

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Byeon, Euisu (1956) is a Korean poet who published his first poetry book, “The city of memories in a faraway land” in 1991. Since then, he has written experimental poetry in a variety of forms, with long and short poems using distant metaphors, until his fifth collection, “The Physics of Metaphor”, in 2022. He also writes reviews of poetry, fiction, art, architecture, and other arts, and has published numerous books of criticism and poetic theory. After advocating “Meta-semiotics: Non-conscious Symbol” in 2009, he published “Convergence Studies: Symbology” in two volumes in 2015, in which he presents “Symbology” as an independent emerging academic field. Since 2019, he has been leading a collaborative poetry creation project with with Ju Won-ik, Kang Seo-yeon, Seo Sang-hwan, and Lee Chae-hyun, among others.  In 2021, he founded and has served as editor for the poetry magazine “Symbology Institute”. In his poetry, he draws on the identification and transcendence of poetry and prose, poetry and science, and poetry and art. His poems show that the root of all things is one, and that all things are one world, one life.

The post Poetry Critique – The Sound of the Bamboo Forest first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Fernando José Martínez Alderete

For many centuries, poetry has been one of the greatest means of expression for the feelings and concerns of human beings. Since the time of the Greeks, poetry was used as a vehicle to sing the exploits of the people’s heroes, to make known their loves and sorrows of the troubadours who wandered with their lyres to make women fall in love, from there the two best-known names in this art of writing are taken:

Poiesis (beauty) and lyricism, (lyrics to be sung with a lyre).

It is for this reason that the singable texts had a meter and rhyme. It was when Rubén Darío appeared that Spanish poetry broke the rhythm system it had for centuries.

From my humble point of view, the art of poetry is one of the most complex that exists in the world of letters, since its form of expression is not simple as the journalistic note or the prose that at times some could be. It becomes simple and clear. However, every outstanding poet knows perfectly how to handle two fundamental elements, metaphor and knowledge of etymology for the optimal use of the word when creating beauty in turn if the reading of books and the observation of human behavior, nature are combined. Among other things, a poetry worthy of cheering will be achieved.

An example of beautiful, profound and well-written poetry is that of Jeannette Esmeralda Tiburcio Márquez.

Author details

Poet, academic and teacher, Architect by training, she graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Pedagogue from the Center for Higher Studies of Veracruz. She has more than 50 anthologies and collaborations and 3 books published alone in the genres of poetry and narrative. She has different postgraduate studies in various fields, Master’s studies in Linguistic Education and in Innovation and Research and for his incomparable work of three decades and brilliant contributions in favor of education, art, culture, literature and peace. It has become and is considered a true icon in Mexico and the world. She has been recognized with master’s degrees, awards and honorary doctorates in the 5 continents of the planet with the Maximum degree of Doctor of Doctors multiple honoris causa. The National Academy of History and Geography of UNAM, through its center for studies on women in literature, recognizes her with the Academic Recognition of Merit for Mexican Women, an award that has been awarded to great figures such as Elena Poniatowska, currently coordinates internationally, with the help of brave women of letters and culture, the International Festival of Women in Letters of the Center for Studies on Women in Letters directed by the imminent Dr. Beatriz Saavedra for the ANHG of the National Autonomous University of Mexico .

The mirror of our roots

Dr. Jeannette in her poems shows us a cosmogony of our Mexican roots, allowing us to have a sense of belonging in the midst of each metaphor and synecdoche she uses in her poetry. It allows us to reflect ourselves in the mirror of our lineage and the most beautiful thing is that it appreciates our mix.

We can see what I’m talking about in this paragraph…

“Meshico breaks pacts in the jaguar of the memories wrapped in Quetzal feathers of strength and will motivation. In infants nation born of Meetings destiny, reconciliation and Recognition armadillo, salamander Blue Dragon being born from the navel Of the moon”

In her poem “Méshico I love you awake” the name of the country is marked by its Nahuatl roots, it is noted that she talks about encounters, from there it is deduced that he speaks of the encounter between the indigenous people and the Spanish, a combination of races that derive the miscegenation of our Latin America, but above all of our Mexico, she also calls the nation by its real name, the navel of the Moon, the navel from which everything germinates, parents, because as we well know, it is impossible and almost sinful to try to separate ourselves from a Iberian past.

At the same time we can notice a great faith in the change of people’s hearts, faith in God who gives us strength, who gives us certainty of people’s courage…

“The strength of God is in everyone…

We are all,

It feels here, it is was, it will be.

“Like spiral light.”

In these verses he gives us a clear picture of the confidence he has in the Mexican people to move the country forward. You can see the true root of the reason why she founded the organization that presides over all his humanity of a thousand minds for Mexico, why he believes in a possibility of force for change. The doctor herself is a force for change, the facts demonstrate it by making herself known in such a forceful way and with such an award at an international level.

In addition to everything, the lines of his poetry show his great interest in highlighting the country’s traditions…

“In front of the Holy Cross of miracles…

In dance, in war, in sacrifice.”

In this stanza the traditionalist character of the people of Mexico is fervently glimpsed, referring to the dances and sacrifices of the Aztecs and even today the sacrifices that many of the Mexican people make to live and be able to support their families, together with That, there is the other pillar of our country which is the cross, the connection between the divine and the earthly and Dr. Tiburcio captures it very well, all of this through her own semiology, the use of the symbol as the support of a culture, own, rooted and very rich.

Pay tribute to a national elixir.

“Blue Heart,

Macerated, fermented

Heart of light,

At rest and in ritual.

From your field to my mouth,

From your center,

A ray of strength,

Heat distilled in my landscapes,

Sweet nectar of transformation,

Miracle gifted,

“Irreverence that burns.”

It is impressive the way they describe these small verses, the way in which the great national drink of tequila is created, from how they mark the maguey and distill it, how they observe in that light yellow drink a gifted miracle. Tequila is a sweet nectar of the gods, well-being for the joy of the Mexican, but it is irreverent and burns in the depths of our being. But at the same time it is a fire that identifies us, a mirror that reflects and sustains our identity in the world like the bronze race that communicates with the spirits that give us pride and courage.

It is extremely pleasant to feel a pleasure through your eyes when drinking from that descriptive source of Dr. Jeannette, you can enjoy culture through the words that she herself has forged with her lyrics around time, for March 2024 FORBES Magazine publishes a note from her latest book of 50 memorable Latin American women, recognizing the importance of the movement that she builds with the help of the most outstanding minds on the continent, Dr. Carlos Hugo Garrido Chalén, Dr. Francisco Xavier Ramírez Sánchez, Dr. Cristian Tietze, Dr. Fermín Romero Vázquez, Dr. Mauro Abelar Castañeda, with the support of great personalities who value their legitimate actions such as Dr. Sandra Maldonado Baur de Rivero Borrell, and their large international family where Dr. Eva Lianou Petropoulou, currently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, is a great support of love and will, along with her great leaders as she calls them from India, Dr. Kamal Taori and Dr. Rajat Sharma, who has placed all her trust in May she champion the United Nations Unit for Climate Change incorporated into the United Nations UNACCC LATIN AMERICA from 2021, being the woman in the chair with this great international leadership that, hand in hand with its allies in literature, education and culture build better worlds and realities for everyone.

I have had very little time to know her and treat her, but I can say with complete certainty that Dr. Tiburcio Márquez is a person committed to society, to her time in life, to letters and literature, since she has a broad mastery of of rhetoric, she also has a kindness in the upbringing of her person and a kindness in her heart that allows me personally to understand the reasons why she is a highly internationally recognized person, that bonhomie and commitment that characterize her are lights that shine brightly even though hopelessness covers us in darkness. I frankly invite readers of this book to read Dr. Jeannette.

Conclusion

Poetry is the best way to conquer unexpected places, whether they call it distant lands or sensitive souls, even if the poet never leaves the place where he was born, it transforms lives, it transports the writer to other universes, I even dare to say that it immortalizes people or things from which it is inspired, let’s cultivate it whenever possible.

Read: Contemporary World Literature – Poetry from Mexico

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Read: Contemporary World Literature: Poetry from Mexico

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