Thanal Online: C. P. Aboobacker

Our good friend, poet and translator, Farideh Hassanzadeh, sent this poem to me several months ago. Today seems a fine day to welcome another international poet to earthfamilyalpha and to feature work from Aboobacker's on line journal, including an interview therein of Farideh.
SB

Love Manifesto
by C. P Aboobacker, Indian poet and translator, chief editor of Thanal Online.

Time changes, oh, friend,
Your midnight of frightening dreams
Is twilight of purple sky for me
With breeze of dreams and fulfillment

Sun rises and sets together
And your morn to me is the beginning of a sleep
World is always sleeping and waking up
Different people dream at different times.
My nightmare is daydream to you,
My moonlight is hot sun to you

Yet, let us agree
Not to exchange good for evil, life for death,
And creation for destruction
Let us share flower and fragrance,
Let us admire the qualities of creation
And not the properties of weapons and enmity

There is a bounty beneath every human relation
A bounty not the evils spirits can steal away
Time and space cannot destroy it
It is the fragrance of sighs,
And notes of the lakes and songs of the larks
Telling the saddest thoughts of man
Flutes carry it in their hollows
Hallowed by the holes of octave
Rumi the pedestrian sang it along
In memory of his beloved friend

© C. P. Aboobacker, 2008.

C.P. ABOOBACKER, editor of Thanal Online lives in Calicut in Kerala. His interests include writing, publishing poems, essays, and many more literary things. Latest writing is about Channels and Globalizations. He is a retired professor of history. He He can be contacted at cpaboobacker@gmail.com

* Art from March edition of thanalonlilne by Riva Sweetrocket.



And here is an interview of Farideh Hassanzadeh by Melissa Tuckey published in thanalonline. I have copied a short excerpt from the interview here. Click on the link to read more.

Tuckey: What is it like to be a woman writing in Iran? Do women poets receive an equal amount of admiration, support and respect?
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Hassanzadeh: In recent years, women writers have been more popular than men writers for they are better to able to express the hidden realities of family and society. Women writers like Roya Pirzad, Fariba Vafi, and many others have won the most famous literary prizes and people buy their books in spite of financial problems. The books of women writers reach the 20th or 30th edition within a very short time. But as for poets, our great poets are still Forough Farrokhzad and Simin Behbahani from the 1940s and 1950s. Meanwhile, among our great directors, women like Rakhshan Bani Etemad, Samira Makhmalbaf, and Tahmine Milany have achieved international success and fame. And our best playwrights have been women too. Increasingly, more women than men are studying in universities.

Tuckey: How has war affected your life and your writing?

Hassanzadeh: Before war my poetry was not familiar with words like: bombs, alarming sounds, ruins and fears. The sky and the beauty of clouds or the brightness of stars turned into a terrible roof above me where bombs could fall and explode all my dreams. Before war I used to see the killed only on TV; in the news about Palestine. I never was able to smell the warm stream of blood shown in massacre reports. War acted like a sleight of hand to make the distance between me and the world disappear, beyond the TV. It turned my first little son to a bird without wings to fly, a bird good only to be buried forever.

Tuckey: I am sorry to hear about the loss of your son. How old was he and when did this happen? How do you cope with the loss?

Hassanzadeh: I almost lost my second child too. On my way to the hospital to give birth to my daughter Sufi, Iraq bombed my city of Tehran eight times in less than one hour. An old man who was looking at me big with child, shouted to the sky: “God! What is wrong that this child must fear coming into this world?” With each bomb the baby inside me tried painfully to take refugee in a peaceful place she couldn't find. In fact during the war instead of the doctor's protective hands, bombs gave birth to many Iranian women's children in the streets. In the past soldiers targeted enemy positions, but now they drop bombs on women and children. My son, before he could experience the fear of his first day of school, experienced the fear of his last breath, his hands gone with the bombs. He never tasted the joy of putting a pencil on paper to write a word.

As for your question: How did I cope with the loss? Honestly I could forget his death but my feet, indifferent to me, sometimes go to the place where my son was bombed. All mothers of dead children know their children never leave them, never forget them. They wait for the night to return in dreams. They live behind the closed eyelids of their mothers.


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