Cegerxwîn: The Poet of Exile

At a Glance

Cegerxwîn was born in 1903, in the village of Hesar in the Gercüş area, today part of Batman province in Turkey. His real name was Şêxmûs.
During the First World War the family migrated south, to the Amûdê area on what is today the Syrian side.
He studied in the medreses, the traditional religious schools, took his icazet, and served as a mele in the villages. Then he dropped the robe and gave his life to poetry.
His pen name is a diagnosis: in Kurdish "ciger" is liver, "xwîn" is blood. Cegerxwîn, the man whose liver bleeds.
The target of his poetry was inside before it was outside: the agha order, the authority of the shaikh, and ignorance. His best-known refrain is a single word: bese, enough.
He entered left politics; his poem in praise of Stalin is recorded in anthologies today. In later years he turned toward Kurdish organizing.
In Baghdad he worked on the Kurdish language: a grammar in 1961, a dictionary in 1962.
His poems were read on Radio Yerevan and spread by heart in the recordings of famous voices. His divan Kîme Ez was printed in Beirut in 1973.
In 1979 he went to Sweden. His last divans and a two-volume history of Kurdistan were printed in Stockholm.
He died in the autumn of 1984 in Stockholm; his body was carried to Qamişlo. His name is counted today among the founders of modern Kurdish poetry.

Stockholm, 26 September 1979. A man of seventy-six, bent over paper in the early-darkening evening of the north. He is writing a poem in Kurdish. The poem calls to a beloved, perhaps to a homeland, and ends with this quatrain: "Ji te dûrim te nabînim / Li ser te ez ciger xwînim / Çi bêjim ko nikarim bêm / Di îro ez swêdîme." In English: Far from you, I cannot see you. For you my liver bleeds. What can I say, I cannot come; today I am in Sweden.

The pen name of the man signing these lines is already this: Cegerxwîn, the one whose liver bleeds. Half a century after choosing his name, the poet hides it inside a poem at the last stop of his life. The date and the place are on record; the poem sits in the divan printed after his death.

This article follows that man's trail: a life reaching from a village room in Gercüş to Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut, and Stockholm. The road is long; the documents are in our hands.

From Hesar to Amûdê: The Map of a Childhood

The records give the year of birth as 1903. The place is the village of Hesar in the Gercüş area; the region was an Ottoman province then, and belongs to Batman province today. The family was poor. The biographies write that mother and father died early, and that the child grew up in the houses of others.

Then the map changed. During the years of the First World War the family migrated south, to the Amûdê area on what is today the Syrian side. A few years later a state border was drawn across. The village where he was born and the town where he grew up were now in two separate countries. For Cegerxwîn's generation, exile was not an event but a condition of birth.

So how does a poor orphan learn to read in that age? The only door is the medrese. The medrese is the traditional school that gave religious education around the mosque; though the language of lessons was Arabic, its teachers and students lived in Kurdish. Young Şêxmûs went from village to village and studied. The sources put the year of his icazet around 1925; the icazet is the certificate of competence a teacher gives his student. Now he was a mele: the village's prayer-leader, its teacher, the man of marriages and funerals.

How Did Mele Şêxmûs Become Cegerxwîn?

Being a mele gave him two things: a classical education and a pulpit among the people. In his medrese years he met the divans of Melayê Cizîrî and Ehmedê Xanî; we told of these two mountains of Kurdish poetry separately on this site. The pulpit showed him the peasant's life: farmers in debt, fathers bowing before the agha, children with no school.

These two kinds of knowledge fed each other and gave birth to a pen name. He signed his poems not with the name Şêxmûs but with Cegerxwîn: the one whose liver bleeds. The name was not a literary ornament but a diagnosis. What was this liver bleeding for? His own lines answer: for the poverty of his people, their division, and their sleep.

In the 1930s a new door opened in Damascus. The journal Hawar, brought out by Celadet Alî Bedirxan, had begun to write Kurdish in Latin letters; the journal's story is a separate article on this site. Most sources count Cegerxwîn among the journal's writers. The medrese-trained mele joined the founders of a literature that was changing its alphabet.

His dropping of the robe falls in these years too. A firm date is hard to give; the biographies spread the process across the late 1930s and the 1940s. What is certain is the result: he stepped down from the pulpit and never climbed it again. The people still called him by the name left from his teaching days: Seydayê Cegerxwîn, that is, Cegerxwîn the Teacher.

Against the Agha and Ignorance: A One-Word Refrain

What does Cegerxwîn's poetry tell? One of his most famous poems opens like this: "Mela banga sibê didî / Dibê: ji xew rabin, bese / Ev bû hezar sal kolene / Ta key di xewde bin, bese." In English: The mele calls the dawn prayer. He says, rise from sleep, enough. A thousand years you have been slaves. How long will you sleep, enough.

Notice it: the mele who calls the prayer is calling the people not to worship but to wake. The old mele rebuilds his old pulpit inside the poem. The refrain is a single word: bese, enough. The same poem goes on and looks for the guilty within: until you are schooled and wise, until you throw off being lessonless and stateless, this sleep will last.

There were three institutions on his target board. The first is the agha order: the landlords who hold the soil and bind the peasant in debt. The second is a certain class of shaikh and mele: religious men who live off the backs of the people; that the one saying this was himself medrese-trained gives the words their weight. The third is ignorance: for Cegerxwîn, the school comes before the gun. In his poems the object of praise is not the sword but the pen and the book.

His language fit his cause too. He left behind the heavy ornament of the divan tradition and wrote in the peasant's daily Kurdish, in a measure made to be memorized. The result can be measured: his poems circulated in the mouths of people who could not read or write. Perhaps the greatest thing that can happen to a poet is this: not that his book is read, but that it multiplies without a book.

When the Poet Entered Politics: Party, Stalin, Zoroaster

Socially-minded poetry carried him into organized politics. At the end of the 1940s he joined the Syrian Communist Party; the sources give the years of membership with small differences. The document of this period is in his poems. The poem he wrote for Stalin's seventieth birthday entered Selim Temo's anthology of Kurdish poetry: it opens, "O great Stalin, long live your principles." Like many Middle Eastern poets of the age, Cegerxwîn saw in Moscow a hope of deliverance.

The hope did not last. Toward the end of the 1950s he broke from the party; the biographies tie his reason to the Kurdish question finding no answer inside it. He turned toward Kurdish organizing. His head ran into trouble with the Damascus governments again and again; detentions and periods of pressure are on record. In the details the sources diverge; the line is clear: he made no peace with the powers that ruled.

The matter of belief is not a straight line either. Where did a mele's faith end up? Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, describing the interest a section of Kurdish intellectuals felt for Zoroastrianism in the twentieth century, gives Cegerxwîn as an example: for most of his life and work, the poet exalted Zoroastrianism against Islam. The name of his fifth divan confirms it: Zend-Avesta is the name of the Zoroastrian holy text. In the same place Dr. Izady draws the end of the curve too: toward the end of his life the poet moved toward a vision of an idealized Islam without a clergy. A life that began as a mele closed in a reckoning with belief.

The Baghdad Lectern, the Beirut Press

Cegerxwîn was not only a poet; he took on the craft of the language too. Why would a poet spend his years on a grammar and a dictionary? The answer is in the books themselves. At the end of the 1950s he went to Baghdad. In Iraq in those years Kurdish, unlike in Turkey, had a place in publishing and education; the story of that contrast is in our article on the Kurdish language bans. In Baghdad he published a grammar on the structure of Kurdish in 1961, and a Kurdish dictionary in 1962; both are recorded in the bibliography of the Kurdish Library in Stockholm. Some of the sources write that he taught Kurdish literature at the university, some that he worked in the Kurdish section of the radio.

Then Syria again, and periods of pressure again. His divans were printed across a geography that knew no border: the first divan had come out in Damascus in the 1940s; the third divan, Kîme Ez, was printed in Beirut in 1973. Its name is a question: Who am I? The question found its answer in the children of a people whose identity had been banned.

In these years the poetry met the voice. The Kurdish broadcasts of Radio Yerevan read his poems too; we told the radio's story separately on this site. Famous voices set his lines to music; the recordings of "Kîne Em" sung by Şivan Perwer carried these lines to the crowds. In every house where a cassette played, Cegerxwîn was now there too; most who listened memorized the lines without knowing the poet's name.

The Last Stop, Stockholm: The Northern Editions of the Divans

In 1979, at seventy-six, he went to Sweden. Why would a man of that age choose the far north? The choice can look surprising; it was not. Sweden in those years was turning into the centre of Kurdish publishing; we told of that turn in a separate article. The old poet settled into the middle of the print shops that would print his books and the exile community that would read him.

His output did not fall; it rose. The Roja Nû publishing house in Stockholm printed his divans one after another: Ronak in 1980, Zend-Avesta in 1981, Şefeq in 1982, Hêvî in 1983. The same house published his two-volume history of Kurdistan (1985, 1987) and his collection of Kurdish folklore (1988). His last divan, Aşitî, that is Peace, could be printed only after 1984. He also dictated his life story in old age; the book came out from the APEC publishing house near Stockholm ten years after his death, and its Turkish edition was printed in Istanbul in 2003.

In the autumn of 1984 he died in Stockholm; most sources give the date as 22 October. His body was carried to Qamişlo, the city of his life. The sources tell of a great crowd on the day of burial; it is widely written that his grave is in the garden of his house. The account of an eighty-one-year life is plain: he lived in four countries, was a guest in none, and wrote Kurdish in all.

How Does Memorization Become Inheritance?

What was left behind from Cegerxwîn? First the number: the bibliography of the Kurdish Library counts eight divans; their names appear in the records with small spelling differences: Sewra Azadî, Kîme Ez, Ronak, Zend-Avesta, Şefeq, Hêvî, Aşitî, and the first. From the 1990s the divans were reprinted in Istanbul. The books printed in Beirut and Stockholm in the ban years came, at last, home to their reader's country.

Then the inheritance that is hard to measure: memorization. His poems circulate to this day at weddings, at gatherings, in posts on social media. Literary historians argue over his art; some write that his political poetry overshadowed the art, some count him a founder of modern Kurdish poetry. Scholars are divided here, and this is a healthy debate. The people's verdict, though, seems given: a poet is only memorized this much.

For the last word let me return to the poet's question. Kîme Ez, who am I? Cegerxwîn answered it with a life: an orphan of Hesar, a mele of Amûdê, a journal writer of Damascus, a language worker of Baghdad, an exile of Stockholm. And the sum of them all: a man whose liver bled and whose pen did not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Cegerxwîn mean, and what was the poet's real name? In Kurdish "ciger" is liver and "xwîn" is blood; Cegerxwîn is a pen name meaning "the one whose liver bleeds." The poet's real name was Şêxmûs; among the people he was known by the title left from his teaching days, Seydayê Cegerxwîn.

Where was Cegerxwîn born, and where did he die? He was born in 1903 in the village of Hesar in the Gercüş area, today part of Batman province. His family migrated to the present-day Syrian side during the war years. He died in 1984 in Stockholm; his body was carried to Qamişlo.

How many divans did Cegerxwîn have? The bibliography of the Kurdish Library in Stockholm records eight divans. Among them are Kîme Ez (Beirut, 1973), Ronak (1980), Zend-Avesta (1981), Şefeq (1982), Hêvî (1983), and the posthumous Aşitî (1985). He also published a grammar, a dictionary, a folklore collection, and a two-volume history.

Why were his poems memorized so widely? Because he wrote in the people's daily language, in a measure made for memory, and on the people's own troubles: the agha order, poverty, ignorance, division. Radio Yerevan's broadcasts and the settings by famous voices carried the poems to those who could not read or write, too.

What was Cegerxwîn's political line? In his youth he was inside socially-minded poetry and left politics; he joined the Syrian Communist Party and wrote a poem in praise of Stalin. At the end of the 1950s he broke from the party and turned to Kurdish organizing. He made no peace with the powers that ruled in any period.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

The Kurdish Library (Stockholm) web archive, the Cegerxwîn bibliography: the places and years of printing of the divans, the language books, and the history volumes come from here.
The Kurdish Library poetry pages: "Mela banga sibê didî" and the Stockholm poem of 26 September 1979 (from the divan Aşitî) were taken from here.
Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th edition); for the interest in Zoroastrianism and the late-period curve of belief.
The academic thesis on Kurdish radio broadcasting in the Middle East; the Radio Yerevan broadcasts and the Stalin poem in Selim Temo's translation were conveyed from here.
Cegerxwîn, Jînenîgariya Min (APEC, 1995); Turkish edition: Hayat Hikayem (Evrensel, 2003).

Social Media Summaries

The following summaries are ready to share; copy and use them.

Stockholm, 26 September 1979. The poet of seventy-six writes in his last exile: "What can I say, I cannot come; today I am in Sweden." The story of the man whose liver bled: bedelboseli.com/en/cegerxwin-poet-of-exile
His pen name was a diagnosis: Cegerxwîn, the one whose liver bleeds. He studied in the medrese, became a mele, dropped the robe, and gave his life to a one-word refrain: bese, enough: bedelboseli.com/en/cegerxwin-poet-of-exile
The mele who calls the dawn prayer calls the people not to worship but to wake: "A thousand years you have been slaves, enough." The old mele's new pulpit was the poem: bedelboseli.com/en/cegerxwin-poet-of-exile
Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut, Stockholm: his divans were printed in four countries, his memory grew in one geography. Cegerxwîn, the poet of the question Kîme Ez, who am I: bedelboseli.com/en/cegerxwin-poet-of-exile
His books were banned; his lines multiplied by radio wave, by cassette, and by heart. Cegerxwîn, the poet memorized even by those who could not read or write: bedelboseli.com/en/cegerxwin-poet-of-exile