David Naimon
speaker
4,074 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 24 Aug
David Naimon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
But I wanted to first, before we hear it, to orient listeners to one detail I I think that won't be legible to those unaware of Kurdish history.
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The first two words are after halabjah, which is referring to the Halabjah massacre, the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian population in history.
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And it was perpetrated by Saddam Hussein against
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his own Iraqi Kurdish population, killing many thousands, and which was ruled decades later by the Iraqi criminal supreme tribunal as a genocidal massacre.
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And I know that encountering Beckus's work in general was important for you as a poet.
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So whether before or after you read, if you want to speak about him as a figure or as an encounter or about this specific poem, I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.
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So silence in many different ways is an important way through which you frame your own work, both I think within the poems and within your discussion of your poems.
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For instance, your craft talk titled Silence as Form: Navigating Forced Isolation in Kurdish Poetics, or in the recent Kurdish-themed issue of the Markaz Review, your essay.
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Say what's form to silence Kurdish poets on the impossibility.
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But while we will explore, I think, different ways you engage with and employ silence today, I think it felt important to start with God's silence, this sense of forsakenness in the Bekas poem.
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So
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In the same issue of the Markas review as your essay.
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The Kurdish poet and dancer Panar Banu Yashar, who is part of the Kurdish poets collective that you are a part of, they engage with Milton's Paradise Lost, speaking of the relationship between Satan and God.
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She says, quote, their relationship is embroiled in the language of colonialism, positioning the banishment to hell.
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Hell as a violent birth of the nation, heaven, a place Satan and the fallen angels may never return to, despite it being their home.
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Satan seeks to find a way to endure what he has lost.
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For me, Satan is a way to explore my own experience of statelessness as a Kurdish person, the endless abyss of hell which God himself never visits.
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Mirrors for me the Kurdish diaspora, my hell which origin never visits, I linger along the fractures, as does Satan, and we both desire comprehension beyond borders.
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When I think of Becus's poem, one poem of yours it makes me think of is your poem, of his names we remember.
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I was hoping you might introduce us to of his names we remember and and we could hear it along with um conventional warfare.
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Showing 81–100 of 4,074 · page 5 of 204
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