Murat Özyaşar

Jul 23, 2024 | wordswithoutborders.org | Pratishtha Pandya |Nina Perrotta |Murat Özyaşar

There’s a moment in Çayan Demirel’s documentary Dersim ’38 that no one should miss. When recounting her experience of the Dersim Catastrophe of 1938, the elderly Mama Dünya starts out speaking entirely in Zaza. Then Turkish words begin to creep in, till at last she ends her account with a sentence in broken Turkish: “Kimsiz kaldım, kimsiz kaldım, derdime yanak yok” (“I’m all ’lone, I’m all ’lone, I have no shoulder to cry on”).

May 11, 2024 | wordswithoutborders.org | Judith Kiros |Murat Özyaşar |Kristian Lundberg |Alexander Aguayo

In color. A black man rests among the roses. He’s tired, he’s neither wounded nor dead. Petals stick to his hair like the light of winter. You turn around in your dream, bite the inside of my thigh . . . You’re right. I’m too much a coward to stay. *A sudden cold snap. Rain causes the blue mountains to rear up, stray dogs to bark loudly, it makes thin scarred cats hiss at their wet fur. The song of the mosque and the song of the church are two birds falling upward at dawn. I’m so far away.