April 16, 2025

Three Poems by Mohja Kahf

by Mohja Kahf

In these three poems by academic and poet Mohja Kahf, Syria is written not only as the site of violent abduction and imprisonment, but also as a diverse country suffering from Arab and Sunni supremacy.

—Layla Faraj, editorial assistant

If you know anything, tell Maimouna

if you met someone who’s been in prison

and may have seen them, tell Maimouna

You can’t mourn; to mourn is to desert them.

They might still be alive, they are.

—Mohja Kahf, Tell Maimouna

Tell Maimouna

They weren’t on the list 

They weren’t on the list of the dead,

the one released July 2018 

of thirty-seven hundred prisoners killed 

years before, without notice to their families.

Maimouna’s brothers were not on the list— 

Iqbal and Suhaib, early twenties

when they were detained November, 2012 

About yay tall. Thin. Thick brown-black hair.

Lifelong intentional nonviolence gives their faces

a certain innocence

If you know anything, tell Maimouna

if you met someone who’s been in prison

and may have seen them, tell Maimouna  

You can’t mourn; to mourn is to desert them.

They might still be alive, they are. 

Suhaib will need that notebook with the clasp

I’m saving for him. I’m stowing the Racine

volumes; Iqbal will need them when he starts teaching

French literature. Their place is saved.

Lives wide open. Unfinished. 

You keep talking to them in your head, 

bargaining against the gnaw,

against mass graves, 

before the spinner in your brain 

yields to sleep. You banish the thought. Banish it. 

Meanwhile, another round of search.

Some bureaucrat may finally talk. 

Some new prisoner released to ply for information. 

The mind repeats, there could be explanations, there could. 

Mazen spent seventeen years inside, and he came out. 

It happens. It could happen. It’s only 

been six years. Seven now. Nine. Twelve. 

Searching. Grieving. Guilt for grieving. 

Coping with guilt, and the cycle repeats,

a wound that won’t close. Mustn’t close. 

Search with us. Hope for us 

when we no longer dare to hope.

And tell Maimouna.

Bibúre

We Arab Syrians could learn a word or two in Kurdish

Say, “Sere Kaniye,” or “Mem ú Zin,” or “biji Kurdistan”

Kurdish Syrians already speak two tongues of endurance,

long ago decoded a regime 

that fires on funerals and calls it “counter-terrorism,”

long ago learned the difference between a soccer match

and a march for rights on land their ancestors furrowed

Kurds already knew the difference between a protester and a terrorist

before it dawned on Arab Syrians getting shot for shouting “azadi”

at the only protest we dubbed with a Kurdish name

We could learn to say s’pas

We could learn to say bibúre

Hidebound in Diaspora

Slowly, you forget the stone church where your great-

grandmother murmured Aramaic blessings for the Virgin,

and you start to think all Syrians are like

the Sunni Arab ones at your Manchester mosque 

In the Chicago Syrian doctor’s club, 

Black Syrians too poor to emigrate slip from sight

Post-1965 the U.S. filtered you by class, welcomed

your light-skinned college-boy dad, but left behind

Kurdish farmers in Sere Kaniye—which

you think is only called Ras al-Ayn. You overlook

that Assyrians might feel out of place

among your exiled Ikhwanji neighbors

at your corporate compound in Riyad

Living in Mecca, how often do you face-

to-face Yezidi Syrians? You start to imagine

that Alawites have horns, forget

your teen crush on the coastal girl beach-bred

You no longer daily see ‘Uqqal of the Jabal 

born and reborn. Your kids 

and Syrian Turkmen kids 

in diaspora keep separate kitchen-table languages

It slips your mind that Armenians are home in Syria too

Your grandkids mistake singer Omar Souleyman for “khaleeji”

but think Asala “looks Syrian”

Together, you watch Bab al-Hara over fajitas

from the Dallas superstore, and misremember 

a Syria filled only with people like you

Mohja Kahf is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas since 1995 in the English Department and Program in Middle East Studies. Mohja, author of a novel and three poetry books, was exiled from Syria until 8 Dec 2024.  Kahf is a member of the Syrian Women’s Political Movement, Radius of Arab American Writers, and Syrian Nonviolence Movement. Mohja serves on the board of Canopy NWA, a refugee resettlement agency in northwest Arkansas.