Music & Arts, Page 49

Gulsen Sevket Beyatli Poetry Reading

Turn around
Let us go and see
Our Iraq with its sadness
Our palm trees,
And the Tigris

Iraqi poet Gulsen Sevket Beyatli. (Staff photo E. Pasquini)

GULSEN SEVKET Beyatli wrote these words—the opening lines of her poem “Turn Around”—on the airplane when she flew to Qatar a few years ago, wishing instead she was going to Baghdad. On Nov. 7, to the accompaniment of Indian flutist Swapan Gandhi, she read this poem and others before a small group at San Francisco’s Hanuman Center.

In September the Iraqi-born poet returned from Qatar, where she worked as a translator and also taught yoga for a year and a half to American service members returning from Afghanistan and Iraq at Al-Sayliyah army base.

“It was an incredible experience, although I was very careful, I always talked about love and peace,” the yoga instructor said. “It was very hard and sometimes I would just say ”˜replace your anger with love and peace.’ Think about it: In this world we are all the same. We are equal. We all have hearts. We all have families. There is no need for hatred.”

At the end of the evening, she handed the microphone to Mohammed Al-Gazawy, who delighted the Iraqis in the audience with his rendition of legendary Iraqi singer Nazem El-Ghazali’s “Ayaratni bil Shaeb” (“She teased me for my grey hair”).

—Elaine Pasquini