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Metis Fiction
Poetry
13 x 19.5 cm, 92 pp
ISBN No. 975-342-244-X
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Prints:
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1st Print: May 1999
2nd Print: May 2000
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Download high resolution copy 
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About the Author
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Bejan Matur was born of an Alevi Kurdish family in 1968 in the ancient Hittite city of Maraş in southeast Turkey. Her first school was in her own village; later she attended high school in the region's most important cultural centre Gaziantep. These years were spent living with her sisters far from their parents. She studied Law at Ankara University, but has never practiced. In her university years, she was published in several literary periodicals. Reviewers found her poetry "dark and mystic". The shamanist poetry with its pagan perceptions, belonging to the past rather than the present, of her birthplace and the nature and life of her village, attracted much attention. Her first book, Rüzgâr Dolu Konaklar (Winds Howl Through the Mansions), published in 1996, unrelated to the contemporary mainstream of Turkish poets and poetry, won several literary prizes. Her second book, Tanrı Görmesin Harflerimi (God Must Not See My Letters, 1999) was warmly greeted. Two further books appeared simultaneously in 2002, Ayın Büyüttüğü Oğullar (Sons Reared by the Moon) and Onun Çölünde (In His Desert), continuing the distinctive language and world of imagery special to herself and her poetry. Her poems have been translated and published in English as In the Temple of a Patient God (Arc Publications, 2004). Bejan Matur, who believes there is no frontier between poetry and life, travels the world like a long-term desert nomad. She stops by Istanbul, a city she sometimes lives in.
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Other Books from Metis
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Rüzgâr Dolu Konaklar (Winds Howl Through the Mansions),1996
Onun Çölünde (In His Desert), 2002
Ayın Büyüttüğü Oğullar (Sons Reared by the Moon), 2002
İbrahim’in Beni Terk Etmesi (Abraham Forsaking Me ), 2008, Poetry
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Bejan Matur
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God Must Not See My Letters
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Tanrı Görmesin Harflerimi
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Reviews
Excerpt
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“To read Bejan Matur is to walk into a windswept desert strewn with bones and broken bodies and stones stained red by absent gods. Nothing is whole; nothing explains itself; nothing lasts. Horsemen gallop out of the night only to fade into the mountains on the horizon. Gravestones line the roads. Ruined houses howl with wind while shepherds sing dirges about a shattered, scattered tribe left to wander in the dark. It is a haunted, desolate and fragmented landscape in which every stone glows with a grief beyond words...
“Her poems are jagged shards that stand together only to expose history as a myth. But it is still possible to see them as children of her childhood. Matur comes from a Kurdish Alevi family and grew up in Southeastern Turkey at a time of virtual civil war. And it is possible, when reading her poems, to imagine what that might mean. It is evident in their very shape, for Matur carves away at her images until she's stripped them down to the anguish at their heart. She claims no literary ancestors, drawing instead upon the oral traditions of her childhood…
“Matur does not write in Kurdish, the banned, and therefore private, language of her early childhood. She writes in Turkish, the language in which she was educated — one might almost say exiled... She talks on the one hand of her Turkish being stronger than her Kurdish. And then she talks of the way in which dead languages lurk inside living languages. Words never forget their spiritual histories... She speaks of cutting her poems back and back, shaving them down to the bone until she has found the old word inside the new word, the Turkish poem that owes its haunting power to Kurdish.
“So she is chipping and carving for a reason. Her dedication to this cause is absolute, and it takes her far beyond the questions raised by her own history. And it's this that makes her a world poet of the highest order.”
- Maureen Freely
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Feridun Andaç, Cumhuriyet, 6 June 2002
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“She is the poet of a quest, a drift, a journey of finding one's voice, of shaping into language the fire one has been through. I very much value the voice she has brought to contemporary Turkish poetry. She’s the bearer of glad tidings: a refined poetry, cleansed of artifice, shallowness, redundancy. As she exposes the color beneath the skin, she takes you around in the labyrinths of that deep ache, and reveals how what comes from within life can be masterfully crafted into the word of poetry. Bejan Matur is bound to become the boundless and prolific voice of our 'new poetry'”
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TO BE IN THE WORLD IS PAIN.
All the red stones on earth are smeared
with blood of the god.
And that’s why red stones
teach our childhood.
When we are children, the god
walks beside us
He touches our ear-rings
and necklace
He enters and hides in our shiny shoes
and the folds of our childish ribbon.
I must buy a flame-red dress and bed,
a red ring
and lamp.
There must come a time
when the mother’s time begins and ends
The blood that knows how to wait,
also knows how to be a stone.
To be in the world is pain –
this I have learned.
Red darkness
blue darkness
and the beginning,
the meaning of these must be
that they never abandon us,
our mother and our god
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