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Bitter-sweet encounters with love, exile and home

Don’t Forget the Couscous

by Amin Darwish (Smokestack Books, £7.95)

DURING the second Gulf war the Kurdish poet Amir Darwish came to Britain as an asylum-seeker, by hanging underneath a lorry on a cross-Channel ferry. 

He now has British citizenship and degrees from Teesside and Durham universities. 

At a time when the British government is talking about Syrian refugees “swarming,” “marauding” and threatening our way of life, his story is an example of the ways in which we can be enriched by welcoming desperate people into our communities.

Don’t Forget the Couscous is Darwish’s full-length collection.

It is a book of poetry about exile and home and a beautiful love-song to the Arab world — Kurdistan, Morocco, Palestine and his native Syria: “The world/Is a stone./A child in a Baghdad street kicks it/And a drop of water/Cultivates all the deserts of Dubai so it can flower. It is an eye-ball reflecting the sun/Then blinking to swallow the earth./Or maybe it is a vase/ Near a window/In Aleppo.”

It is a memoir of the failed Arab Spring and the civil war that has turned Syria into a “fountain of blood” and a bitter account of the violent interference of the West in the Islamic world. 

It is also a book about being a Muslim and not a terrorist. 

I Am is a powerful account of the experience of Islam in Europe, from “a Friday night doner kebab after a good night out” to a “girl who has taken off the hijab in order to feel safe” and “a mosque with broken windows.” 

The strongest poem in the book is Sorry, a long and ironic apology on behalf of Muslims everywhere for having contributed nothing to the modern world except astronomy, coffee, clocks, falafels, apricots, doner kebabs and algebra. 

Not forgetting the couscous, of course, as the book’s title reminds us.

Review by Andy Croft

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