Tag: Ian Lennart Surraville

She threw that man’s head
severed, plucked
off his body
rolling down
on the grey pavement
of the town square
and screamed
curling blood
that her honour was
exonerated. 

This land is of
perpetual sadness.
Winters promise springs
never arrive;
springs bloom
no flowers.
Summers are of constant
weariness of toiling sweat;
autumns yield no fruit but
for all the surreptitious farewells done.
News come with imprints
of iron bars;
letters are rearranged
by fingers invisible.
The inhabitants of this land
aren’t even free to be silent;
even their silence needs to be
silenced. 

Silence and always,
nothing has changed;
eight months and silence,
insane silence,
decaying numbness.
Winters just become
delayed springs,
absent springs;
always and no exception
like a time bomb that goes off
without blood,
without sound.
The fabric of her heart is not derived
of all the recognisable beauties
and for whom she asks the point of
this silence’s existence,
no one
knows. 

They call her a monster —
beaten, abused and
raped.
She wore her soul on her tattered
sleeves;
her name marked red on her
forehead.
Her scream echoed only
in between her
ears;
her mouth force shut
by the muted violence of
indifference.
Her womb bore the semen
of a man whose penetration
only spilled disgust and
humiliation;
her labia only a channel
for another man’s preconceived
imagery of pleasure,
soiled with dripping reminder
of the fate of being born
as one among many
beasts with
vaginas. 

So she decided to pluck a flower
for herself,
carried it in her hand
its red petals falling,
dripping,
its root deeply seeded
in her womb
for five months.
She needed no spring;
she became that spring,
that perpetual spring,
delayed,
absent,
and again, always
silent.

---

Ian is an American expatriate writer currently residing in Turkey. Strongly influenced by the 20th century witness literature, it became the central tenet to his works, and he wandered conflict zones like Bosnia and Afghanistan in his younger years. His latest works have been about poverty, refugees, human rights and women’s rights in the Middle East and Turkey. His favourite poem is W. B. Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” and he lives by a line from the poem, “a lonely impulse of delight.” When he is not travelling, Ian loves being picked on by his 13-year-old son, Edward, for being clumsy and slow at getting pun jokes and reading his first drafts to his 7-month-old cat, Jean-Paul Sartre. His previous two reading cats, Simone de Beauvoir and Ernest Hemingway, ran away with their lovers. 

 

To you,
She was just a
pretty-faced young 
orospu* who was
nothing but
three holes in which
you could relieve the daily urge of
quick pleasure,
just one of
many young pretty faces come and
go in and
out of
your mini bus that
you could use alternately in
your sickness. 

To you,
She had no name nor
family nor
affiliation nor
friends nor
emotions nor
future plans nor
dreams nor
opinions nor
preferences nor
honour nor
self-respect nor
integrity nor
voice. 

For you,
She just had to submit to
your urge without a
protest or
resistance so
that you could go in and
out of
her three holes until
after you were satisfied like
walking out of
a toilet at a
bus terminal — to be
discarded and
forgotten. 

For you,
She could not have possibly
fought back with
scream and
struggle and
pepper spray like
a human being in
a desperate attempt to
preserve her honour and
integrity and
safety so
She had to be stabbed and
beaten down with an
iron pipe until
She could be silent and
still like a
pretty-faced young
orospu with
three holes — bloody,
dead and to be
burnt. 

*orospu: n. a Turkish word equivalent to an English word, bitch.

Ian is an American expatriate writer currently residing in Turkey. Strongly influenced by the 20th century witness literature, it became the central tenet to his works, and he wandered conflict zones like Bosnia and Afghanistan in his younger years. His latest works have been about poverty, refugees, human rights and women’s rights in the Middle East and Turkey. His favourite poem is W. B. Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” and he lives by a line from the poem, “a lonely impulse of delight.” When he is not travelling, Ian loves being picked on by his 13-year-old son, Edward, for being clumsy and slow at getting pun jokes and reading his first drafts to his 7-month-old cat, Jean-Paul Sartre. His previous two reading cats, Simone de Beauvoir and Ernest Hemingway, ran away with their lovers.