Salim Barakat joins the scholarly debate: The People of Three O’clock at Dawn on the Third Thursday

Kurdish poet Salim Barakat’s The People of Three O’clock at Dawn on the Third Thursday (Ahl al Thālitha Ṣabāḥan fī al Khamees al Thālith) imagines a People, seen emerging only at a precise ritualized moment, on the “third Thursday.” The People are Kurdish and are bound by a shared condition of exile, vigilance, and existential crisis. Each stanza of a group of initially 41 stanzas presents an issue, analysis, and then conclusion, told largely by the use of symbols. In this later work of 2008, Barakat is analytical and could be said to have matured as a scholarly poet. In for example, his narrative Sages of Darkness (Fuqahā’ al-Ẓalām), a combination of poetical prose and actual poetry written in 1985, also with late Ottoman settings, the poet resists closure; it is preservational rather than being diagnostic. The People of Three O’clock at Dawn on the Third Thursday occasionally, importantly, but not prominently, uses ta’wīl of the Qur’an reminiscent of for example his earlier long poem The Obscure (al-Mu‘jam) published in 2004.