What was it that brought Mammad Araz's poetry and Mohammad-Hossein Shahriar's poetry closer? Why did Mammad Araz answer no to the journalist's question, “If the President had given Shahriar a house to live in, would he have come to Baku?”
When we examine the works of two master artists – Seyid Mohammad-Hossein Shahriar and Mammad Araz – and filter them through our thoughts, we witness a strange, mystical attraction and connection between them, created by the divine word. What unites the poetry of these two artistic devotees is naturalness, sincerity, and spiritual connection. And it is also the promotion of respect for national values, attachment to national roots, and the desire and idea of building a bright future for the nation by relying on and drawing strength from national memory.
“The most infamous kind of desertion is turning away from ancestors, fleeing from roots, origin, and the 'self,' becoming 'sclerotic' in national memory, in spiritual memory (that is, in nerves, blood, roots!). Literature without memory is only the lot of a people without memory, the historical fate of one without a face, the destiny of one without essence and lineage, without origin and nobility. Just as the horizon, sky, and firmament do not retain stones, so too spiritual and moral emptiness does not retain memory.” M. Shahriar's poems “Salam to Heydarbaba”, “Sahandiyya”, and his works that shake our national memory can also be explained as a logical continuation of the thought of literary scholar-critic Yashar Garayev. In the memory of M. Shahriar, who returned to his native homeland – the village of Shangulava – the bitter-sweet memories of his childhood and adolescence come alive like a cinema screen, turning into the history of the homeland, the nation, its blood memory, and transforming into a national symphony in the poet's pen. What made the poem “Salam to Heydarbaba” beloved and familiar to compatriots living on both banks of the Araz is its presentation of the nation's innermost feelings in their own language:
Heydarbaba, the geese of Dry Lake,
The saz melodies played by the mountain passes,
The autumns and springs of the village and fields,
Are a cinema screen in my eyes,
And I sit alone, watching them myself.
Let's look at M. Araz's poetry in parallel. The same feelings form the main line and the essence of M. Araz's poetry. The main leitmotif of the poem “Ata ocağı” (Father's Hearth) is patriotism based on national honor, and his feeling of anxiety for the nation's future:
This hearth has remained with us from your grandfather,
When one hearth dies out, a unity is lost.
The extinguishing of a hearth is for our honor
The laughter of an enemy generation.
Since national language forms the basis of national spirit and national consciousness, M. Shahriar gives ample space in his work to the promotion of the mother tongue, the native language, and lovingly praises and propagates the Turkish language:
There is no language as beloved and desired as the Turkish language,
If you mix this noble language with another, it will not be noble.
M. Araz, likewise promoting this sacred ideal, addressed those who disliked their native language, writing:
Beware of tongues that grow dull from the scent of my language,
Beware of tongues that seek a new language.
Beware of hands that patch yesterday's history
Onto today's stone and bury it.
The spiritual influence of M. Shahriar's poetry on Mammad Araz's work was undoubtedly not without reason. Let us recall that in the second half of the 20th century, M. Shahriar's famous work “Salam to Heydarbaba” was one of the most widely read works in the entire Turkic world; there were countless imitations written for it, and it was discussed everywhere. On this side of the Araz – in Northern Azerbaijan – there were also quite a few poets and literary scholars whom M. Shahriar knew and corresponded with through poetry. M. Rahim, S. Rustam, B. Vahabzadeh, N. Khazri, H. Billuri, A. Tude, R. Aliyev, etc. This list also included M. Araz, who sought to open a new page in Azerbaijani literature with his creativity. M. Araz's interviews, the poems he dedicated to him, and the notes he made about Shahriar in his works demonstrate the poet's attachment to Shahriar's poetry and his love for Shahriar's pen.
Let's pay attention to the poem M. Araz dedicated to M. Shahriar in 1967, on the day when the 250th anniversary of the birth of M. Vagif, one of the classics of Azerbaijani literature, was celebrated, in the final hours of the celebration:
Gazes hung from airplanes,
Hopes remained spread on the roads.
From this heavy news, this ominous news,
Flowers remained unpicked in the flowerbeds
Shahriar did not come...
M. Araz would later clarify the writing of the poem “Shahriar did not come” as follows: “This poem was written long ago – in the year we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birth of the great Vagif, on the last day of the festivities, one evening. At that time, we had also invited master Shahriar to this great celebration of our people. However, the then-existing political regime did not want Shahriar to see Azerbaijan's light and great achievements, and prevented his arrival.”
The reasons why M. Shahriar did not come to Azerbaijan, and who on both sides prevented this, are still kept as a taboo in our literature. Until when? Explaining the 'why' is currently beyond our capabilities. But the obstruction of the great master of words' longed-for arrival in Northern Azerbaijan had deeply shaken all Shahriar-lovers, including M. Araz, who were eagerly awaiting his arrival:
In essence, the poet's homeland is the world,
In essence, the poet's word is the world.
In essence, the amateur who sets barriers for the poet
Goes against this world itself,
Goes against the laws of creation,
Goes against the revolving laws...
Whatever we say, the truth is this:
It became very difficult for us to see him...
In one of his interviews with journalists, M. Araz expressed his great, sublime love for Seyid Mohammad-Hossein Shahriar: “The master could not cross the bridge of longing from homeland to homeland until the end of his life. Although we did not meet face-to-face, the warmth of my heart, my heartbeats – my poems – met Shahriar and reached him sooner than I did. Now, hearing that the master shed tears of longing as he listened to my poems line by line, my heart was deeply moved. Today, there are dozens of young poets who drink from the wellspring of Shahriar's poetry and art. A series of poems titled “Salam to Heydarbaba” has emerged.”
Among these poems, those written by the poet M. Araz also have their place:
Heydarbaba, you could not see this day,
May the rocks echo this call,
The knot of a nation turned into mourning,
The heart burns secretly, the eye weeps,
If we utter a word, the word weeps on our tongue...
One of the similar aspects uniting the works of M. Shahriar and M. Araz was the suffering both poets endured for the integrity of Azerbaijan, the longing for Araz. In the poems Master Shahriar dedicated to S. Rustam, it is as if not the Araz river flows, but the longing for the homeland:
You are my tear, oh Araz, let my eye not see even if it looks,
What a terrible curtain you have drawn between two brothers!
Do not say it is mountains and stones, Suleyman, that separate you from me,
It is a pimple that has appeared between the eye and the eyebrow...
“Since the day I tied my fate to Araz, the sorrow of Araz has become the main artery of my poetry. I opened my eyes to the world on this side of the Araz, in ancient Nakhchivan, which fell captive to imperial chains. Since I came of age, the sorrow of Araz has become my sorrow. “Lights of Araz”, “Tonight I saw Araz in my dream”, “I saw Araz again”, “When my themes run out...” etc. The poem “Araz Flows” was written back in the 60s.”
Europe, on your map
There is no river of this color, after all!
From your furrowed chest
What bloody rivers flow!
In Mammad Araz's poetry, the sorrow and longing for Araz serve the ideas of national independence and integrity. The poems he wrote on this topic are a chronicle of the homeland's history for the poet:
...When I say Araz,
I don't just think of a river.
It is history, I see...
Or:
Tonight I saw Araz in my dream...
I saw Araz very content with its fate.
It threw a path over itself: "Cross with courage!"
It said: ...If courage does not rise above me,
Tabriz will lose its Tabriz-ness.
Literary scholar Ramiz Gasimov, who studies M. Araz's poetry, highly values precisely these factors in the poet's work: “The poet, who said "I am the voice of Araz," not only looked at the history of Azerbaijan's fragmentation through the theme of Araz but also succeeded in keeping alive the hopes for its reunification as an idea, an ideal. He is also a great citizen-poet because, in his works dedicated to Araz, he managed to reflect the ideology of Azerbaijanism even without using the word 'Azerbaijan'.”
Throughout his entire creative work and activity, Mammad Araz approached Shahriar's greatness, perfection, and spiritual richness with deep respect. The magnitude of this value is clearly evident in an interview he gave to journalist Teymur Mahmudlu: “During the conversation, I ask Mammad Araz what he thinks: if Shahriar were alive and the president gave Shahriar a house to live in, would he come to Baku? He replies that he would not. He loved Tabriz very much. His single-story, humble house was dearer to him than all the houses in the world. Then he tells me about his journey to Tabriz via Nakhchivan. He talks about visiting Shahriar's poor and simple house and his grave. He talks about how people in the streets of Tabriz approached him cautiously out of fear of Persian chauvinists.”
In the poem “Salam to Heydarbaba”, when M. Shahriar greeted the mountain and shared his burden of sorrow and grief, he also bid farewell to it, perhaps thinking that his fate might never lead him to these places again:
Much to be thankful for, we came again, we met,
We asked about those lost, those gone,
We had been estranged, God willing, we reconciled,
May another meeting be destined, or not,
May there be an opportunity in life, or not...
When we pay attention to M. Araz's poem “Farewell, Mountains”, we clearly feel the influence of “Salam to Heydarbaba” and M. Shahriar's sensibility. The overlapping points in these influences are the love for their native lands, the attachment, and the fear of losing it, in both artists:
I came, flowers and blossoms greeted me,
I leave, gray meadows wave goodbye.
The winds told my lament to the rivers:
Turbid one, stay well, flow – stay well!
Let us remember that there is one ideal that unites the poems dedicated to M. Shahriar – divine love for the master artist, infinite respect, and reverence for his art. M. Araz also remains faithful to this ideal. In his poem “It Still Remains” dedicated to Master Shahriar, he shares with him the pain of the problem of Azerbaijan's integrity:
There is a country – a bellows as big as itself,
Truth is braided on the tip of its tongue.
Many tear off the plaster of darkness and laugh,
My Heydarbaba, my Savalan still remain.
Mohammad-Hossein Shahriar's poem “Azerbaijan” is considered one of the masterpieces of his work
It is. Despite being written in Persian, the poem possesses a true national spirit, the idea of Azerbaijanism, and the desire of a national devotee to see his homeland whole. Shahriar scholar Elman Guliyev, in his book “Shahriar's Poetry and National Evolution”, highly evaluates the place of this work in the master artist's oeuvre, writing: “The poet, penetrating all the depths of socio-political issues, gave preference to the image of the people as a remedy that could save the nation from calamities, and repeatedly reflected these issues in his poems. In the poem “Azerbaijan”, as a continuation of the same logic, he takes national unity and national strength as the basis under the address of Azerbaijan and concludes his thoughts with the certainty that his hopes will come true as follows:
How long will your children be exiles from their homeland?
Join hands, rebel, awaken, awaken, Azerbaijan!
Enough of ashes being sifted over our heads in the fires of separation,
Stand up! Either be free, or burn completely, Azerbaijan!
Shahriar's cry for the homeland seems to echo in M. Araz's poem “Stand Up, Azerbaijan”. As for the common features uniting M. Shahriar's poem “Azerbaijan” and M. Araz's poem “Stand Up, Azerbaijan”, these are rebellious motifs, feelings of anxiety for the homeland's future, and a call for national unity:
Why are you sleeping, old volcano, I am with you!
Stand up, Azerbaijan, I am with you!
Without you, we know everything like this!
Without you, all of us can die!
Shahriar's cry for the nation seems to tear M. Araz's chest, shakes him by the collar, sounds like a roar, a mad bellow, echoing:
I am with you, justice, I am with you,
National pride, national honor, I am with you!
Scatter in the sand, sprout on the ground, grow on the rock,
Hidden hatred, open hatred, I am with you,
Awaken us, oh Creator, I am with you!
Poet Mammad Ismayil wrote in his article “The Role of Mohammad-Hossein Shahriar's Poetry in Azerbaijan's Freedom Struggle”: “One of the greatest factors in the return of Azerbaijani Turkism to itself is undoubtedly Shahriar's art. The scent of land, mother's milk, nation, tradition, and custom, coming from ancient times, has settled into the deeper layers of his verses. From them, a spirit of national unity is spreading throughout the world. This spirit was a brand new revival of the old world, wrapped in antiquity. This was the mountain spirit, the Heydarbaba spirit, descended from God.”
The caravan that stopped here has arrived and departed,
It has drunk the sherbet of separation,
The migration of our lives has passed through here,
It has passed and gone to roads of no return,
Its dust has settled on these stones and bushes.
Poets are the speaking tongue of the nation, and their created works are the lasso of words that bind generations together. In the words of the prominent critic and scholar Prof. Yashar Garayev: “...Indeed, memory is unity and integrity itself, perceived at the level of pain. Only where there is memory is there wholeness, a connection between centuries and generations.” In this sense, the poetry of the immortal masters of words, Seyid Mohammad-Hossein Shahriar and Mammad Araz, can also be called the historical word memory of the Azerbaijani people, a treasury of national spirit, a shield of words calculated for the national integrity of Azerbaijan on both sides of the river. The national memory of our nation is created and adorned by the hands of such artistic geniuses, passed down from generation to generation through the language of words and poetry.
When we reviewed the works of both poets, which carry socio-political meaning, promote the national unity of the homeland, support the idea of a unified Azerbaijan, and extol the national spirit, national memory, national consciousness, and its main factor, the national language, and Azerbaijanism, the result was that the poetry of M. Shahriar and M. Araz maintains its relevance for our present day, fully resonates with the times, and not only does not lose its artistic and social value, but on the contrary, once again highlights and reminds us of how important the factor of national memory is in our globalizing world, awakens our genetic memory, and sounds an alarm. It raises the questions: Who are you, who are your roots, where is your path, what is your goal, your purpose? And nations that are not concerned by these questions and do not find answers can hardly pass the test of time in history. This is the majestic truth that M. Shahriar and M. Araz wanted to instill in their compatriots!
Esmira Ismayilova,
Doctor of Philosophy in Philology
