Notes on Transrelation

I wanted to start this essay with the opening scene from a work of fiction I wrote a couple of years ago. This scene recounts a trip by French colonial explorers to Simê Hêstir, the main character’s ancestral village as it is depicted in a page that the main character’s father ripped off a magazine at Dar al-Kutub wa al-Watha’iq al-Iraqiya, Iraq National Library and Archive, which marked the first time he encountered his people in a piece of writing—about his village’s first encounter with a screen—while serving in the military in Baghdad, just five years before it was burned and looted in the wake of the US-led occupation of Iraq. The Guardian reported that “British archaeologists accused the US government of succumbing to pressure from private collectors in America to allow plundered Iraqi treasures to be traded on the open market.” 

At the age of sixteen, my grandmother lit my first cigarette for me and gave me a sheer, purple bag of homegrown tobacco we harvested from our rooftop and a stack of RAW rolling paper. She told me, “If you smoke alone, you take a puff, and before taking in your next puff, you think of a person you wish you could share it with. If you have a person with you, you hand the cigarette to them before you breathe the smoke out.” This could be the first intentional lesson on sharing I remember receiving, one that shaped sharing as a value central to my creative practice that I continue to carry with me. 

As a college student majoring in Translation at the University of Duhok, I was bored of the amount of legal translation and journalistic translation that were offered to translate and the lack of literary translation courses. In my first semester, I was lucky to meet my friend Jaff, a mononymous poet and a then-psychology student, with whom I shared the love for poetry and translation, and whose poetry I translated and included in Something Missing from This World, an anthology of contemporary Yazidi poetry that I co-translated and co-edited. At that time, Jaff translated from Sorani before I could speak it and I translated from English before he could speak. In our gatherings with other poets on campus where we smuggled in cheap whisky, or on the bank of the Tigris river near the confluence of Tigris and Xabûr rivers, we shared our poems and our translations as we, as displaced poets, mimicked the pre-Islamic al-Sa’aleek poets in their self-destructive habits, as well as in seeking shelter in poetry. 

Translation for me was not a task, nor was it a job; rather, it was a gesture. I translated because I wanted to share a feeling, a voice, a moment of poetry with someone who would not otherwise encounter it. As I came to understand later, the act of translation was not about rendering a fixed meaning but about sustaining a relationship—between myself and the poet, between the poem and its reader, between one line and the following, between language and world. I was the translator: writer of new sentences on the close basis of others, producer of relations, as Kate Briggs writes in her book This Little Art. Translation wasn’t the carrying over of language; it was the crafting of new connections to facilitate relation between worldviews peaking in metaphor. I wasn’t making equivalents; rather, I was forming kinships.

As I returned again and again to the practice, I began to sense what Natalie Diaz names in her Fusings, as “autonomous lives in collective living,” she continues, “I am of consequence to your body.” Translation, in this sense, was never solitary. Even when done alone, it extended from and toward another—another language, another voice, another way of being. When I translated Jaff’s poems, I wasn't just concerned with what his lines meant—I was invested in how they sounded, what silences they held, and what emotional truths they refused to simplify. His desire to be read and heard mattered to me. I wanted his lines to reach someone the way they reached me. That desire is mutual. “I will recognize my life in your desire to live,” Diaz writes. I recognize the original poet’s life in my own desire to carry their words. This desire is not possessive; it’s generative. It expands the terrain of the poem without flattening its origin.

To write and to translate from relation and towards relation is to practice a politics of repair—a refusal to allow colonialism the final word in how we connect, speak, or remember. Colonial power thrives on rupture: it severs kinships, languages, cosmologies, and intimacies. It turns neighbors into enemies, knowledge into property, and culture into commodity. The colonial strategy of divide and conquer does not merely operate through military or administrative control; it functions by breaking the web of relations that sustain collective life. To write and translate from relation, then, is an anti-colonial act because it seeks to rethread those broken ties by affirming that relation itself is a living, evolving practice of survival, resistance, and mutual care. This kind of relation does not deny conflict or difference; rather, it makes space for them, recognizing that true relation means staying in the room when histories hurt, when wounds surface, and when power imbalances must be named and unlearned. Translation in this frame is not the transfer of meaning across neutral linguistic lines—it is a negotiation of histories, a bearing witness to the asymmetries of empire while refusing to let those asymmetries define the terms of encounter. Relation insists on returning to the places where separation was enforced—not to seal over the cracks, but to understand how the fracture speaks, how it remembers, and how it might be tended. To write from relation is to write in many directions at once: toward the ancestor whose name was erased, toward the reader whose life cannot be assumed, toward the language that does not yet exist but is needed to carry what we feel. It is to imagine solidarity not as sameness but as shared risk, shared desire, and shared refusal. In a world that has been mapped by colonial coordinates—where borders slice through rivers and tongues, and where some lives are made speakable while others are disappeared—transrelation emerges as a strategy of re-mapping. Not a map of ownership or conquest, but a map of meeting, of echo, of co-presence. It is an insurgent grammar, one that insists: we are not alone, we were never meant to be alone, and every act of connection, no matter how fragile, is a blow against the machinery of colonial isolation.

Most of my translation work has also been collaborative, a practice we call co-translation—another way of relation. We often speak of collaboration as an effort to share labor, but for me, co-translation is more intimate than that. It’s the art of mutual trust. Each decision—of a word, a phrase, a metaphor—is negotiated not just for accuracy, but for resonance. We bring our different linguistic fluencies, cultural memories, poetic instincts into conversation. Sometimes we fight over a word for hours; other times, we sit silently until the right rhythm settles between us. It’s a slow form of listening. In co-translation, you must let go of ownership and be willing to be revised. The poem becomes a shared space of emergence—what survives the process is what holds up under both our eyes. This is not consensus; this is faith. 

Climb the back of my hand, my palm

Pîrê Cerwa walks ahead of you, stride after stride

You must follow like a man escaping the wolf’s mouth

Like a man escaping the wolf’s mouth, you must follow

The trust between us is a lifetime trust

Together, we drank water from the bat’s wing

From the bat’s wing, together, we drank water

The poison in our hearts turned green, bloomed into a pomegranate

Look: last year’s lily just blossomed on the river’s lip once again

These three tercets are from the Hymn of Pîrê Cerwa. Pîrê Cerwa, God of Scorpions, is a Yazîdî deity whose shrine still stands, only 15 kilometers south of Lalish Temple, the largest, most ancient, most holy Yazidi temple, in the north of Mosul. This hymn is often mumbled to clear a house from scorpions without causing them harm. The hymnist often crouches and mumbles the hymn, spreading their two hands on the ground. Their right palm faces the land and their left palm faces the sky. The scorpion comes out and climbs the back of their hand. In 2021, I met Pîr Murad, the last surviving, practicing hymnist, scorpion tender. He told me, “From the moment of birth, we put a scorpion on the body of our newborn. Some of us are bestowed with the gift from Pîrê Cerwa, others are not. However, they may acquire it later should they work for it.” He continued, “We are in a desert, we share this land with scorpions and snakes. If we harm these creatures, they too can harm us. They can get under our dress at night and end our lives. We want no harm for them. We want to live with them in harmony, and that requires a friendly relationship with them.” What I heard is that what makes peace possible with scorpions in this desert is recognizing the environment we share, and inviting that to create a relationship. What inspired me most was turning to poetry to pursue this relationship, a way of performing our energy to speaking to their energy.

I wish to conclude this essay with the first poem I wrote on the occupied, unceded land of the Coast Miwok people, after I moved to this new continent; a poem that I consider to be my land acknowledgement. It’s titled A Song To A Turtle Shell In Turtle Island, after an encounter with a turtle shell that I spontaneously named Enki after the Sumerian god of wisdom, water, fertility, magic, and creation to converse with in order to entertain my friends’ two-year-old: