CPTnet
26 April 2011
IRAQ REFLECTION: Shakespeare’s sonnet in the midst of a nonviolent uprising.

 by Michele Naar-Obed

 Every week organizers give a different name to the demonstrations at "Freedom Square" in Suleimaniya in the Kurdish north of Iraq.  This week, the choice was, "Days of Hope."  On the team, we look hard to find signs of hope here in this land that is experiencing a nonviolent people's uprising against corruption and dictators; I wanted to share this story, in which I believe hope appears.

 Recently, my teammate Peggy Gish and I decided to accept an invitation to visit some students at Suleimaniya University.  The student who made the invitation took us to a ninety-minute lecture in the English department.  The class was studying William Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixéd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose Worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Approximately 50 students, both young women and men grappled with words, metaphors, meanings, and their implications for their world.  Not only that, they struggled, not in their own language but in English.Encouraged by a professor who gingerly drew out their thoughts and gave them the space to articulate them, they tackled such concepts as spiritual love versus physical love, fixed marks, bending love, time's fool, sickles compass.  The depth to which both professor and student went was inspiring.

Speaking with some of the students after class, they shared with bright eyes and glowing smiles that they really didn't know what would come of such studies as this but they wanted to keep trying.

 Shakespeare's message of true love, the love that transcends time and space still exists in this troubled world marked by war, destruction, cruelty, and despair.  It certainly existed in this classroom of future poets and writers, lovers and leaders.

 And right up the road from the university, the nonviolent fight for justice and peace goes on too.