Mohammad Saleh Dilan is the son of "Mullah Ahmad Dilan", the son of Mullah Saleh, the son of "Mullah Qader Shaw Khwen". I talk about the origin of Dilan because I think it influenced him to choose his artistic career.
The Dilan family came from "Qala Chwalan" city, the former capital city of the Baban dynasty. Saleh Dilan was born in 1927 in the Gweja neighborhood in Suleimani city. He finished his primary education in this city and began to work in the Tobacco office.
In 1948, when he was almost twenty years old, he began to write poems. During his life, he was imprisoned for his political activities and opposition to the occupying regimes of Kurdistan. This artist died in 1990.
It is worth mentioning that most of the Kurdish people know Saleh Dilan as a great artist with his special style. His voice is one of the most special and beautiful voices among Kurdish singers. Since he had such a professional style of singing Kurdish songs and Maqams and such a beautiful voice most of the other singers were under his influence. For example, "Aziz Sharokh" who is a great Kurdish singer with a special style particular to himself has said that he considers Saleh Dilan as his master in several interviews that he has had. The interesting point, however, is that Dilan considered himself a poet, not a singer and he was annoyed by being called a singer. His singing abilities, however, are much better than his abilities in writing poems.
Even in his biography written by "Dr. Abdullah Agrin", every detail of Saleh Dilan's life as a poet and political activist is mentioned but there is not even a sentence about his singing abilities. "Ajdiha" maqam and "Newroz" songs and tens of other lyrics and songs of Dilan are all very good reasons for his high place in Kurdish music. It seems that his family background has influenced his decision in this field.
But despite his singing career, let us see who Dilan was as a poet and what he did.
Dilan began to write poems when Kurdish literature was on the verge of separation. At that time, the first moves of Kurdish poets and writers began in a modernist manner. Others such as "Sheikh Nouri Sheikh Saleh" and "Abdullah Bag Goran" began to get acquainted with Western literature. Sheikh Nouri did this by knowing the Turkish language and Istanbul school and Goran knowing English and French helped a new poetic movement to rise in Kurdish poetry.
Along with Goran, many other poets began to try new experiences and styles of poems. Goran's style included a kind of modern Naturalism and a look back on the folklore poetic meter and abandoning the Arabic Prosodic meter.
On the other hand, at that time the content of the poems had changed and a social and political theme was applied in the poems. Both of the mentioned parts were included in Saleh Dilan's poems. A poem with simple language, very close to the public ordinary form of language that everybody can understand with the same meter as the Kurdish folklore literature.
This form of writing, although simple in the form, is going to be made into an artistic text that is both simple and artistic and needs the innovation and creativity of "Goran" who can be found in very few poems after he and even Saleh Dilan did not possess it. However, what is important in Dilan's poems is his view of political and social events inside Kurdistan and a glance at the world's political events. For example, in his great and long poem "War and Peace" which is a combination of the world's sufferings and regional problems, the poet narrates the difficulties of World War I from the point of view of an old man, but in "the Omen Owl of War", he talks about Kurds' sufferings and pains. Or he wrote his poem "The Live Sheikh Mahmud" for a well-known Kurdish figure. He has also looked back on Kurdish cultural and social phenomena and has pictured the Kurdish situation through these phenomena. The most famous poem of Saleh Dilan is a poem that is exactly about this subject. "Mama Kurnou" is Dilan's most famous poem.
Many Kurdish singers have sung this poem. The listeners and readers of this poem assume that "Mama Kurnou" must be a great hero due to the content of the poem. But in fact, he was a social figure of Suleimani city who was known as "Ahay Kurnou" and he was a chatty vendor telling funny jokes to his customers. What is important here is that Dilan has created a curious contrast by making a funny man's character his poem's audience smartly.
He calls the funny Mama Kurnou:
Mama Kurnou whom you are lying in Girdi Saywan (Girdi Saywan is a cemetery in Sulaimani)
Be relaxed and calm while listening to my story
The poet narrates a sad story for Mama Kurnou who is now dead.
In addition to this form of poetry, another thing that Dilan has done is to write about the under-oppression nations of the world's attempt for liberation. For example, he wrote a poem for "Lumumba" or "Martin Luther King". He also wrote for the Algeria liberation movement and Kongo and … many other liberating parties which shows he was aware of the world's political and social movements. However, despite all these, Saleh Dilan was a great singer who was also a poet, and some of his poems were sung by great Kurdish singers, such as "Mama Kurnou", "Hey nestles bird on the tree branch" and "Hey silver moonlight beam of the sky".
