Photo: G. Jaylan Arsalan, Noor Ahmad Yurtdaş, Mathilde Melek An (Mahalla Festival, September 2025)
Life Philosophy
I do not seek fame
As long as you recognize me.
The good see good, the wicked see wicked —
Everyone perceives me according to their own worth.
Life’s philosophy — how strange it is,
Nights pass into years before dawn ever breaks.
I learned how to live from the seas:
To flow in silence,
To walk upon my own wave.
I am not perfect, that is true,
But the truth is: I am neither cunning nor cruel.
My enemies are astonished by me —
For neither love nor friendship has ever changed in me.
When I bought a watch and strapped it to my wrist,
Time itself began to follow me.
I thought I’d build a home and live in peace,
But the needs of that home turned me into an exile.
Do not ask me about the comfort of childhood —
It was a time that will never return.
Time slips away as we chase our desires,
And as we laugh and play, life too slips away.
Once, I would wake with a smile each morning,
These days, the days end without a single smile.
I have gone far just to preserve my relationships,
And lost myself — trying to find my own people.
People laugh and say, “I laugh a lot,”
But I am exhausted from hiding my sorrow.
I try to make everyone happy,
I neglect myself, yet I’m not indifferent to the value of others.
I know: I have no worth,
Yet I still walk beside those who carry worth within them.
(G. Jaylan Arsalan)
G. Jaylan Arsalan, Poetry, Cast, Editing/Noor Ahmad Yurtdaş, Camera
The poem unfolds between restraint and revelation: smiles that conceal exhaustion, relationships stretched by distance, a childhood that can no longer be returned to, a home imagined that turns into exile.
Exile appears here not only as displacement, but as an inner geography. Time no longer follows the clock; instead, it bends around longing and responsibility. The sea becomes a teacher—instructing how to move without noise, how to carry oneself on one’s own wave. The self is neither heroic nor broken, but persistent: refusing cruelty, refusing cunning, holding fast to an ethical core even as certainty dissolves.
Arsalan’s poem reads as a fragile yet steady act of witnessing. It speaks not in the language of slogans or demands, but through intimacy and duration. What emerges is not a declaration, but a presence—a voice that continues to walk beside others, even when it has lost its own ground. Poetry here becomes a form of shelter: temporary, porous, and necessary.
G. Jaylan Arsalan is an Afghan journalist living in exile in Turkey. As a member of Afghanistan’s Uzbek minority, he works alongside fellow journalists who once reported for Ayna TV and who now continue their work through UzbekPedia TV, carrying independent journalism forward across borders and ruptures. One of them is his friend Noor Ahmad Yurtdaş.
For the Mahalla Festival, Arsalan, together with Yurtdaş, prepared a personal reflection in the form of a poem—a language chosen not to seek recognition, but to endure. His words move quietly, attentive to the slow erosion of time, the weight of memory, and the moral effort of remaining oneself while everything familiar recedes.
Sabine Küper-Büsch, Artistic Director of the Mahalla Festival
