|
Showing 1 - 5 of
5 matches in All Departments
Choman Hardi's Considering the Women explores the equivocal
relationship between immigrants and their homeland - the constant
push and pull - as well as the breakdown of an intermarriage, and
the plight of women in an aggressive patriarchal society and as
survivors of political violence. The book's central sequence,
Anfal, draws on Choman Hardi's post-doctoral research on women
survivors of genocide in Kurdistan. The stories of eleven survivors
(nine women, an elderly man and a boy child) are framed by the
radically shifting voice of the researcher: naive and
matter-of-fact at the start; grieved, abstracted and confused by
the end. Knowledge has a noxious effect in this book, destroying
the poet's earlier optimistic sense of self and replacing it with a
darker identity where she is ready for 'all the good people in the
world to disappoint her'. Choman Hardi's second collection in
English ends with a new beginning found in new love and in taking
time off from the journey of traumatic discovery to enjoy the
small, ordinary things of life. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Between February and September 1988, the Iraqi government destroyed
over 2000 Kurdish villages, killing somewhere between 50,000 and
100,000 civilians and displacing many more. The operation was
codenamed Anfal which literally means 'the spoils of war'. For the
survivors of this campaign, Anfal did not end in September 1988:
the aftermath of this catastrophe is as much a part of the Anfal
story as the gas attacks, disappearances and life in the camps.
This book examines Kurdish women's experience of violence,
destruction, the disappearance of loved ones, and incarceration
during the Anfal campaign. It explores the survival strategies of
these women in the aftermath of genocide. By bringing together and
highlighting women's own testimonies, Choman Hardi reconstructs the
Anfal narrative in contrast to the current prevailng one which is
highly politicised, simplified, and nationalistic. It also
addresses women's silences about sexual abuse and rape in a
patriarchal society which holds them responsible for having been a
victim of sexual violence.
Between February and September 1988, the Iraqi government destroyed
over 2000 Kurdish villages, killing somewhere between 50,000 and
100,000 civilians and displacing many more. The operation was
codenamed Anfal which literally means 'the spoils of war'. For the
survivors of this campaign, Anfal did not end in September 1988:
the aftermath of this catastrophe is as much a part of the Anfal
story as the gas attacks, disappearances and life in the camps.
This book examines Kurdish women's experience of violence,
destruction, the disappearance of loved ones, and incarceration
during the Anfal campaign. It explores the survival strategies of
these women in the aftermath of genocide. By bringing together and
highlighting women's own testimonies, Choman Hardi reconstructs the
Anfal narrative in contrast to the current prevaling one which is
highly politicised, simplified, and nationalistic. It also
addresses women's silences about sexual abuse and rape in a
patriarchal society which holds them responsible for having been a
victim of sexual violence.
Choman Hardi was born in Iraqi Kurdistan just before her family
fled to Iran. She returned home at the age of five, but when she
was 14 the Kurds were attacked with chemical weapons, and her
family were forced back into exile. Her poems chart lives of
displacement and terror, repression and the subjugation of women,
family love, flight and survival. Life for Us is a book of great
warmth and passion, which explores both the struggle of a people
not represented on the world map and the pains of exile. It shows
the human spirit triumphing over adversity. Intertwining political
and personal struggle in a quirky, sometimes humorous way, Choman
Hardi's poems draw upon dual memories - like fireworks and gunfire
- as well as different realities for different sexes: the father's
political struggle and loss of books, the mother's silent labour
and weeping for others. Life for Us (2004) was Choman Hardi's first
English collection, and was followed by Considering the Women
(2015), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
The late 1980s witnessed two devastating chemical attacks by the
Saddam regime on Iraqi Kurdistan. The first of these, in 1988,
known as the Anfal campaign, saw the destruction of 3000 Kurdish
villages, over 40 chemical attacks launched, and 100,000 civilians
buried in mass graces, with hundreds more dying of exposure to
chemical weapons. The second attack was on the town of Halabja
where over 5000 people died instantly. Thousands of people who had
survived the attacks in both Anfal and Halabja but had been mildly
affected by the gas later died from cancer and other diseases.
Butterfly Valley is Sherko Bekes' response to these atrocities.
Stunned by the world's silence in the face of this genocide, Bekes
- in exile in Sweden at the time - longs to go home and mourn the
victims. He laments the repetitive cycles of continuous oppression
and suppressed revolutions in Kurdish history, and in his despair
speaks to other exiled Kurdish poets (Nali, Hani and Mawlawi among
them) from the sixteenth century to the present day. This long poem
unfolds in beautifully-drawn images of the poet's homeland -
mountains and forests, rivers and villages, meadows and flowers -
which are juxtaposed with scenes of death, destruction and
suffering. This is an immensely powerful poem, at once lyrical and
heart-rending, and Choman Hardi's fine translation at last gives
the English-speaking reader the most extensive example yet of his
outstanding writing.
|
You may like...
Catan
(16)
R1,150
R887
Discovery Miles 8 870
|