80 contemporary poetry
POLITICS AND POETICS OF EXILE: CHOMAN HARDI
Attention to a traumatic political history is explored by Kurdish
poet Choman Hardi’s volume Life for Us.^52 Hardi was born in
Iraqi Kurdistan. His family fl ed to Iran, to return when the poet
was a young child. When the Kurds were attacked by Saddam
Hussein’s chemical weapons in 1988 , Hardi’s family returned to
exile, this time settling in the UK. She has researched the testimony
of widows of genocide in Iraqi Kurdistan, in association with the
Uppsala Program for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. A search
for a safe domestic space where family life can be nurtured and
protected dominates Hardi’s poetry. In ‘There was.. .’ we are told
that: ‘There is a house with four bedrooms / where a couple live
with their three children’ (p. 9 ). Yet even in this contained space
where a ‘young man used to play his fl ute until the women cried’
the poem presents a father ‘torn between politics and poetry’ (p.
9 ). The poet’s role is often one of fact-fi nder, gatherer of narratives
and the speaker on behalf of those who have suffered. ‘The Spoils,
1988 ’ presents a passage of documentation and evidence, and is
dedicated to the ‘ 182 , 000 victims of Anfal, Kurdistan, Iraq’. Hardi’s
own research focuses upon interviews recording the experiences
of widows in Kurdish cities and Kurdish women’s experience of
diaspora. Explaining the term ‘Anfal’, Hardi states it means ‘spoils
of war’ and is the name of ‘the eighth chapter of the Qura’an which
came to the prophet in the wake of his fi rst jihad against the non-
believers’.^53 ‘Anfal’ was used by the Iraqi government as a naming of
their military operations against Kurdish Muslims in Northern Iraq
between February to September 1988. Hardi outlines the political
and religious impact of naming the military strategy:
By using this word the government intended to mobilise support
from within the country and to legitimise the operations in the
Muslim world, portraying the Kurds as non-Muslims. Anfal
took place in eight stages, targeting six geographically identi-
fi ed areas. In this process over 2600 Kurdish villages were
destroyed and an estimated number of 100 , 000 civilians ended
up in mass graves. Many more died as a result of bombard-
ment, gas attacks, exodus to Iran and Turkey and life in the