Contemporary Poetry

82 contemporary poetry

my left leg in the other” ’ (p. 30 ). One of the fi nal poems, ‘To
Kurdistan’, suggests a need for a cartography of place and home.
Hardi recalls that once questioned on her destination, ‘I will take
the repeated advice / and will not say “to Kurdistan” ’ (p. 48 ).
This need to map, locate and reorient the exile into a safe space is
also echoed in the appeal towards creating safe domestic spaces.
Forché states that a poetry of witness ‘reclaims the social from
the political’ and in doing so ‘defends the individual against ille-
gitimated forms of coercion’.^55 She adds that this poetic regis-
ters ‘through indirection and intervention the ways in which the
linguistic and moral universe have been disrupted by events’ (p.
45 ). The genocide in Kurdistan is presented by Hardi as a history
which is echoed in other political histories; a husband’s retelling
of world news stories becomes a site for revisiting trauma and the
reinscription of a series of losses: ‘Somewhere, people are fl eeing
again. / We hug and I cry. Somewhere / there is another war to
be remembered by children’ (p. 61 ). Hardi’s poetry struggles to
narrate this sequence of losses; from her research she stresses the
therapeutic role of stories for women in exile:

Narrative therapy is a way of empowering these women

by enabling them to deconstruct the structures which

oppress them as women and as ethnic minorities in the UK.

Recounting histories in a group context enables them to give

positive meanings to their experiences as well as establishing

a support network. Coming together in groups also enables

women to fi ght oppression and take on broader political aims

for their community.^56

Hardi’s engagements with exiled Kurdish women in the UK reit-
erates the importance of discursive practices as a way of engaging
with traumatic life histories, while also reconvening political com-
munities.

VETERAN’S EXPERIENCE: YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

Vietnam War veteran Yusef Komunyakaa began to write about
his war experiences in 1984 , almost fi fteen years after his return