Butterfly Valley
Published on 25. June 2018
Book
Hardback
136 pages
978-1-911469-08-7 (ISBN)
Description
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 Bekas' response to these atrocities. Stunned by the world's silence in the face of this genocide, Bekas - 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.
Butterfly Valley is Sherko Bekas' response to these atrocities. Stunned by the world's silence in the face of this genocide, Bekas - 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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Lancs
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 162 mm
Weight
355 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-911469-08-7 (9781911469087)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Sherko Bekas was born in Iraqi Kurdistan, son of the poet Fayaq Bekas, and published his first book when he was 17. He joined the Kurdish liberation movement in 1965 and worked in the movement's radio station (the Voice of Kurdistan). In 1986, he left his homeland because of political pressure from the Iraqi regime and from 1987 to 1992, he lived in exile in Sweden where Butterfly Valley was printed in January 1991, around the time of the first Gulf War. Shortly afterwards, following the uprisings in the Kurdish and the Shiite regions in March 1991 Bekas was able to retrun to Iraqi Kurdistan. He died of cancer in Stockholm, Sweden on 4 August 2013. Choman Hardi was born in Iraqi Kurdistan, her family fleeing to Iran in 1975 after the Algiers Accord but returning to Iraq after a general amnesty in 1979. Having been forced to move again in 1988 during the Anfal campaign, she arrived in the UK in 1993 as a refugee. She studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford and University College London and did her PhD at University of Kent focusing on the effects of forced migration on the lives of Kurdish women from Iraq and Iran. She has published three volumes of poetry in Kurdish and a collection of English poems Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004). A former chairperson of Exiled Writers Ink! she has organized creative writing workshops for the British Council in UK, Belgium, Czech Republic and India. She was a resident poet for 10 months at Scotland's National Writing Centre in 2004 and was a recipient of a Jerwood / Arvon Young Poet's Apprenticeship. In 2014, she was appointed lecturer in the Department of English and Journalism at the American University of Iraq - Sulaimani, a post she still holds.