CHOMAN HARDI. Born in Iraqi Kurdistan just before her family fled to Iran, Her father Ahmed Hardi was also a noted Kurdish poet. In 1993, Hardi was granted refugee status in England where she went on to study Psychology and Philosophy and completed doctoral research at the University of Kent in Canterbury on the mental health of Kurdish women refugees. She lives in England . Her poems chart lives of displacement , repression and the subjugation of women, family love, flight and survival.She is also a good painter. About her poetry noted Hungarian Scholar and poet George Szrites says “ Choman Hardi’s poems tell of tragedy, war, persecution and dispersal, but are far more than simple summoning of facts. The grace and rhythm of the telling – the singing of it – moves the poems beyond reportage. There is a kind of tranquility and civilization in the voice which heals as it weeps: the tears are not those of self-pity but those of ageless lamentations, caught freshly here, formed into fresh shapes. Pity there is, but the poetry is not in the pity: the pity is in the poetry ” AT THE BORDER-1979 “It is your last check-in point in this country!” We grabbed a drink- soon everything would taste different. The land under our feet continued divided by a thick iron chain. My sister put her leg across it. “Look over here,” she said to us, “my right leg is in this country and my left leg in the other”. The border guards told her off. My mother informed me: We are going home. She said that the roads are much cleaner. the landscape is more beautiful and people are much kinder. Dozens of families waited in the rain. “I can inhale home,” somebody said. Now our mothers were crying. I was five years old standing by the check-in point comparing both sides of the border. The autumn soil continued on the other side with the same colour, the same texture. It rained on both sides of the chain. We waited while our papers were checked, our faces thoroughly inspected. Then the chain was removed to let us through. A man bent down and kissed his muddy homeland. The same chain of mountains encompassed all of us.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 20:50:40 +0000
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