Poetry
Butterfly Valley
دەربەندی پەپوولە (Derbendî Pepûle)
Sherko Bekas · 1991
Synopsis
In exile in Sweden, the poet mourns the dead of Anfal and of the chemical bombings that struck Iraqi Kurdistan in 1988. He looks back on the Kurdish uprisings crushed over the centuries and converses with Kurdish poets exiled before him, from the sixteenth century to the present day. The mountains, rivers and meadows of the native land are set against scenes of death and destruction.
Context
The poem appeared in Sweden in 1991, while the author was living there in exile. It responds to the Anfal campaign, waged in 1988 by Saddam Hussein's regime against the Kurds of Iraq, which killed some one hundred thousand civilians, and to the gassing of Halabja. Choman Hardi published an English translation of it in 2018, with Arc, in a bilingual edition alongside the Kurdish text. The poet's work has also been translated into Arabic, Swedish, Italian and French.
Who it is for
To read the great Kurdish poem of exile and mourning, written after Halabja by one of the major voices of that language.
Prizes and reception
Ian Brinton, in the review Tears in the Fence, compares it with Paul Celan among the kinds of poetry that respond to atrocity.