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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > Butterfly Valley

Butterfly Valley

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 graves, 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.

Author

Sherko Bekas

Sherko Bekas

Books

Butterfly Valley

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 in Stockholm, Sweden on 4 August 2013.

Translator

Choman Hardi

Choman Hardi

Books

Butterfly Valley

Born in Sulaimaniya in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1974, Choman Hardi is is a poet, translator and painter. In 1975 her family fled to Iran after the Algiers Accord but returned to Iraq after a general amnesty in 1979. They were forced to move again in 1988 during the Anfal campaign.Choman arrived in United Kingdom in 1993 as a refugee and studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford and University College London. She did her PhD at the University of Kent, focusing on the effects of forced migration on the lives of Kurdish women from Iraq and Iran.

Choman has published three volumes of poetry in Kurdish. Her first collection of English poems,   Life for Us,   was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004. Choman’s poetry has been widely anthologised, and four of her poems have been studied by GCSE students since 2010. Her poems were recorded for the Poetry Archive in 2010. In 2006 she became one of the youngest poets featured by the ‘Poems on the Underground’ programme.

Published by

Arc Publications, 2018
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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 graves, 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.

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