Dispute Over a Mass Grave
by Choman Hardi
The one you have finished examining
is my son. That is the milky coloured Kurdish
suit his father tailored for him, the blue shirt
his uncle gave to him. Your findings prove
that it is him – he was a tall fifteen year old,
was left handed, had broken a rib.
I know she too has been looking for her son
but you have to tell her that this is not him.
Yes the two of them were playmates and fought
the year before. But it was my son who broke
a rib, hers only feigned to escape trouble.
That one is mine! Please give him back to me.
I will bury him on verge of my garden –
the mulberry tree will offer him its shadow,
the flowers will earnestly guard his grave,
the hens will peck on his gravestone,
the beehive will hum above his head.
From Considering the Women. Reproduced with kind permission from Bloodaxe.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2016
Considering the Women
Choman Hardi
About Choman Hardi
Choman Hardi sought asylum in the UK in 1993, and subsequently earned degrees from Oxford, UCL and Kent, before returning to Kurdistan-Iraq to teach English literature and gender studies. As a Kurdish poet and a woman raised in a repressive, patriarchal society, she writes poems about, arising from, or in response to the intersecting inequalities she has seen. This is also the subject she continues to research as an assistant professor in the department of English in the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani and as the director of the Center for Gender and Development Studies.
Hardi’s family fled to Iran in when she was in her early teens, and it was then, learning Persian and reading the modern Persian poets, that Hardi first came to poetry. She began writing poems soon after, inspired by love, ‘real, tangible, and tidal’.
As well as two collections in Kurdish, Hardi has published one previous collection in English, Life for Us. Bernard O’Donoghue wrote that he had ‘rarely read a book which so indisputably establishes the capacity of poetry to express the historical and political’. Hardi says of her Forward shortlisting that she can now believe that those to whom she ‘tried to give voice… in Considering the Women will be heard, that bearing witness is valued, that telling the truth about the human condition is necessary.’
