Kamal Mirawdeli

Kamal Mirawdeli was born in the Kurdish part of Iraq (South Kurdistan) in 1951 and came to London in 1981. He describes how he lost his ability to write poetry after the massacre of Kurds in Halabja, and how he regained it after he went back to Kurdistan.

Listen to Kamal (mp3, 537kb)

Transcript

'And then all this problem with genocide in Kurdistan happened. I heard that the village I was born was destroyed by chemical weapons. Halabja was destroyed in 1988, chemical weapons. And people don’t talk about it but Qaladiza, where I studied, actually they bulldozed it completely so there was no house left at all. 

'So every night, every night I was dreaming nightmares. In the morning I was just like a piece of wood, I didn’t feel I am a human being… 

'I continued to write poetry after Anfal, then after, really, I went back two times to Kurdistan.  And I saw people, they were more optimistic. Before that, believe me, I mean I was, in these 11 years I never dreamed anything about Britain - always I dreamed about Kurdistan, about death, destruction, villages, tanks, executions, everything. But when I went back, I got rid of that. When I went to the community there and mixed with people, I saw the villages still come back to life, people there and my villages come back to life. Myself I built a village school…

'So this helped me actually to say OK now, people are OK there and I am OK I can do my own things. So I came back, then, only then I came back, could read poetry again, could read literature. So I started to write poems, and then started to write in English.'

Copyright Evelyn Oldfield Unit