kawakurdi12 Sep 2002

I think it is too harsh to say that choosing this title brings the author to "the dishonorable status of slanderer". That is what I call a cultural attitude. It shows the arrogance that people everywhere hate about America and the Americans. In fact the poem is very old, written in 1988 when Saddam was gassing my people and US was a great supporter of him and providing him together with other Western countries and [not surprisingly for us] the Soviet Union then, with all weapons of mass destruction. I did not add the other title with the intention of being a slanderer or reducing from the magnitutude and uniqueness of 9/11. We very much feel the pain of the people who lost their dear ones. I simply wnated this title to provoke some interest in other similar targedies which adily afflict other human peoples in many parts of the world, especailly in Kurdistan. But I see it as sheer arogance to challenge a poet the right to choose a title because "your tragedy cannot be like ours". It is always this us/them dichotomy which creates jsutification for murder, torture and oppression. Also I meant by cultural context sepcific individual and collective experiences. The names in the poem of course do not mean much to you. You would feel different if the names were Colorado, California, Hawai, Florida, Manhatan, etc. And this is natural. So for an American reader of course the poem loses the cultural and emotional conetnt and history associated with these names. So it is not critisizing or attacking or defending when mentioning this fact.

For me one of the names Marga is my village where I was born. It was a very beautiful mountain village in a vallay of orchards farms and natural forest. Only 150 families lived there. The whole village together with 4000 other villages were obliterated either with napalm bombing, bulldozing or if these did not do the trick, Western-supplied chemical weapons. When I went back in 1992 my village did not exist. The town in which I I studied my econdary education and then taught there as a teacher of English, did not exist anymore. No villages at all existed And there were 200,000 less people, women, youn people and children taken by Sdadm to Arab deserts of South Iraq near Saudi and Jordanian borders for experimenting the effectiveness of his biological and chemical weapons. This means at least seven 9/11s in terms of the number of victims. But I am sure this comparison again makes you angry: How can you compare the death of invisible Kurds to the death of bankers, engineers, technicains or simply American males and females?

So again in terms of culture, poetry also has a different mission in different context. But I stopped writing poetry for many years after Anfal because I became depressed, desperate and disillusioned about human nature. Can all poetry of the world stop the killing of a chid by a dictatorial regime? Another thing: I never approach culture in terms of East versus West, Us versus the world. In the poem there is reference to Islamic butchers. Yes, those who carried out Anfal they did it in the name of Islam in the same way they did 9/11 atrocities in the name of Islam. Anfal itself is a word taken from the Quran which refers to the right of Muslims to kill, rob, rape, and destroy Kafirs {infifdels] once they were conquered by Muslim hordes. So Saddam used this Quranic order to perpetrate his genocide. And non of the Muslim countries and peoples in any part of the world, thsoe who fill the world with wails and cries to defend Paletenians, ever raised a voice to defend the Kurds or even to recognise their pain and suffering. Althou the greatest Muslim leader ever was the Kurdsih Salah-al-Din who fought the crusaders and I think still the West has not forgotten this when dealing with the Kurds.

{ I have to go. Maybe I'll continue later}