Life for Us by Choman Hardi.

Life for Us by Choman Hardi.
Bloodaxe 2004. £7.95
ISBN: 1852246448
First published on Birmingham Words

Life for Us is Choman Hardi’s fourth book of poetry, but her first in English, her previous three books being written in her native Kurdish. An Iraqi Kurd, Hardi’s family fled Iraq shortly after her birth to return when she was five years old. At the age of fourteen when the Iraqi government launched gas attacks against the Kurds, her family fled again for Iran. Hardi came to England in 1993, where she studied philosophy and psychology at Oxford. She now lives in England where she teaches creative writing and works on developing projects with writers in exile.

Life for Us is a deeply personal collection, drawing upon the intimate and sometimes shocking experience of a life lived amongst the fires of some of the worst events of recent history. The poems here range from Hardi’s childhood in Iraq to her life in England, but despite their intimacy they never become lost in the personal: there is a sharp intelligence at work in Hardi’s poems allowing her to speak beyond the particulars of biography to raise wider, more universal and often more disturbing questions. It is this that makes Hardi’s book at times difficult reading. For example, in the middle ‘What I Want’, far from one of the best poems in the book, we find ourselves in the final stanza stumbling across lines like this:

I imagine humane soldiers
soldiers who would never say:
‘We will take you to a place
where you will eat your own flesh.’

The suddenness of this is shocking, all the more so because of the calmness of the delivery. Many of the poems collected here seem to quiver with the possibility of such appalling violence: the painter who one day no longer appears on the next-door roof and who eventually surfaces again, his hands broken and with no more desire to paint; the crowd forced to shout ‘Long live justice!’ as a friend is executed; the perpetual possibility being driven from one’s home by soldiers, by the threat of gas, by fear. But, against the background of this horror, life persists. There are poems here about the more intimate political matters such as the family partitioning of the weekly chicken. One of the best poems in the book, ‘His Boots’, tells of an old woman who receives a dictator’s boots from the window of his car, a poem both beautifully constructed and bizarre.

Hardi does not always hit the mark. ‘The Church and the Mosque’, for example, has the appearance of an idea that has not yet fully resolved into a poem; but when she speaks directly, Hardi does so with a poise and a fearless intelligence. Life for Us is an impressive collection. Reading it one suspects that future collections will be more impressive still. It is above all the rare combination of delicacy and toughness that characterises these poems. They remind us again, in a time when many voices clamour to turn the condition of being in exile into a crime, that the roads of exile are far from easy. For all this, however, one senses that even without having lived closer than many of us to the excesses of much of recent history, by nautre Hardi would not have been one to elect to choose only easy paths:

It is so soothing here – the soft sprinklers
everywhere. But it is the rough roads
of my childhood that I miss most, the piercing
wind, the summer earth burning my bare feet.