Wednesday, May 24, 2023 - 14:30
American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS) and American Corner in Sulaymaniyah held a book launch on Wednesday, May 24, 2023, for AUIS faculty member and Center for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS) Director Dr. Choman Hardi’s debut novel and latest release Whispering Walls.
The event began with a musical performance of traditional Kurdish music, and was followed by a reading of excerpts from the novel by Dr. Hardi and an on-stage conversation between Dr. Hardi and Ms. Shiereen Said, Program Director at the Hiwa Foundation.
The novel follows the story of a Kurdish family living in London, and that of a brother living in Sulaimani. The events covered take place in the last five weeks before the Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Dr. Hardi described her intention for the novel, saying, “I tried to explore why people make the same mistake over and over again, and don’t change.”
“During times of tragedy, people construct walls to survive pain, but for Kurds, due to repeated tragedies, people have disassociated and that’s now become catastrophic,” she continued.
“This is about the goats of the past and the past lingering. It’s also about the diaspora, intergenerational conflict, and adding a feminist perspective to the stories,” she ended.
Dr. Hardi is the author of critically-acclaimed books in the fields of poetry, academia, and translation. Since 2010, poems from her first English collection, Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004) have been studied by secondary school students as part of their English GCSE curriculum in the UK. Hardi’s second collection, Considering the Women (Bloodaxe, 2015), was given a recommendation by the Poetry Book Society and shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection. It was also translated into French in 2020. Her book Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan–Iraq (Routledge, 2011) was named a UK Core Title by the Yankee Book Peddler. Her translation of Sherko Bekas’s Butterfly Valley (ARC Publishing) won a PEN Translates Award.