My Country's Hair Turned White

Dilawar Karadaghi is one of the most important contemporary Kurdish poets and his work is marked by the long years of persecution, marginalization and struggle that are part of the Kurdish experience. The poems in this short selection are full of longing, sadness, loss and, in the final poem, anger, as the poet remembers the devastating chemical attack on Halabja in 1988 in which his ‘country’s hair turned white’.