Halabja in Iraqi Contemporary Poetry: The Tragedy of A Memory and A Memory of The Tragedy

Abstract

This study focuses on Halabja in the contemporary Iraqi poetry: The Tragedy of Memory and the Memory of Tragedy. The genocide that Halabja suffered from has inspired my poets to write about that. The wound of the city is too deep to recover, too tragic to stop shedding tears, and too inhuman that made its images and cries live in our memory forever. This human calamity has created a haunting memory in the minds of the Arab and Kurd poets in the contemporary poetry because of its brutality and vehemence. Therefore, this adversity has provided poets with a fertile ground on which they have implanted their poems and realistic images that inspired their pens. The study is divided into four sections and a preface. The preface is concerned with the poeticness of the city in the Arabic poetry. The first section deals with Halabja: the memory of pain. The second section studies Halabja and the portrayal of suffering. The third section delineates Halabcha the city of defiance and challenge. The fourth section focuses on the city of Halabja between reality and dream. The study comes up with the conclusion that shows the Iraqi poets’ revolutionary ideas to fight oppression in the world and change it, and replace it with freedom and justice. The poets have succeeded in portraying the pains and miseries of Halabja, and the suffering of the Kurds.