Dilawar Karadaghi’s My Country’s Hair Turned White, translated from Kurdish by Jiyar Homer with Mike Baynham, also carries records of survival; it is a collection shaped by the emotional and historical weight of Kurdish life under systematic repression. The poems move through landscapes marked by forced displacement, disastrous warfare, and the slow violence of erasure; yet, they remain deeply intimate, attentive to the smallest gestures of memory, longing, and survival. Rather than narrating events, Karadaghi traces their afterlives: the way devastation settles into the body, the way grief becomes a companion, the way leaving becomes a condition rather than a choice:

"a piece of heart beats

and is calling us

a piece calls us to go back to the forest

to our heartbroken grandparents

and another piece to distant cities

to the other broken piece of our hearts!" (21)

The collection takes a political and emotional stance: the poems are presented bilingually, with the original Kurdish qasidas placed alongside their English translations. This parallel structure, while also being aesthetic, shows the Kurdish language here in full presence, refusing disappearance. The translations carry the cadence and sorrow of the originals while acknowledging the impossibility of perfect equivalence. Translation becomes an act of reclamation, of ensuring that the poems inhabit two linguistic worlds without losing the gravity of their origins.

Across the collection, themes of leaving, fleeing, and dissolving recur with insistence. Travelling, sleepwalking, and disappearing are not metaphors but lived realities. Departure is constant and staying is dangerous — people leave or are taken, vanishing into deserts, prisons, or fog. The self is always partially elsewhere: ‘Everywhere is sunny/I’m unhappily happy/before picking up my bag, saying farewell and leaving’ (19). Karadaghi writes from within this instability, capturing the emotional texture of a life shaped by forced movement. Yet the emotional core of the collection is not departure itself but the fragmentation it produces; the sense of being scattered across landscapes, memories, and histories.

Nature appears as both witness and participant: birds in flight – ‘I should not forget the gentle manners of the birds/who knew I was a poet’ (17) – passing clouds, the sun’s daily migration, the West Wind addressed as a messenger capable of carrying the poet back to what was lost. These images create a sense of motion even in moments of stillness, suggesting that leaving is embedded in the natural world as much as in human experience. The poems often gesture towards a longing for return: to forests, grandparents, and the broken pieces of one’s heart. Yet, they acknowledge the impossibility of returning unchanged.

The collection culminates in the devastating final poem, from which the book takes its title, confronting the chemical attack on Halabja in 1988. Here, language strains under the weight of atrocity. The ‘whitish fog of death’ becomes a symbol of a horror that resists articulation (39). Seasons collapse, time dissolves, and the poet turns to the wind for guidance. ‘We are an aged grief now’ (41), he writes, capturing the exhaustion of a people archived in international reports yet rarely seen.

I felt a deep sense of love and nostalgia for the Beirut depicted in October, while reading and reviewing it. Whereas in My Country’s Hair Turned White, I identified with the brutal contrast between living joyfully and the devastation of loss. Both collections carry so much love and anguish, a malaise that immigrants like me can relate to.

LARA EL MEKAUI
© 2026 LARA EL MEKAUI
https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2026.2667096