Sleeping in the Courtyard brings together historically isolated writers in community—and invites readers to join them around the table to share in their memories, secrets, tears, and joys. Featuring poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and graphic work by emerging and well-established writers, this collection shines a light on works by a diverse group of contemporary Kurdish women and nonbinary writers living in Kurdistan and in diaspora.
Recognizing the complex web of physical and lingual displacement of the Kurdish people and celebrating the diverse tapestry of their stories, this collection presents work originally written in English and work translated from Kurdish dialects as well as from Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Swedish. A few works in Kurdish dialects appear alongside their translations, both in recognition of the experience of linguicide and to push against oppressive attempts to strip away Kurdish language.
Several works here explore the impact of the countless forms of militarized displacement, cultural destruction, and mass genocide that Kurds have endured. Other pieces illuminate Kurdish experience of desire, friendship, empowerment, familial intricacies, and other topics spanning across universal human conditions. The writers in these pages take risks both in craft and content—and in some cases, just by daring to write and publish. What emerges in Sleeping in the Courtyard is the antithesis of erasure.
Holly Mason Badra is a Kurdish-American writer. Her poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews appear in Meridian, The Arkansas International, The Rumpus, CALYX, Circumference, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She is currently the associate director of Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University. She reads for Poetry Daily.
Introduction
Editor’s Note: On Transliteration and Spelling Choices
HAJJAR BABAN
Broken Ghazal with Words
In Another Dream Where My Father Apologizes
ZHAWEN SHALI
Yesterday
with the original Sorani Kurdish version
A Night with No Country
with the original Sorani Kurdish version
AVA HOMA
Excerpts from Daughters of Smoke and Fire
TRACY FUAD
Object Exercise
Jin-Jiyan-Azadî
JÎLA HUSEYNÎ
Question
with the original Sorani Kurdish version
When I Dream About You
with the original Sorani Kurdish version
MAHA HASSAN
Excerpt from In Anne Frank’s House
NARIN ROSTAM
Wrestling
with the original Sorani Kurdish version
Six Fingers in One Hand
with the original Sorani Kurdish version
GIAN SARDAR
Excerpts from Take What You Can Carry
HIVA PANAHI
Secrets of the Snow
A Poet Was Murdered
BAYAN NASIH
The Explorer Who Watched from a School Window
LEILA LOIS
Last Light
Tasseography
NAZAND BEGIKHANI
The War Was Over
A Child’s Painting
CHOMAN HARDI
Excerpt from Whispering Walls
PINAR BANU YAŞAR
Past and Future Selves Consider Language
The Relevant Parties
MERYEM RABIA UZUMCU
Family Rashomon
ROOZ MOHAMMED
Pages from the graphic novel Between Two Rivers
ASIMA ESSMAT SOPHIE
Setar on the Mud Wall
NAHID ARJOUNI
My Roots Were Somewhere with You
Kitchen God
CKLARA MORADIAN
How Light Shines Through the Blue Vase on the Windowsill
LARENA AMIN
What I See in My Sleep, March Thirty
To My Friend Who’s Older Than Me
BALSAM KARAM
Event Horizon
MERAL ŞIMŞEK
I Was Woman
Dream and Reality
HOLLY MASON BADRA
Waiting
Qurban
HERO KURDA
Except for Poetry, Nothing Else Shields Me
Acknowledgments
Credits
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