Magin_Edward-thesis

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it was winter and they had no food or shelter. Many died from starvation and sickness.
This was a huge turning point for the Kurds. According to Quçan (2010):
That America―which was against our beliefs, our ideas―that America
itself came to help us and protect us. And we were peşmerga, ‘Kurdish
military!’ So, we were in Iran and were like rural people; but then we
came into the civil life in cities. The Kurdish man who was low esteemed
before― now he highly appreciated himself.
Quçan (2010) goes on to say:
We in Iraq were in a closed society. We didn’t know anything about the
world, through books and things. But after that―after Saddam, 26 or after
the uprising you could say―satellite TV came into Kurdistan and things
from Syria came. So there was a great opening up to the world towards
Iraq. So all the norms were changed. These factors…affected the norms of
writing poetry, of visualizing things―for example, a tree, water,
everything was changed. Even how to deal with your children, your wife,
took another form. It was the other way around; it was changed. So this
fast and successive change affected the way authors thought and wrote.
In 1994, after these changes happened, there was a civil war among the Kurdish
people. It was in this year that a new group called “Renewal Forever” was formed, led by
Quçan. All of society—mosques, political parties, the university—was against what the
group was seeking to do. Renewal Forever sought to challenge society to change its
norms. As time passed, some people in the group died; others immigrated from Iraq.
While it only lasted about two years, according to Quçan, its effect on society remains.
He says:
…such as the poets who were under the effects of that group, as well as
painters and those who work in the theatre. Even the religious men―when
they go, for example, on Friday to the mosque, they admit that if there’s
no renovation, there’s no life. These are the changes that happened in
poetry. (Quçan 2010)
Today, most poets in the Northern Kurdish area write in a modern, free verse
style. Generally, it is mostly the older poets who are still writing in the Neo-classical
26 Saddam Hussein, the fifth president of Iraq.