Poetry in Freedom Park
A concert in Azadi Park, Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan. Photograph courtesy of Nathan Perrin.
Nathan Perrin
I recently came back from a delegation to Iraqi Kurdistan with Community Peacemaker Teams, an organization I have served with for eight years. Eight years ago, I first visited Iraq, and I was stunned after seeing what I felt was the best and worst of humanity. Iraq has remained close to my heart ever since.
One of the stops on my recent trip was in Azadi Park (meaning “Freedom Park”) in Sulaymaniyah. In that location in the late 1980s, mass executions took place under Saddam Hussein’s regime. A brutal genocide called the Al Anfal campaign against the Kurds started in response to the Iran-Iraq War. What would often happen in the park is that a mass grave would be dug up, and Kurds would be led to the grave and shot en masse. They were buried afterwards.
Today, it would be extremely hard to tell a genocide once took place there, if not for the monuments. Near the center of a park is the grave of a famous Kurdish poet, Sherko Bekas. His work is now being slowly translated into English. His work broke literary grounds in the region, discussing in it frankly the costs of religious extremism, fascism, and war. The one book in English I was able to access, “Butterfly Valley,” covers the Al Anfal campaign as it was carried out in Halabja. Trauma is felt in the pages, as he is often left without words to fully explain the pain and torment of the Kurds under Saddam Hussein.
Reading Bekas’ poetry brings me back to the Psalms. The rage and the pain, both often pointed at God, sound familiar. When I encounter poets from the Middle East, I’m often reminded of how the writers of the Old Testament tried to make sense of the violence and displacement in front of them. Despite our own Scriptures being written by survivors of war trauma, Christian nationalists still use it as justification for further war while ignoring the real-world consequences.
Like the Kurds did with their poets in Azadi (Freedom) Park, we are also invited as Christians to build something beautiful on the ruins of injustice — to plant a tree in an otherwise scorched earth. That is how we participate in the ongoing resurrection of the world, and how we can bear witness to how God works for good what the world intends for evil.
Kurdish culture treasures its poets because they put voices to the pain of displaced people who have known nothing but war. Kurdistan, which is divided into the four countries of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, has faced continual oppression and discrimination. The spirit of most introductions to conversations I had with Kurdish survivors of genocide and bombardments began with, “I welcome you into my home… but I do not like the U.S. government.”
The Kurds feel largely abandoned by the world, and their agony and pain is expressed sharply in their literature. However, Kurds also express pride in what they’ve survived and endured, summed up in this common cultural phrase: “Berxwedan Jiyane” (resistance is life).
This spirit of resistance is also found in Choman Hardi’s poetry. Hardi, who has also translated Bekas’ work, writes in the poem “One Moment for Halabja” in “Considering the Women”:
One moment of no silence, no sorrow.
One moment of thinking not of your entangled, twisted bodies, your blistered eyes, your poisoned blue lips.
This time, one moment of applause for your remembrance, dear ones. One moment of smiling. One moment of thinking of your dreams, colourful as finches.[i]
It is a delicate balance for me as an outsider to consider the wholeness of Kurdish culture and the atrocities this region has survived, It is a delicate balance for me as an outsider to consider the wholeness of Kurdish culture, the atrocities this region has survived, and U.S. complicity in its suffering. I wrestled long and hard the first time I visited this region about what it meant to be Christian in response to what I learned. After an intense faith season, I came to the same conclusion that these poets and many Kurds came to: resistance is life, embracing it and fighting for it.
We can’t allow evil to have the last say. The Kurds demonstrate that. And like they did with their poets in Azadi Park, we are also invited as Christians to build something beautiful on the ruins of injustice — to plant a tree in an otherwise scorched earth. That is how we participate in the ongoing resurrection of the world, and how we can bear witness to how God works for good what the world intends for evil. Our work is never done on this side of eternity, but it is holy and mysterious, and meant to be fully embraced.
After all, resistance is life.
Nathan Perrin (he/him/his) is a writer and Anabaptist pastor in Chicagoland. He holds an MA in Quaker Studies and is a doctoral student studying Christian Community Development at Northern Seminary. His doctorate work centers on creating a writing program for nonprofits and churches to use to help under-resourced communities process trauma. His work has been published in the Dillydoun Review, Bangalore Review, Collateral Journal, Esoterica Magazine, etc. His forthcoming novella Memories of Green Rivers will be released in winter 2026 by Running Wild Press. He is also a screenwriter. For more information, visit www.nathanperrinwriter.com
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[i] Hardi, Choman. Considering the Women. Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2015, p. 19. Kindle Edition.
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