A beauty in anger

This literary book is a conversation conducted by Hiwa Qadir with Sherzad Hassan, a Kurdish writer. This book is one of Xazalnus’s publications.

Hiwa Qadir begins the book by describing the 1980s, when the Kurds were stumbling on one catastrophe to another. He points out that literature works were reduced to a message that served the general political situation. Kurdish literature has been about crafting successful heroes for the past two decades, but during those times Sherzad Hassan would write differently, portraying failed, miserable and lonely characters, invisible and wounded people, therefore, the emergence of a writer like Sherzad Hassan was a big transformation for that time.

After Sherzad Hassan’s arrival to Finland, Hiwa Qadir asked him to contact each other and arrange an interview, through fax and posts, every time he would send him a question and waited for the answer, after he got an answer he would send him another post with another question. For Sherzad Hassan, this interview is different from all his other ones, it could be called the interview of a lifetime, as Sherzad Hassan stated; after this particular interview, everything he has said to the public has been a repetition of his words there.

In this interview, Sherzad Hassan wounded imagination and memories explode to the surface, opening up about everything he feels he had never talked about or expressed before, or had talked about but they never reached their target. It was as if seeing his wounded body in front of a mirror for the first time, so he begins to talk about his scarred history, the history of Kurdish people and all the pain and tragedy that we all have experienced.

The first question that Hiwa Qadir asked Sherzad Hassan was why he left the country and came to this frozen land? “Such a simple question tears me between two worlds, here and there, I am here and yet in spirit I remain there, or am I so confused and baffled that I am nowhere, I can neither belong nor settle.” he replied.