1. Invasion by Choman Hardi
LO: to analyse how Hardi uses
vocabulary and verb tense to create an
ominous sense of impending conflict

2. What feelings and ideas does word
“invasion” prompt? 3 minutes
INVASION
• 1. The act of invading, especially the entrance of an
armed force into a territory to conquer.
2. A large-scale onset of something injurious or harmful,
such as a disease.
3. An intrusion or encroachment.

3. What types
of invasion
are in the
pictures?

4. Choman Hardi
Choman Hardi (born 1974), is a contemporary Kurdish poet,
translator and painter. She was born in Sulaimaniya in Iraqi
Kurdistan. In 1975 her family fled to Iran after the Algiers
Accord but returned to Iraq after a general amnesty in
1979. They were forced to move again in 1988 during the
Anfal campaign. She arrived in United Kingdom in 1993 as a
refugee and studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford
and University College London. She did her PhD at
University of Kent focusing on the effects of forced
migration on the lives of Kurdish women from Iraq and
Iran. She has published three volumes of poetry in Kurdish.
Her only collection of English poems titled Life for Us was
published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004.

5. • Kurds Total population estimated 28 to 35 million Regions with significant
populations Asia
• Turkey 14-19.5 million (2010)
Iran 5–8 million (2010)
Iraq 4.5–7 million (2010)
Syria 1.4-2 million (2010)
The Kurdish people, or Kurds (Kurdish: ‫ کورد‬Kurd), are an Iranic people
native to the Middle East, mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan
which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. They speak
the Kurdish language, which is a member of the Iranian branch of Indo-
European languages.
• Kurds are an indigenous ethnic minority in countries where the Kurdistan
region is located, although they have enjoyed partial autonomy in Iraqi
Kurdistan since 1991. An irredentist movement pushes for the creation of
a Kurdish nation state.

6. “I grew up in a refugee Kurdish neighbourhood filled with stories about homeland and the
hopes of return,” she recalls. “This is where I spent my first five years.”
In 1979 the Iraqi government issued an amnesty and after much hesitation her father decided
to return. Choman remembers crossing back to her homeland; the journey captured in her
poem At the Border.
“I was five years old and expected the other place behind the border to be much more
beautiful. This is what my family had assured me. I realised I had been deceived. That day I
probably learnt the first important lesson in my life: that the stories immigrants tell about their
homelands are myths and beautiful lies. Suleimanya was not better than Kerej and the
landscape was not that different.”
A year later, war broke out between Iraq and Iran.
“My childhood, like many of my generation, is full of the sound of sirens and planes and guns.
Our days were dominated by the Iraq-Iran war and our nights by Iraq’s war against the Kurdish
peshmarga (fighters for independence).
“In those years all of our textbooks started with glorious pictures of Saddam Hussein, grinning at
us. A large portrait was also hung above our blackboard. Some days, after heavy breakouts of
shooting the night before, we would go to school and there would be more triumphant posters
of Saddam on the walls. My father told me that they were hiding the bullet holes.”

7. Invasion
Soon they will come. First we will hear
the sound of their boots approaching at dawn
then they’ll appear through the mist.
In their death-bringing uniforms
they will march towards our homes
their guns and tanks pointing forward.
They will be confronted by young men
with rusty guns and boiling blood.
These are our young men
who took their short-lived freedom for granted.
We will lose this war, and blood
will cover our roads, mix with our
drinking water, it will creep into our dreams.
Keep your head down and stay in doors –
we’ve lost this war before it has begun.

8. Invasion
Soon they will come. First we will hear
the sound of their boots approaching at dawn
then they’ll appear through the mist.
6. Who are “we” and “they”?
7. What images are created by “dawn” and “mist”?
8. What are alternative images of “dawn” and
“mist”?

9. In their death-bringing uniforms
they will march towards our homes
their guns and tanks pointing forward.
5. Identify the military words. What effect do they
create?
6. Why aren’t the soldiers described in more detail?
Why are only boots and uniforms mentioned?

10. They will be confronted by young men
with rusty guns and boiling blood.
These are our young men
who took their short-lived freedom for granted.
6. What does “rusty guns and boiling blood”
suggest about “us” in the poem?
7. How is this contrasted with “their guns and tanks
pointing forward” in the previous stanza?

11. We will lose this war, and blood
will cover our roads, mix with our
drinking water, it will creep into our dreams.
5. Is this an optimistic or pessimistic vision of their
future? Why is the poet like this?
6. What is the effect of using “will” (modal verb that
expresses certainty)?
7. What is the effect of the repetition of “will” and
“our”?

12. Keep your head down and stay in doors –
we’ve lost this war before it has begun.
4. What is the purpose of the imperative in the first
line?
5. What is the effect of the dash?
6. How does the statement at the end of the poem
contribute to the overall mood of the poem?

13. A few literary terms...
• Tone, stanza, rhyme, verse, free verse, enjambment
3. What the poet sounds like / the emotion you detect in
the poet’s voice ___________
4. Run-on lines/ opposite of end-stopped line
__________
5. When words chime _____________
6. A verse that doesn’t have rhyme or specific rhythm
____________
7. A paragraph in a poem _____________
8. A line in a poem _____________

14. Identify the following in the poem
1. What is the tone like? Can you provide an
example to back up your ideas?
2. How many stanzas are there? Are they
regular or irregular? What is the effect of this?
3. Is there rhyme in the poem? What is the
effect of this?
4. Find an example of enjambment. What is the
effect?

15. Consolidate
• Which poems can you compare this one to?
Write 3 comparative points.