On June 3, 2019, CGDS Director, Dr. Choman Hardi gave a poetry reading at King’s College London (KCL). This was part of a two-day workshop, “Visual Embodied Methodologies.” The workshop built on KCL’s emerging network to relocate visual, embodied, and art-based methodologies from the margins of social science research in and on the Global South to the center.
Dr. Hardi read the Anfal Sequence from her second poetry collection, “Considering the Women.” The sequence consists of thirteen poems. The first and last poems are written in the voice of the researcher, in between which eleven survivors tell their genocide stories. The poems address a number of sensitive issues such as the position of the researcher, power relationships between researcher and researched, toxicity of some knowledge, the appropriation of survivors’ voices, and the need for closure. They also address the way mass violence disconnects and disempowers survivors, leaving them to grapple with a kind of grief that seems inexpressible.