Lifelines of an Iraqi Poet

By Eleanor Limprecht October 2002

In the fifth grade, Hadi Kazwini discovered poetry.

A scrap of paper, a few words about his new tie, and a teacher looking over his shoulder.

The teacher read the words aloud to the class. It wasn't bad, he said, it was a poem.

The memory still makes Kazwini flush with pride. "In Iraq, the teacher is very powerful – he is more than a family, more than a father to us," he says.

Kazwini is an engineer in the Australian power industry. He is also an Iraqi writer and poet, publishing political poetry and academic articles. He is also, according to the Iraqi government, a traitor.

Closely shaven and his black hair neatly coifed, with just a touch of grey hinting at his 40 years, Kazwini looks more like an olive-skinned John Travolta than a political dissident. He wears the shirt and tie of an engineer, but has the expressive, fidgeting hands of a poet.

With precise English and a resonant voice he recalls sessions reading poetry with the Young Poets Union – a group of writers and intellectuals in 1980s Iraq.

"We were against all the classical forms of poetry," Kazwini says. Crowding into their tiny office, sometimes 40 at a time, they held ebullient readings and discussions.

The Iraqi government, although initially supportive, became suspicious and bugged the office. Nevertheless "it was very cozy, it was beautiful", says Kazwini.

The short-lived support meant that while he was still in university Kazwini found his political poems impossible to publish in Iraq. Some of them appeared in journals abroad.

It wasn't long before his name appeared on a list of traitors printed in Babel, a newspaper owned by Saddam Hussein's eldest son. So, after the Gulf War, Kazwini and his family fled Iraq.

Six years ago, after several years in the Middle East, they came to Australia.

"Australia is the only country to give me security and safety," says Kazwini. "Wherever we went before, we were like strangers. We used to go wait in long queues for residency certificates and visas – it was humiliating."

"In Jordan, in 1995, I had several incidents where I was just about to be deported to Iraq," Kazwini says, his hands momentarily still. He had to contact the UN and other human rights organisations to plead his case. "If I was deported to Iraq, I would be history."

Since he's been in Australia, Kazwini has continued to write, though sporadically. "I have a big family now," he says, "so I had to stick with engineering. At least I can make enough money to live on and give everything possible to my kids. I can't live from writing."

But he can't leave it behind either, much as he can't fully leave behind family members and friends still in Iraq.

Born in Babylon, 1000km south of Baghdad, to a religious Shiite Muslim family, he says nine of his relatives have "disappeared" in the last seven years.

Two months ago he lost his mother to a heart attack. "I couldn't even be there for the funeral," he says. "For me, it was devastating".

"I wrote several poems about my mother – I always associate my mother with the Iraqi land. How warm is the land, and how warm is the lap of the mother."

In his poem Motherland, Kazwini explores the contradiction between the country of his childhood and the Iraq that he escaped, writing: "I will reveal this secret to you,/The one I learnt after you shut all doors/In my face and many others/And left us on the noisy streets of life,/Wondering about our being/It was me who adored you."

Much as he misses Iraq, Kazwini says he is grateful to have found a new home in Australia. Asked if he has experienced discrimination here, Kazwini laughs, saying "No, I've been through real discrimination in my own country for 30 years."