Jalal Barzanji, a Kurdish poet and journalist, was born in a small village called Ashkaftsaqa in 1953. The village was remote and didn’t have a school until Barzanji was seven years old. He describes his village as “a peaceful place between mountains” where he “learned about the beauty and simplicity of life” and listened to stories the men told by the fire or on the rooftops and he dreamt of things he had never seen. That vision of simplicity and beauty changed overnight when Barzanji was in first grade. Iraqi forces bombed the village and everyone was forced to flee. He and his family ended up in Hawler (Erbil), the capital of the Kurdistan region.
Later at university, he read the works of foreign writers and it inspired him to start writing. In 1979, he published his first collection of poetry under the title The Dawning of the Evening Snow (Jamour publishing, Kurdistan). It was his second collection of poetry published in 1985 that landed him in prison. But the imprisonment of the body is not the same as imprisonment of the mind, and for Barzanji, writing is his reason for being “If I don’t write, I feel like I’ve lost something. Writing has become part of my life and spirituality”.
Barzanji was pardoned and released from prison after three years, as part of one of Saddam’s birthday celebration. Although he continued to live in fear of his life, he maintained his dreams of freedom. He still wrote, but in secret, as he was still under investigation. In 1991, after an uprising in Kurdistan that drove out Saddam’s forces, Barzanji was asked to be the chief editor of a Kurdish magazine. He knew it would be a challenge because although Saddam’s military was now absent, a legacy of governmental control remained.
Saddam’s forces returned to Kurdistan in 1996. Barzanji and his family fled to Turkey, approaching the United Nations to claim refugee status. After receiving government sponsorship, they headed to Canada in 1998 and settled in Edmonton. In Edmonton, he helped establish the Canadian-Kurdish Friendship Association and the Edmonton Immigrant Support Network Society. In 2007, Barzanji was named Edmonton’s inaugural writer-in-Exile-a writer-in-residency program created by the literary and human rights association PEN Canada to foster refugee writers who have fled persecution in their home countries. The one-year appointment provided him the time, space, and financial means to build his writing career in Canada and complete The Man in Blue pyjamas. The first draft of the book, completed in 2007, was written in Kurdish. After many rounds of revisions and translations, the novel was available in 2011 from the University of Alberta Press.[1]