Homeland as mother in Some Irish and Kurdish Poems: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Nationalism and attachment to country and land is as old as man’s existence on earth; yet, as a concept, it is almost modern, or may be, some steps behind the modern age. There are, undoubtedly, reasons and factors behind the rise of this concept and its appearance in the literature of some, if not all, nations throughout the history. This comparative investigation is an attempt to tackle a number of poems in both the Irish and Kurdish modern poetry. The resemblance between the historical, geographical, political, and cultural situations of the two nations was behind the germination of the idea of the paper. Despite the huge distance between the two nations’ lands, history, and culture, the paper pre-supposes a sort of resemblance that marks ‘the poetry of resistance’ in each case and consequently some common features to be discovered through the poems under study here. The paper starts with a brief introduction about nationalism as a concept along with its development in the modern age due to the political upheavals in different parts of the world. It is followed by a critical analysis of selected Irish and Kurdish poems using some modern and up-to-dates sources. The comparative aspects between the two cases precedes the conclusions and list of sources where some points are concluded the most obvious one of which is the heavy and unexpected semblance between the two groups of poems in forms, themes, and even techniques.