Something Missing From This World

Ten years have passed since 2014 and the seventy-fourth genocide of the Yazidis, a people who have faced ongoing persecution, displacement, and ethnic cleansing from their ancestral lands in the Kurdish regions. In the wake of this genocidal violence, new poetic voices have emerged in university campuses and IDP camps along the borders of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, as well as from across the Yazidi diaspora. With globalizing forces compounding the erasure of their culture and traditions, the Yazidi poets in this multilingual anthology firmly stand their ground, their art a testament to Yazidi resistance and presence. This anthology joins in the poetic tradition of the Yazidis, which has historically preserved and documented instances of their traditions, dispossessions, and erasures. It is its own act of witnessing to recount the 2014 genocide for future generations. Translated from both Arabic and Kurmanji, the poets in this anthology affirm that they, indeed, will not let Yazidi voices be missed from this world.