Slaughter, TraceyAl-Bahar, Sara2026-08-062026-08-062025https://hdl.handle.net/10289/18516In 2017 I travelled to Iraq for the first time. I became mesmerised by the culture surrounding death and grief: the Iraqi tradition of grieving for forty days, the roads leading from my hometown of Najaf to Karbala lined with martyrs’ photographs. Najaf is home to Wadi Al Salam: the world’s biggest cemetery, in translation, the Valley of Peace. I became obsessed with the cemetery’s history and couldn’t stop talking about its name, suffused as it was with poetry. It is a name to transfix and enthral, one that proved indelible. The cemetery is impossible to avoid, and looking out either window you’re met with endless stretches of land covered in headstones, some almost completely shattered and all covered in a film of fine sand. There is some comfort in death here and the contrast between the tidy, sterile suburbs of Aotearoa where I now live with the grit and pain-soaked landscape of Najaf is incredible. On my return to Aotearoa, I felt for the first time, a sense of longing for ‘home,’ and the disquiet that neither Iraq nor Aotearoa felt sufficient or fitting for the term, like the knowledge of the existence of another place—a place that I should fight and die for had shattered my perception of home. Home was suddenly ephemeral and impermanent. This collection of poetry, وادي السلام, the Valley of Peace, is an exploration of growing up in Aotearoa as an Iraqi Muslim, wanting to encapsulate the isolation of migrants, and refugees, in diaspora. These two very separate parts of an inseparable whole, dual parts of who I am. The final piece in this collection is written in Arabic, not only as an expression of myself, for myself, but as a gift to my people.enAll items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.Thesis