Afghan Women’s Powerful Poetry – Even Amidst War
Leigh Cuen / Jul 7th, 2013
Despite constant dangers, Afghan women’s poetry continues
to flourish. One outlet for women’s poetry is Mirman Baheer,
Afghanistan’s largest literary society for women. Mirman Baheer operates
in Kabul with over 100 members. Its members are generally educated and
employed; they are professors, parliamentarians, journalists and
scholars.
Approximately 300 of Miram Baheer’s members live in the
outlying provinces — Khost, Paktia, Maidan Wardak, Kunduz, Kandahar,
Herat and Farah — where the group functions in secret. Many who cannot
safely travel to meet together listen to radio programs broadcast by
Mirman Baheer and the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.
“We recruit only through word-of-mouth and delete any
content that might be used to identify our writers,” says Richelle
McClain, director of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.
The Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP) was founded in
2009. Today, 160 Afghan women across five provinces are enrolled in
AWWP’s workshops, including a new workshop for teenagers and a Dari
writing program. While security is an omnipresent concern, dwindling
financial support is one of their greatest challenges. “We just lost 75
percent of our funding because of the U.S. withdrawal,” says McClain.
Before the 2014 elections in Afghanistan, the AWWP plans to
partner with IFES Afghanistan (International Foundation for Electoral
Systems) to promote political writings by local women through digital,
print, and radio networks. They will also run special broadcasts
featuring interviews with female candidates and programs about how
election results will impact Afghan citizens.
For many rural women in Afghanistan, these secret networks
and the poetry broadcasts are their only form of education. U.N.
investigations revealed that only 12 percent of Afghan women are
literate.
But, thanks to volunteer translators and journalists,
contemporary Afghan women’s poetry can now reach global audiences. For
example, the June 2013 issue of Poetry magazine was dedicated to landays
– vitriolic, two-line verses traditionally recited by Afghan women at
the river, the well, or private gatherings.
This collection came from years of investigative reporting
by journalist Eliza Griswold. She journeyed to Afghanistan with
photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy. On July 30, 2013 the Pulitzer
Center will host “I Am the Beggar of the World,” a presentation of
Griswald and Murphy’s work at the Culture Project in New York City.
A free exhibit at the Poetry Foundation Gallery in Chicago,
Shame Every Rose: Images of Afghanistan, features many of these landays
and images. The exhibit is open to the public through August.
“Sharing this poetry could endanger the poets’ lives,” says
Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine. “Still, they gave these poems
willingly.”
The tradition of landays provides some level of anonymity
for women because they are collective. They are recited and shared
rather than attributed to a single poet. Even so, in modern Afghanistan,
poetry can be dangerous. Over the past year, several young Afghan poets
were killed by their male relatives. A young Mirman Baheer member who
called herself Rahila Muska burned herself to death in protest after her
brothers found her writing poetry and brutally attacked her. Her real
name was Zarmina. She often recited this landay over the phone to
members of Miram Baheer:
“You sold me to an old man, Father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.”
Landays derive their power from shrewd layers of tension
between the poet’s inner and outer world. They can explore rage,
sarcasm, irony, loss, separation and desire. Many of the poems are
humorous, filled with bawdy sexual imagery.
Whatever the subject, a landay lilts from word to word in a
short lullaby with scathing, layered meaning. These poems come from a
long legacy of Afghan women’s literature.
“The Afghan woman poet predates the American or European
female poet,” says Zohra Saed, an Afghan-American poet living in New
York City. “Consider the poet queen Rabia Balkhi.” Legend has it this
11th century Afghan used her last drop of blood to write poems.
“Afghan women’s poetry is unique because it must respond to
create change,” says Saed. “Within our communities and also to change
outside perceptions. It is the poetry of witness, of trauma, of memory
and of struggle to be seen as individuals.”
Saed recounted the time she edited a collection of
literature by Afghan writers around the world. Before it was finished,
an American radio station published a CD of the collection without her
permission. They listed her as the editor and printed a photograph of an
impoverished child on the cover.
“When people are interested in Afghan women’s poetry, it is
presented as poetry by the same women the world has imagined rescuing
over the past 20 years,” Saed says.
She took legal action to recall the copyrighted anthology,
then focused it exclusively on Afghan-American writers. “There were also
women poets who were not part of the war,” she says. “Writers raised
abroad, their aesthetics and poetic voice is very different.”
Today, Afghan literature is fragmented by linguistic,
cultural and geographic divides. Some of the world’s most prominent
Afghan writers live outside their fatherland and write in English. Many
female writers in Afghanistan come from the urban elite, often educated
in western universities. Poems by women in rural Afghanistan are rarely
published. Groups like the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and the Poetry
Foundation are working to bridge this divide.
“Poetry is not only for the classroom and elite art
circles,” says Share, editor of Poetry magazine. “Poetry is an essential
part of life, the only way these women can share their experiences.
These poems are electrifying and relevant.” He hopes readers will
realize that, even in the digital age, poetry can wield tangible power.
Photos Courtesy of The Poetry Foundation (top, second, and last)
and The Afghan Women’s Writing Project (Workshop photos by Cheney Orr,
Blue Burqa by Heidi Levine).http://dowser.org/afghan-womens-powerful-poetry-even-amidst-war/
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