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I just finished reading the June issue of Poetry<\/i> magazine, which features the landay, an oral form of poetry popular among Pashtun women in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
You should really just go read the issue here<\/a>. But here\u2019s a quick description:<\/p>\n The landay is an anonymous and collective tradition with origins in the Indo-Aryan caravans of thousands of years ago. These couplets were traditionally sung to the beat of a hand drum. \u201cLanday\u201d itself means \u201cshort, poisonous snake,\u201d and it can indeed bite like a snake: quick and frequently acerbic, the landay is only twenty-two syllables long, with nine syllables in one line and thirteen in the other.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here\u2019s an example of one:<\/p>\n You sold me to an old man, father. Landays are a form in which women can voice a rage of feelings\u2014love, longing, anger, desire, lust, pride, nationalism, and grief\u2014while remaining anonymous. Because they\u2019re constantly repeated and remixed, they\u2019re not about the speaker personally. At the same time, they are<\/i> about the speaker, because different landays resonate with different individuals.<\/p>\n Landays are often shared in secret. Men don\u2019t hear women speak or sing them. As a consequence, they can be subversive in multiple ways.<\/p>\n The poet-journalist who translated these landays, Eliza Griswold, worked with photographer Seamus Murphy in Afghanistan to collect as many landays as possible. Their collaboration resulted in the stunningly beautiful issue of Poetry<\/i>\u00a0(which also features some fabulous commentary by Griswold) as well as a forthcoming collection, I Am The Beggar Of The World: Landays From Contemporary Afghanistan<\/a>,\u00a0<\/i>pictured above.<\/p>\n (If you\u2019re really interested, Seamus Murphy has made a short film, Snake<\/a><\/i>, with more images and audio that includes recitations of landays in Pashto and English. There\u2019s also an older collection of landays, called Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women\u2019s Poetry<\/a><\/i>, originally collected and translated into French by the poet Sayd Bahodine Majrouh during the civil war in the 1980s, and then translated into English by the distinguished Marjolijn de Jager. Oh, and check out the Facebook<\/a> page on landays as well.)<\/p>\n Despite all the writing about Afghanistan in the West\u2014the journalism, the policy papers, the political pronouncements\u2014these poems remind us of the voices that are shut out of the halls of power. Their lines suggest deep and often bitter feelings about the U.S., the Taliban, and the years of war and foreign occupation. One landay dating back to the nineteenth century used to be about a British soldier, but today it has changed:<\/p>\n My lover is fair as an American soldier can be. Many of these poems are political and speak with rage about loss and destruction.<\/p>\n
\nMay God destroy your home, I was your daughter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nTo him I looked dark as a Talib, so he martyred me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n