Afghans revere poetry, particularly the high literary forms that derive
from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet-a landay,
an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate
people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border
between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation, homeland, love-these
are the subjects of landays, which are brutal and spare, can be remixed
like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary.
From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that
first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, landays
reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of
war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of
protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave.
After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write
poems and set herself on fire in protest, the poet Eliza Griswold and
the photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to learn about
these women and to collect their landays. The poems gathered in I Am the
Beggar of the World express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke,
a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms, all of which
belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost
beneath a blue burqa.
