Soul of Afghanistan etched in poetry of its people

by doreen peri

Posted to Utterances on 2002-06-10 16:15:00

from here

http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/nation/3438615.htm

Posted on Mon, Jun. 10, 2002

Soul of Afghanistan etched in poetry of its people

BY LAURIE GOERING
Chicago Tribune


KABUL, Afghanistan – KRT NEWSFEATURES

(KRT) – For at least the last millennium, Afghanistan has been a society of poets.

Two-thirds of Afghans can’t read or write, but nearly every shopkeeper and taxi driver can quote an appropriate stanza, or make up a new couplet on the spot. Newspapers include poetry columns, kids battle with exchanges of rhyme on street corners, and some of the country’s best histories are in verse.

Afghanistan’s museums, monuments and treasures may have fallen victim to 23 years of war, but its poetic spirit has survived. In fact, its poets say, the country’s agonies have brought one good thing: inspiration.

“Our people have suffered a lot of misery and problems, and everyone wants to explain his problems. That makes for a lot of poets in Afghanistan,” said Hayatullah Bakhshi, the head of the Association of Poets and Writers of Afghanistan, which is struggling to get back on its feet after being closed by the former fundamentalist Taliban government.

As Bakhshi explains: “Feeling is a key element of poetry, and the Taliban created a lot of feeling. Women especially were banned from participating in life, so with their time, they wrote poetry reflecting their pain. No one realized it at the time, but there were probably more poets at work under the Taliban than now.”

Disguised messages

For centuries, Afghans have used poetry to disguise political messages, and poems under Taliban rule were no exception. The few published in that time were thick with double meaning.

“The pain in my throat is getting more and more severe. The path of my throat is obstructed,” reads a section of one poem Bakhshi published during the Taliban years.

Now, however, Afghanistan’s newly unencumbered poets are waxing, well, poetic.

“The sun of my hope cultivated the seeds of this day; I am as happy as a deer that I am moving and not stopped in one place,” reads a recent work by Sida-Urans Sing, a young Afghan poet who raced to Kabul’s leading radio station to read her long-hidden works on the air after the fall of the Taliban.

“We should rebuild our country, as a hard rain that comes to a dry place and makes it green,” she reads aloud from one of her poems, written right to left in an elegant Arabic script.

Much of Afghanistan’s poetry – like that everywhere – is focused on love. A 17th Century work by Khushal Khan Khattak, one of Afghanistan’s most famous Pashtun poets, urges:

My love, my bird, remember that

A hawk when he grows old

Becomes more subtle in the chase,

His stoop becomes more bold;

Surrender then to me, for though

I seem no longer young,

The fervor of my love will taste

Like honey on your tongue.

The rest of Afghanistan’s poetry focuses, appropriately, on either God or war, both long national fascinations. While much of the country’s poetry is in Dari, a cousin of Persian and the language of the educated elite, the national language Pashtu has its share of works as well, particularly in the war genre.

Consider an old Pashtu couplet: “If you don’t wield a sword, what else will you do?/You who have suckled at the breast of an Afghan mother!”

Poetry fighting

In Afghanistan’s ancient days, every kingdom or castle had a poet, often chosen for the job through poetry fighting, a tradition that goes back at least a thousand years. In the contests, a master poet would recite a line, and the challenger would reply with a line of his own, making the first word of his stanza start with the same letter as the last word of the previous stanza, Bakhshi said.

Today team poetry fighting, between boys and girls, or adults at parties, remains a favorite tradition.

As in the rest of the world, poets rarely make a good living these days in Afghanistan. Most work other jobs.

“Poets here are like poets everywhere: poor,” says Bakhshi, who works by day as a salesman. His poets association, the offices of which were destroyed by the Taliban, now has only a shabby room in a shabbier building, outfitted with little more than a tea kettle, a couple of cups and an ancient couch.

But in Afghanistan, he said, “poets feel loved.”

Readers with afghanis to spare snap up their books, and public poetry readings – now resuming after the defeat of the Taliban – routinely draw overflow crowds.

Poets, who wrote and read in secret all these years, are happy to see at least one ancient Afghan tradition resuming its rightful place, strengthened as well as threatened by war.

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© 2002, Chicago Tribune.

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