As promised in the previous post,
here is Selina Rodrigues on the talks she heard at Poetry
International in the South Bank Centre, Saturday 25 July: Pashtun poetry and
landays, and Syrian and Iraqi poets on modern war poetry. Her account of the talk on landays started me
on a fascinating search to learn more.
“It was about lips and hair and
meeting your beloved,” said poet Saleem Khan, describing Pashtun poetry, before
Pakistan undertook a military intervention against the Taliban in North
Waziristan. Of course this is a
simplification, but with the displacement of over 700,000 people, poets are now
recounting their experiences of conflict, death, and the challenges of
witnessing and transcribing such events. “Our children are exposed to sun and
even the sun is not easy here”, mused Saleem Khan, on the difficulties of
living in camps without schools, frequent running water or electricity.
“You handed me the gun and took away
the pen”, quoted Dilawar Khan, also of North Waziristan, and later, “you kept me
hungry, so I turned into a man-eater”, these lines showing the agony and
complexity of human responses to violence. Poetry and self-expression are still shared
through Mushaira, traditional gatherings of poets and people. Many have started to write poetry as a
response to the conflict. With limited
access to technology, poetry is a spark and signal for subjects ranging from
resistance to individual grief, to the solace of religion.
These two Pakistani poets were also
joined by fellow poet Zahid Ullah Khan and journalist Aamir Iqbal in the talk,
Free of the Taliban.
Poetry is acclaimed as a remover of
obstacles, a bridge between discordant ideas. These events showed its
mutability and flame-like attraction.
Text messaging and social media enable the sharing of landays between
rural and urban women in Afghanistan.
Existing for 3,500 years, of 2 lines and 22 syllables, landays cut to
the essential, enabling confession, rebellions and companionship between women.
How much simpler can love be.
Let’s get engaged. Text Me.
Sahera Sharif, founder of the Mirman
Baheer literary society in Kabul, said women may be writing under pseudonyms,
using fantasy or even male personas to convey “the feelings of women… which are
different”. American journalist Eliza
Griswold collected and published these landays but as Sahera Sharif gently
reminded us, the meanings can be intricate and sometimes the deeper layers
remain visible only to Afghani people.
When sisters sit together, they always
praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together they sell
their sisters to others.
Griswold’s i-Phone was placed under
a pile of pillows during one gathering in Afghanistan and she suggested that
this was due to the potency of the subject matter, created by women. Yes, women
and girls experience violence and brutality and poetry and self-expression can
be seen as shameful, but perhaps it’s more complex than that. Even in our
selfie-saturated environs, the brain clicks from thought, to photograph, to
publication. What we say is charged differently when taken by a foreigner to
another continent. Landays are oral
forms and there’s an adjustment in transferring to page/screen, as we can see
when wonderful UK-based performance poets snake between the landscapes of stage
and page.
Sahera Sharif and journalist Eliza
Griswold participated in the talk, Why Afghan Women Risk Their Lives to Write
Poetry. There’s a long piece on landays
by Eliza Griswold at the Poetry Foundation, here. Her collection of landays, I Am the Beggar of the World, is
published by Macmillan US.
One of Golan Haji’s poems, ‘Shooting
Sportsmen’ (published in The Wolf, here) considers how the borders of conflict
expand so that no-one, no thing is left unaffected.
They murdered the madman of the
quarter, the milk vendor and the
parsley seller
They killed the window and the
sister who looked from it
Neither the neighbours’ cow survived
Nor the streetlamp.
Both Adnan al-Sayegh, a poet from
Iraq, and Syrian Kurdish poet Golan Haji spoke of the need for translation,
visits, contact between cultures. Golan
Haji reflected on the complexities of language and power and his concern that
non-Western literature is viewed as “from the ruptured country, [we are]
pictured as victims in the mundane version of the world”. But he celebrated his “love [of] poets of the
world as if they are of my own country”.
These poets participated in the talk
Modern War Poetry.
No fault of the organisers, through
all the events we ran out of time, only enough to hear one or two poems and
sensing the poets had more they wanted to share. How strange it was to leave the dark Purcell
Room, go out to July wind and sun, back to the internet and hope to see and
hear more, again.
Selina
Rodrigues lives in London and works for a charity. She is of mixed-race Indian
parentage and writes poetry focusing on identity, urban living and the
pull-push of desire and behaviour. Her
poetry has been published most recently in The Rialto and Magma and as a
competition winner for the Poetry School and South Bank Poetry Magazine. She has read at the Poetry Café, for Poetry
Shuffle and by invitation at various London bookshops.
