Shouts from Beneath the Burqa

I am shouting but you don't answer—

One day you'll look for me and I'll be gone from this world.

Such was the landay—a two-line folk poem repeated over centuries among Afghan nomads and farmers—that Rahila Muska recited over the phone to fellow Afghan women in 2010. A women's literary group, Mirman Baheer, meets every Saturday afternoon in the capital, Kabul, and hosts a call-in hotline that attracts young poets from rural provinces. After Rahila's sister caught her reading love poetry, Rahila's brothers beat her and destroyed her notebooks. Two weeks later, Rahila set herself on fire, then died.

Journalist and poet Eliza Griswold told Rahila's and other Afghan women's stories for The New York Times Magazine in 2012. Griswold's newest book—I Am the Beggar of the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), featuring photography by Seamus Murphy—is a collection of landay translations, which provide a window into the often unseen, surprising dimensions of Afghan women's lives. Many of the landays are bodily and bawdy. One memorable example from the book's opening section, on Love:

I'll kiss you in the pomegranate garden. Hush!

People will think there's a goat in the underbrush.

Others are brazenly confrontational, challenging husbands and fathers (most of Afghanistan's 15 million women are married by age 16; three out of four are forced marriages) as well as the political forces that shape their future:

May God destroy your tank and your drone,

You who've destroyed my village, my home.

Griswold read many of the landays aloud at this year's Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. Later, she spoke with Katelyn Beaty about the work of translating them as well as the ways they connect to Griswold's other work: The Tenth Parallel, a journalistic look at Christianity's and Islam's collision along the latitude line 700 miles north of the equator, and Wideawake Field, her 2008 collection of poetry.

Part of the effect of the landays is to complicate our understanding of what life is like among women in a strict Islamic country. In that way, this new book seems connected to what you achieve with The Tenth Parallel. In what ways are the two projects linked?

First, you're exactly right, that what interests me about observing the world is rendering things that are too simple, that we at a distance see too simply, into three-dimensional reality. I write my own poems, and that's probably more of a straight line. The line from Wideawake Field to the landays is that I'm very interested in the idea of sacred time—in poetry that punctures the quotidian and reaches by nature of its ceremonial aspect toward the divine. Although landays are very, very earthy, they are also about ceremony, about invoking another way of being. They are still told at weddings, around campfires. The question is, how do they not only give voice to women's everyday experience but also elevate that experience into something larger than its parts? It's not just about cooking spinach; it's about being married to an abusive husband.

You write that the landays "frustrate any image of a Pashtun woman as a mute ghost in a blue burqa." In what ways?

Well, in the content, right? The women take on spousal abuse, repression, the daily misery of a woman's life, being sold into marriage to a much older man. They're talking about societal taboos.

How do they function among the women who are repeating them?

Folk poetry over millennia is typically an oral tradition, mostly because it comes from illiterate people. It's not about writing words down; again, it's about puncturing secular time, puncturing the quotidian. Folk poetry isn't a literary tradition, it's the opposite—it's a tradition that belongs to everyone. Landays can be sung by both men and women, but the majority are sung in the voices of women, because what they're singing about is a woman's experience. So they have been traded, passed along for centuries, probably millennia. The most popular thinking on them is that they come out of a nomadic tradition, that they were a form of communication in caravans.

Many of the landays you've collected have overt political content, critiquing Hamid Karzai, U.S. troops, and the Taliban, for example. How effective are they in effecting political change in Afghanistan?

They have no capacity to change political outcomes.

Is your hope that they will effect at least attitudinal change in the West?

Sure, they certainly helped me rethink assumptions that I made. They complicated my understanding of an Afghan woman as beneath the burqa, having a less sophisticated understanding of the forces working in her life. In fact, her sense of the forces working in her life is far more sophisticated than what I see as an outsider. I could come in as an outsider: "Oh, she's suffering in ways she doesn't understand, she doesn't even know what it would be to have an education." But she knows more than I do, and landays reveal that. So the way they helped inform my understanding, I certainly hope they do that for readers as well.

Talk about the work of translating them. What was the process of achieving accuracy, both translating them from Pashto into English and also going from the oral to the written form?

The transcription was undertaken by two young Afghan women, one of whom has died, as you know (the book is dedicated to her). We would sit with groups of women, and I would have conversations with them. My translator would render that into Pashto, and the women would speak in Pashto and repeat the poems back. My translator would write them down.

Then we'd go home with a very loose understanding of what that poem meant, and over months we'd trade that poem between ourselves but also between other journalists and professors and poets.

A landay is just about nine words, and if you translated the poem literally, word by word by word, it would sound like nonsense when you read it aloud in English: "moon," "star," etc. I usually had a loose understanding of what the poem meant before I saw the literal version. So we'd work through it to get the layers of meaning in that poem into English.

Do you see these as fitting or not fitting into a Western feminist literary tradition?

I know nothing about Western feminist literary tradition. I'm just interested in the poems themselves as poems. I think it would be really dangerous to make some sort of connection between Western feminist theory and these folk poems from Afghanistan.

Obviously you spent a lot of time with these women in their communities. How did that experience affect you personally—as a poet, as a journalist?

That's a good question. The two relationships in this project that affected me most were my relationships with the young women who were translators. Asma Fafi, whom the project is dedicated to, got sick after we worked together. It turned out that she had an undiagnosed heart condition, and she had an operation that didn't go very well. The thinking is that she contracted an infection; she died on her way to the hospital in Kabul with her little brother in the taxi. Even though she was extraordinarily conservative on the outside, she was very dedicated to the future of Afghanistan as a functioning society—even beyond what she herself wanted to participate in. So my relationship with Asma definitely helped open my mind to the many identities that an Afghan girl (she was in her early twenties) might carry within her.

My second translator, a young woman who goes by the initial Z. in the book, is also in her early twenties. She's worked professionally with journalists and NGO types and different Westerners since she was in her early teens. And she doesn't understand the strictures that her mother and other women of that generation simply accept. She received a death threat from the Taliban pretty recently, for working with foreigners. She had to leave Kabul. The challenges for young girls trying to make their own lives in Afghanistan are considerable.

The landays' power comes from their lowness, their earthiness—they're not high and literary. That has certainly given me confidence to work in English in the same way. They rely on humor and sassiness and bawdiness, and I love all of that in poetry and would hope to work more in a tradition that is of the earth.

I also hope that readers think, What can I do? There's plenty to do to commit to girls' education in Afghanistan and elsewhere. I hope that these poems serve as an impetus to reach out.

Katelyn Beaty is print managing editor of Christianity Today magazine. She is writing a book about women and work (Howard, 2016).