Faisal Devji (a well known historian) taking about
The Poetry of the Taliban. This piece is edited from the introduction to The Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Strick Van
Linschosten and Felix Kuehn (Columbia University Press/Hurst, $24.50) : Being Poet
The Taliban are known not only in the
West, but in much of the Muslim world, too, for their strict conservatism
rather than for any delicate feelings of humanity, yet the poetry associated
with them is replete with such fine emotions.
Drawing upon the long tradition of
Persian or Urdu verse as much as Afghan legend and recent history, it is an
aesthetic form that includes unrequited love, powerful women for whose illicit
favors competitors vie, and descriptions of natural beauty among its themes.
Indeed a common claim in this poetry
is that the simple humanity of rural Afghans, nourished by the loveliness of
their mountains, meadows and streams, is under attack by coalition forces with
their drones, air strikes and heavily armed soldiers.
This is of course a literary trope,
whose distance from reality does not, however, mean that Taliban poets and
their audiences have no genuine feeling for such things as natural beauty.
Indeed the contrary is probably true, with the Taliban's aesthetic doing as
much to heighten an Afghan's appreciation of flowers, birds and the landscape
as of turning him against American troops.
But the concern in this literature for
humanity is more complex, with some writers sorrowfully acknowledging its loss
among the Afghans themselves.
--
At
your Christmas, Bagram is alit and bright;
On my Eid, even the rays of the sun are dead.
Suddenly at midnight, your bombs bring the light;
In our houses, even the oil lamps are turned off.
On my Eid, even the rays of the sun are dead.
Suddenly at midnight, your bombs bring the light;
In our houses, even the oil lamps are turned off.
Khepulwaak,
On Eid
The contrast drawn in the lines above
between Americans celebrating Christmas in the Bagram Air Base and Afghans
commemorating the Muslim festival of Eid outside is so simple as to be
unanswerable.
However slanted it might otherwise be,
this brief description represents a truth beyond the politics of good
intentions that characterizes the international community's actions in
Afghanistan. Ultimately it is likely to be such descriptions that come to
define the war in that country, and not the complicated arguments of those who
would rescue it from the depredations of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
Now that coalition forces are
preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan without achieving any of their goals,
such arguments are about to fall silent in any case, and a new society will
have to be built from the kind of consciousness that is on display in this and
other poems that may be said to constitute the literature of the Taliban.
Even when the large store of poetry
produced by the Taliban or their supporters has been noticed, which is more
often than not by American military analysts, it tends to be seen merely as
propaganda and thus folded back into the instrumentality of politics.
Yet it might well be the autonomy of
this aesthetic, or rather its general and broadly human character, that links
the Taliban to a wider world outside their ethnic and doctrinal limits. And
such a link, of course, is as capable of diluting the movement's integrity as
of reinforcing it.
Why should the Taliban's aesthetic be
so removed from the opinions and practices that define them both religiously
and politically? To account for such a division by invoking ideas about
hypocrisy or propaganda is unsatisfactory, because their very possibility would
have made Taliban verse controversial and perhaps even impossible.
Instead of which it both draws upon
and finds acceptance within a poetic tradition that links the movement to a
world outside its own. The Taliban's aesthetic is marked by a consciousness
external to their movement, one that moves beyond the limits of ideology to
make for a thoroughly individual sense of freedom which can manifest itself in
obedience as much as defiance, fidelity to a cause as much as its betrayal.
Taliban verse is full of statements
decrying as hypocrisy all invocations of human rights by coalition armies. And
the violation of such rights by the Americans or British is viewed as being so
egregious as to empty the category itself of any meaning. The accusation of
hypocrisy, in other words, is not matched by any desire among Taliban poets to
recuperate some authentic form of human rights, and in this way they diverge
fundamentally from the rhetoric of international politics.
Yet we have seen that these men and
women are also capable of expressing their utmost horror at the exercise of
cruelty, even when it is perpetrated by their own side, and regularly sing
about the virtues of peace, love and harmony in the name of humanity.
The great question as well as
opportunity sounding out from this literature is how to establish such virtues
in a post-war Afghan society without enclosing them in the legalistic carapace
of human rights that has been marred from its origins by an association with
imperialism. For in the absence of rule by consent, it was often humanitarian
considerations that gave Europe's colonial empires their legitimacy in the
past.
--
From its origins in the Soviet
invasion of 1979, the war that continues to wreck Afghanistan has also given
rise to an extraordinary aesthetic consciousness. By weaving it into carpets,
photographing it in secret studios and commemorating it in song and verse
distributed by way of CDs and cell phones, Afghans across the political
spectrum have struggled to humanize a long and destructive war in an effort that
bears comparison to the cultural productivity of the First World War in Europe.
Poetry, which was probably the most
important aesthetic medium of traditional Afghan society, has played a crucial
role in this effort, and the Taliban verse collected in this volume represents
the melancholy beauty of the old lyric as well as the moral outrage and call to
action that is characteristic of modern literature.
(source : huffingtonpost.com)
