 |
Saheera
Sharif, the founder of Mirman Baheer (upper center); Ogai Amail, a poet and
member of the group (bottom left); also pictured are other members of the
poets’ group.
|
This
article and the accompanying photographs were financed in part by a grant from
the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. And the report presented by Eliza Griswold, a senior fellow at the New America
Foundation and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. : Being Poet
In
a private house in a quiet university neighborhood of Kabul, Ogai Amail waited
for the phone to ring. Through a plate-glass window, she watched the sinking
sun turn the courtyard the color of eggplant. The electricity wasn’t working
and the room was unheated, a few floor cushions the only furnishings. Amail
tucked her bare feet underneath her and pulled up the collar of her puffy black
coat. Her dark hair was tied in a ponytail, and her eyelids were coated in
metallic blue powder. In the green glare of the mobile phone’s screen, her face
looked wan and worried. When the phone finally bleeped, Amail shrieked with joy
and put on the speakerphone. A teenage girl’s voice tumbled into the room. “I’m
freezing,” the girl said. Her voice was husky with cold. To make this call,
she’d sneaked out of her father’s mud house without her coat.
Like
many of the rural members of Mirman Baheer, a women’s literary society based in
Kabul, the girl calls whenever she can, typically in secret. She reads her
poems aloud to Amail, who transcribes them line by line. To conceal her poetry
writing from her family, the girl relies on a pen name, Meena Muska. (Meena
means “love” in the Pashto language; muska means “smile.”)
Meena
lost her fiancé last year, when a land mine exploded. According to Pashtun
tradition, she must marry one of his brothers, which she doesn’t want to do.
She doesn’t dare protest directly, but reciting poetry to Amail allows her to
speak out against her lot. When I asked how old she was, Meena responded in a
proverb: “I am like a tulip in the desert. I die before I open, and the waves
of desert breeze blow my petals away.” She wasn’t sure of her age but thought
she was 17. “Because I am a girl, no one knows my birthday,” she said.
Meena
lives in Gereshk, a town of 50,000 people in Helmand, the largest of
Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Helmand has struggled with the double burden of
being one of the world’s largest opium producers and an insurgent stronghold.
Meena’s father pulled her out of school four years ago after gunmen kidnapped
one of her classmates. Now she stays home, cooks, cleans and teaches herself to
write poetry in secret. Poems are the only form of education to which she has
access. She doesn’t meet outsiders face to face.
“I
can’t say any poems in front of my brothers,” she said. Love poems would be
seen by them as proof of an illicit relationship, for which Meena could be
beaten or even killed. “I wish I had the opportunities that girls do in Kabul,”
she went on. “I want to write about what’s wrong in my country.” Meena gulped.
She was trying not to cry. On the other end of the line, Amail, who is prone to
both compassion and drama, began to weep with her. Tears mixed with kohl
dripped onto the page of the spiral notebook in which Amail was writing down
Meena’s verses. Meena recited a Pashtun folk poem called a landai:
“My
pains grow as my life dwindles,
I will die with a heart full of hope.”
“I
am the new Rahila,” she said. “Record my voice, so that when I get killed at
least you’ll have something of me.”
Amail
grimaced, uncertain how to respond. “Don’t call yourself that,” she snapped.
“Do you want to die, too?”
Rahila
was the name used by a young poet, Zarmina, who committed suicide two years
ago. Zarmina was reading her love poems over the phone when her sister-in-law
caught her. “How many lovers do you have?” she teased. Zarmina’s family assumed
there was a boy on the other end of the line. As a punishment, her brothers
beat her and ripped up her notebooks, Amail said. Two weeks later, Zarmina set
herself on fire.
Like
Meena, Zarmina lived in Gereshk, a little less than 400 miles from Kabul. She,
too, wasn’t allowed to leave her home. She first found the literary group by
listening to the radio, her only link to the outside world. One day, on Radio
Azadi — Radio Liberty — she heard a Mirman Baheer member reading poems. With no
way to contact the group, she phoned another radio program, “Lost Love,” a
popular show that mostly connects refugees to family members or friends they
haven’t seen in decades. Zarmina asked for help in finding Mirman Baheer. One
of the station’s employees was a member. “Oh, so you thought we were lost,
too!” she told the aspiring poet, before sharing the phone number.
Zarmina
soon became a regular caller. Whenever she could, she phoned into Mirman
Baheer’s Saturday-afternoon meetings at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in
Kabul. Zarmina would ask Amail if she could read her poems aloud to the group.
But the Kabul meetings were crowded with eager poets, vying to be heard. Amail
often had to tell Zarmina to wait her turn. “I’d say, ‘No, I’ll call you,’ but
she’d call back within a few minutes.”
Sometimes
Zarmina couldn’t stand to wait for a meeting to call Amail. When Amail said she
was too busy to talk, Zarmina would respond with a landai:
“I
am shouting but you don’t answer —
One day you’ll look for me and I’ll be gone from this world.”
“How
sweet it would have been if we’d only recorded her voice while she was reading
poems,” Amail said. She picked bits of caramelized sugar and almonds from a
glass dish. “Now, when any girl calls, I note down everything — the dates of
the poems, the phone numbers, every single thing she says.” (The group still
can’t afford a tape recorder.)
In
her poems, Zarmina described “the dark cage of the village.” Her work was
impressive, according to Amail, not only for its distinctive language but also
for its courage to question God’s will. “That’s what our poems had in common,”
Amail said. “We complained to God about the state of our lives.” Zarmina’s
poems posed questions: “Why am I not in a world where people can feel what I’m
feeling and hear my voice?” She asked, “If God cares about beauty, why aren’t
we allowed to care?” She asked: “In Islam, God loved the Prophet Muhammad. I’m
in a society where love is a crime. If we are Muslims, why are we enemies of
love?”
As
Amail and Zarmina grew closer, they would talk several times a day whenever
Zarmina could sneak access to a phone; but there were periods when they managed
to speak only once a month. During the two weeks between her brothers’ beating
and her suicide, Zarmina gave Amail no indication of how desperate she was when
she called. She did, however, recite another landai:
“On
Doomsday, I will say aloud,
I came from the world with my heart full of hope.”
“Stupid, don’t say
that,” Amail recalls saying. “You’re too young to die.”
To
the women of Mirman Baheer, Zarmina is only the most recent of Afghanistan’s
poet-martyrs. “She was a sacrifice to Afghan women,” Amail told me. “There are
hundreds like her.”
Mirman
Baheer, Afghanistan’s largest women’s literary society, is a contemporary
version of a Taliban-era literary network known as the Golden Needle. In Herat,
women, pretending to sew, gathered to talk about literature. In Kabul, Mirman
Baheer has no need for subterfuge. Its more than 100 members are drawn
primarily from the Afghan elite: professors, parliamentarians, journalists and
scholars. They travel on city buses to their Saturday meetings, their faces
uncovered, wearing high-heeled boots and shearling coats. But in the outlying
provinces — Khost, Paktia, Maidan Wardak, Kunduz, Kandahar, Herat and Farah —
where the society’s members number 300, Mirman Baheer functions largely in
secret.
Of
Afghanistan’s 15 million women, roughly 8 out of 10 live outside urban areas,
where U.S. efforts to promote women’s rights have met with little success. Only
5 out of 100 graduate from high school, and most are married by age 16, 3 out
of 4 in forced marriages. Young poets like Meena who call into the hot line,
Amail told me, “are in a very dangerous position. They’re behind high walls,
under the strong control of men.” Herat University’s celebrated young poet,
Nadia Anjuman, died in 2005, after a severe beating by her husband. She was 25.
Pashtun
poetry has long been a form of rebellion for Afghan women, belying the notion
that they are submissive or defeated. Landai means “short, poisonous snake” in
Pashto, a language spoken on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The
word also refers to two-line folk poems that can be just as lethal. Funny,
sexy, raging, tragic, landai are safe because they are collective. No single
person writes a landai; a woman repeats one, shares one. It is hers and not
hers. Although men do recite them, almost all are cast in the voices of women.
“Landai belong to women,” Safia Siddiqi, a renowned Pashtun poet and former
Afghan parliamentarian, said. “In Afghanistan, poetry is the women’s movement
from the inside.”
Traditionally,
landai have dealt with love and grief. They often railed against the bondage of
forced marriage with wry, anatomical humor. An aging, ineffectual husband is
frequently described as a “little horror.” But they have also taken on war,
exile and Afghan independence with ferocity. In the 1880 Battle of Maiwand,
when Afghan forces were losing to the British, a Pashtun heroine named Malalai
is said to have seized the Afghan flag and shouted this landai:
“Young
love, if you do not fall in the Battle of Maiwand,
By God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame.”
Malalai died on the
battlefield, but Afghan forces were ultimately victorious.
More
recently, landai have taken on the Russian occupation, the hypocrisy of the
Taliban and the American military presence. One landai that came into circulation
during the Russian occupation is still uttered today:
“May
your airplane crash and may the pilot die
that you are pouring bombs on my beloved Afghanistan.”
Like
most folk literature, landai can be sorrowful or bawdy. Imagine the Wife of
Bath riding through the Himalayan foothills and uttering landai so ribald that
they curled the toes of her fellow travelers. She might tease her rival: “Say
hello to my sweetheart/If you are a farter [tizan, one who farts a lot], then I
can fart louder than you.” She might make a cutting political joke: “Your black
eyelashes are Israel/and my heart is Palestine under your attack.” She might
utter an elegiac couplet: “My beloved gave his head for our country/I will sew
his shroud with my hair.”
“A
poem is a sword,” Saheera Sharif, Mirman Baheer’s founder, said. Sharif is not
a poet but a member of Parliament from the province of Khost. Literature, she
says, is a more effective battle for women’s rights than shouting at political
rallies. “This is a different kind of struggle.”
On
a recent afternoon in Kabul, Amail looked over her reading glasses at two dozen
poets and writers, 15 to 55 years old, convened around a U-shaped conference
table at the Ministry for Women’s Affairs. Sharif held her 7-year-old daughter,
Zala, in her lap. Zala clutched a white fur pony purse loaded with markers. She
unzipped its belly, colored distractedly and played with an iPhone during a
brief lecture on the nature of the soul given by Alam Gul Sahar, one of
President Hamid Karzai’s speechwriters and the author of 15 books of poems. As
Sahar droned on, the women yawned, their exhales forming puffs of gray breath
in the room’s freezing air. As soon as Sahar finished, the workshop began. A
young woman stood and raced through a reading of her short story in an anxious
monotone: a girl whose mother died in childbirth ends up going to college and
having to choose between two potential lovers. One suitor attempts suicide but
is miraculously revived. The end. The critique started. One of the group’s more
senior members pointed out two problems. First, Pashto stories don’t feature
two lovers, because that would sully a woman’s honor. Second, the story’s
diction was monotonous.
“Since
your character is educated, she should speak in a more sophisticated way,” the
woman told the downcast author. In judging a work’s merit, members consider the
writer’s recitation. Sharif believes that the group’s mission is to teach young
women not just to write but also to speak aloud and with confidence.
The
meeting turned to poetry next. The women had brought contemporary landai with
them. Traditionally, the poems were traded at henna night, the evening before a
wedding when women gather around the bride to decorate her body. The landai are
sometimes sung to the beat of a small hand drum. (Because singing is associated
with loose morals, poetry can be seen as shameful for women, a notion that the
Taliban’s conservatism helped foster.) Landai once focused on the godar — the
place where village women went to fetch water and where men, who were not
allowed to approach them, tried to steal looks at their beloveds from a
distance. These educated women used landai to speak of larger issues, like
Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s one-eyed spiritual leader who is rumored to be dead,
not a guest of Pakistan: “Grass is growing on the blind man’s tomb/Stupid
Talibs still believe that he’s alive.” Amail read one about America’s failing
military efforts: “Here, they fight the Taliban/Behind the mountains, they
train them.”
When
I asked who brought this one, Zamzama, 17, raised her hand amid nervous
giggles. She seemed both embarrassed and emboldened to be criticizing America
to an American. Along with her 15-year-old cousin, Lima, Zamzama joined the
group two years earlier. Lima had recently won the group’s literary prize. When
she was 11, she began writing poems addressed to God.
“I
started reading them to my father,” Lima said. She smiled and glanced around at
the others who were suddenly listening. “My father doesn’t know much about poetry.”
An engineer, he heard about Mirman Baheer from a colleague and now sends his
daughters here weekly to learn to write. “He gave me this,” she said. She held
up a blue plastic notebook embossed with the words “Healthnet — Enabling People
to Help Themselves.” Lima stood to recite her latest poem: a rubaiyat, the
Arabic name for a quatrain, addressed to the Taliban.
You
won’t allow me to go to school.
I won’t become a doctor.
Remember this:
One day you will be sick.
Following
Zarmina’s story meant traveling to Gereshk. I wanted to see how she’d lived,
and I wondered what, besides her brothers’ anger, led her to take her life. It
seemed impossible that I would find the family of one dead girl among 50,000
people or that, if I did, they would speak about her, but I went anyway, as
there was also the slight chance of meeting Meena Muska, the teenager who
called Mirman Baheer and invoked Zarmina’s name. I began my search in Helmand’s
embattled capital, Laskhar Gah, of which Gereshk is a suburb. Government
sources and a local network of traditional leaders called maliks (they belong
to an Afghan organization, Wadan, the Welfare Association for the Development
of Afghanistan) helped me gather a list of reported cases of women and girls
who died violent deaths in Gereshk in the past two years. The list was brief
but grim. Was I looking for the girl who was found drowned in the Helmand River
in a sack? No. The girl who had her head shaved and then was chopped into
pieces by her husband’s brothers? No. Well, then, there was only one left: a
girl who in 2010 set herself on fire and died in the Kandahar hospital.
“Ten
years ago, no one heard about these problems,” Fauzia Olemi, Helmand’s minister
of Women’s Affairs, told me when we met. “Now we have a network of
organizations that investigate them.”
It
was a balmy afternoon in Lashkar Gah, and Olemi wanted to show me some of
Helmand’s modest successes for women’s education, which included a three-day
workshop on the health benefits of eating tomatoes, okra and other vegetables.
Because Helmand is among the largest poppy producers in the world, there’s a
special effort to encourage farmers to plant other crops.
In
a squat, cement-block government building, about 50 women sat in front of a
whiteboard, which read, “If you eat two kilograms of tomatoes a day, you will
be cured of cancer.” This group was very different from the one in Kabul. Many
of the women were in their 20s and 30s, their faces deeply lined from working
in the fields. It was nearing midday, when the insurgents would begin to
explode I.E.D.’s along the road, and the lesson was almost over. As the women
gathered their things to leave, I asked if any of them liked poetry. As soon as
the question was translated, a wisp of a woman leapt to her feet and began what
looked like freestyle rapping in Pashto. She shook her bony shoulders to
four-beat lines that ended in a rhyme of “ma” or “na.” Gulmakai was 22 but
looked 45. She made up poems all the time, she explained, as she cooked and
cleaned the house. She said,
“Making
love to an old man is like
Making love to a limp cornstalk blackened by fungus.”
The
women roared with surprised laughter, which I, hearing the poem in translation,
took a minute to understand (the first, sanitized version offered to me was
something like “Being married is like corn”). “I know this is true,” she
announced. “My father married me to an old man when I was 15.” She tried to say
something else, but the workshop leader, a man, silenced her. Time was up. The
participants needed to go home, or their families would worry.
A
few days later, I arranged to travel to Gereshk and meet with Zarmina’s parents
with the help of a local women’s advocate. Under the Taliban, the advocate
worked as a physician assistant in Gereshk Hospital, where her services were in
high demand. Paradoxically, since their fall, her life had grown more
dangerous: being a women’s advocate linked her to Karzai’s government and to
seemingly Western notions of women’s rights. Like almost every local women’s
leader I met, she’d survived several botched assassination attempts. “I have
six or seven colored burqas so the Taliban doesn’t know who I am,” the advocate
told me on the phone. She laughed. “The burqas keep me safe.” Yet she agreed with
Olemi that, for most women, violence was more likely to come from home. “Now
that Afghan women are aware of their rights, they fight for them in their
family,” she said. “If they get their rights, that’s good. If they don’t, they
kill themselves or get beaten up.”
The
night before we left Lashkar Gah, I dialed Meena Muska’s number, hoping she
would be able to meet me the following day.
“Absolutely
not,” she told my translator.
She
couldn’t leave the house without raising suspicion. She also had reservations
based on her family’s code of honor. “Because of the war, it’s dishonorable for
a Pashtun to meet an American,” she said. “Please don’t take it personally,”
she added. “I didn’t mean to insult you.” Suddenly, in the silence, she changed
her mind. “Meet me at the hospital,” she said. “I’ll be waiting.” Her only
stipulation was that I and my translator come alone.
The
next morning, our miniconvoy — two white sedans flanked by two green police
pickup trucks — left town for the 50-mile drive north along Helmand’s main
highway to Gereshk. We’d been driving less than five minutes when an oversize
rickshaw catapulted out of an intersection and rammed into our Toyota Corolla.
Within seconds, a swarm of onlookers surrounded the car, looking at the smashed
headlight. It wasn’t a great place to be trapped in a crowd — two weeks
earlier, a suicide bomber blew up a truck only yards away. There were sure to
be Taliban informants among the onlookers; if anyone hadn’t known we were
coming along the road that day, they did now.
We
drove on past young boys raking patches of blown-up road, the mangled rebar
gnarled like hair; past America’s surveillance blimps hanging cartoonishly low
above the salt plain; past a line of camels cruising under industrial power
lines. The electric lines were a legacy of a U.S.-sponsored midcentury
hydropower project, the Kajaki dam, which, for a while, earned this stretch the
nickname “little America.”
An
hour and a half later, we arrived at the mud-walled compound of Fatima Zurai, a
member of Gereshk’s local women’s council, through whom I hoped to meet
Zarmina’s parents. An elderly couple, they were seated in the corner of the
room. Zurai ran a women’s business collective that sold heart-shaped, beaded
rainbow purses for 10 U.S. dollars to foreign soldiers. Over tea and caramels,
Zurai spoke of the losses she and her family suffered, caught between American
forces and the insurgents. Zurai sent her daughter to fetch a bundle of cloth,
which she unwrapped, holding up a white, blood-soaked shalwar kameez.
“My
husband was wearing this shirt when the Taliban murdered him two years ago,”
she said. Her husband, Mir Ahmad, was on the Taliban hit list because he worked
with the local government as a malik.
Then
she shook out a small pair of brown muslin trousers from the cloth pile. Muddy
and torn, they smelled like rot, and Zurai’s small daughter held her chador
against her nose to block the stench. The trousers, Zurai said, belonged to her
12-year-old son, Ihsanullah. He was walking home from school in the spring of
2011 when a military vehicle driven by a U.S. Marine struck and killed him. The
U.S. Marine commander, Zurai said, brought the driver to her house to make
amends.
“God
gave me this son 12 years ago, before the Americans came,” she recalled telling
the commander. Zurai said that, yes, she forgave the driver. This was less a
personal decision than a cultural one. Forgiveness was part of the honor code
known as Pashtunwali. (The U.S. military said it did not have enough
information to verify the incident; payments for accidental civilian deaths,
which Zurai said her family received, are common.)
From
her seat on a floor cushion, Zarmina’s mother, Simin Gula, a maroon burqa
pulled back from her face to reveal a mouth devoid of teeth, leaned into my
translator and pointed to me. “Do they have the custom of marriage where she
comes from?” she asked. “Is she married?”
“Yes,”
the translator lied.
Zarmina’s
father, Kheyal Mohammad, remained silent. Zarmina burned to death two years
earlier, her mother said. “It was an accident. She was trying to get warm after
a bath, but the firewood was wet, so she poured gasoline on it and caught
herself on fire.” Zarmina’s father nodded assent. No, their daughter absolutely
did not like writing, reading or poetry. “She was a good girl, an uneducated
girl,” Zarmina’s mother said. “Our girls don’t want to go to school.”
“The
mother is lying,” Zurai whispered.
The
parents agreed to take us to see where Zarmina was buried, a five-minute drive
away. A maze of rocky hummocks marked the graves. We passed three women
kneeling over three smaller, fresh plots. Zarmina’s parents stopped before a
grave covered in loose black gravel with no headstone.
Walking
briskly back to the cars, we passed the three kneeling women again. Behind me,
one murmured Zarmina’s name. “She set herself on fire because her family
wouldn’t let her marry the man she loved,” she said, then returned to grieving
over the plot that held her son, who was killed in a recent suicide attack.
The
early-afternoon sun had swung above us. The local council members urged us to
hurry. But before we left Gereshk, we had one final stop to make — to meet
Meena. Leaving the entourage behind at the district governor’s office, we drove
through the bazaar’s crowded warren of streets and pulled up under the dusty,
red-lettered sign of Gereshk District Hospital. A handful of people milled in
the parking lot. Meena Muska hadn’t come after all, I thought, my heart
sinking. Then the phone rang.
“Why
did you bring the police?” a high voice demanded. She was suspicious of our
armed government guard. Through the windshield, I saw a woman in cerulean blue
glide past. Her burqa was an awkward shape; she was on the telephone. Without
glancing our way, she breezed around the edge of the whitewashed clinic. I
tumbled out of the car, unaccustomed to the tangle of fabric engulfing me, and
shuffled after her. Behind the corner of the building stood a young woman with
a diamond stud in her nose. She wore thick black socks and open-toed rhinestone
slippers. The rest of her face remained behind a piece of woolen fabric. There
was no need for introductions. We embraced. Next to her stood a shorter, rounder
woman, with a heavily wrinkled face. She was the girl’s meira: her second
mother and her father’s second wife.
“I
told my father I was sick and had to go to the doctor,” she explained. But she
told her mother and her meira the truth; both women support her writing, at
least for now. She led us into a winter garden, where we four — Meena Muska,
her meira, my translator and I — knelt facing one another on the faded grass.
Our blue, crimson, jade and dove burqas were the only colors in the gray garden.
From her plastic purse, Meena pulled out her notebook. The forearms of her
dress were black mesh, her fingernails carefully painted. For a girl who
couldn’t leave the house, her latest Indian-inspired fashions were surprising.
But this was a special occasion, and Meena had dressed in her finest. At my
request, she took a notebook and began to transcribe some of her new poems line
by line in sloppy, schoolgirl script. She copied a ghazal, a sophisticated form
of Persian poetry, then scribbled the following landai:
O,
separation! I pray that you die young.
Since you are the one who
lights lovers’ houses on fire.
This
was her protest against being torn from her dead fiancé, she said. She asked
that translations of her more formal poems go unpublished in this article. “My
poems don’t deserve this much attention,” she said. “I am just learning to
write.” Meena had little hope for her future. She would be marrying one of her
fiancé’s two surviving brothers whenever her father and brothers decided it was
time. She wrinkled her nose and let the cloth drop from her face, then pulled
two mobile phones from her purse. Her brothers, who ran successful
irrigation-pipe factories, bought her the phones; they also monitor her call
log to make sure she isn’t speaking to boys. I wanted to give her something,
but I feared that a book of my own poems might endanger her. If her brothers
found it, how would she explain where this American’s poems had come from?
Having nothing else, I tugged a scarf from my neck. She reached into her purse
and handed me a rhinestone butterfly comb. Then she tugged the burqa’s soft
grille back over her face, took her chaperon by the hand and disappeared into
the crowd.
In
the parking lot, one of the hospital’s doctors, Dr. Asmatullah Heymat, was
waiting to speak to me. “I know of this girl you are looking for,” he said.
“Her name was Zarmina, and she set herself on fire because her parents would
not let her marry the man she loved.” That was all he knew.
“Zarmina’s
mother couldn’t tell you the truth in front of her husband,” the girl’s aunt
told me by phone once we returned to Lashkar Gah that evening. Zarmina loved to
dance and sing. “She loved fashion,” her aunt said. “She loved a good burqa,
nice shoes.” She also played the hand drum at weddings and loved to recite
landai. “She’d say landai in front of her mother, but never in front of her
father,” the aunt said. As for being able to write, “She knew some Koran, but
only had a childhood madrassa education.” The aunt could recall little else
about her poetry: “I’ve had so many of my own problems, I’ve forgotten the
landai she used to say.”
From
childhood, Zarmina was engaged to marry her first cousin, whom she’d grown to
love. Yet when the time came, the boy couldn’t afford the bride price of about
$12,500. Zarmina’s father refused the match, knowing that he would have to
support the couple. The boy visited Zarmina’s home several times hoping to win
her father’s approval, her aunt said.
Zarmina
took solace in writing love poems and reading to the women of Mirman Baheer by
phone. Then came the spring day in 2010 when Zarmina got caught reading these
poems and her brothers beat her. A couple of weeks later, according to her
aunt, when the girl was cleaning the house, she locked a door behind her and
set herself alight, a common means of suicide among women in Afghanistan and
elsewhere. The custom can be linked to the outlawed Indian practice suttee,
when a wife climbs on a funeral pyre. The practice and even the Hindi word —
suttee — exist in Pashto, too. In this sense, it is possible that Zarmina saw
her choice to die for love as romantic and honorable.
Her
sister-in-law tried to break into the room to reach Zarmina, then called her
husband, who was working as a contractor for the Canadian military, stationed
at the time in Gereshk. Zarmina’s father was at his factory. Her mother was at
her aunt’s house fetching water. A young girl came racing into the compound,
crying that Zarmina had tried to kill herself. By the time her aunt and mother
reached her, Zarmina was nearly unrecognizable.
“Give
me water, give me water,” she said.
With
one of her brothers as a chaperon, Zarmina traveled by helicopter to a hospital
in Kandahar more than 100 miles away. But there was little the doctors could
do. Zarmina had severe burns over most of her body. A week later, she died.
After
Zarmina’s death, her fiancé tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself
multiple times. His friends managed to stop him, Zarmina’s aunt said. (Local
leaders confirmed this.) Later, he married and moved to Kandahar.
Zarmina’s
family had also dispersed. One brother escaped to Herat after receiving threats
for working with foreign soldiers. The day after I met them, Zarmina’s parents
were scheduled to join him there. There is little evidence of Zarmina’s life
left in Gereshk. After she died, her father gathered up her belongings,
including some books and some scrawled-on pieces of paper. “I don’t know if he
hid them or burned them,” her aunt said.
But
the whole village remembered Zarmina’s story. Her two neighbors, 15- and
17-year-old girls, confirmed details, as did the local women’s leader who recorded
the case two years ago. “She was such a good poet,” the 15-year-old neighbor
said. “We were the ones who encouraged her to start calling the radio. We were
the ones who told her to write down her poems.”
When
I returned to Kabul, I went to see Ogai Amail in Microrayon, a row of concrete
Russian-era apartment blocks in northeast Kabul. For $200 a month, Amail shares
a single room with an older poet and member of Mirman Baheer who took Amail in
after a family argument. She had nowhere else to go. Still unmarried at 40,
Amail has no husband or children to ensure her position in society. Although
she cherishes her independence, she said, hers is a difficult freedom. She has
made the women and girls of Mirman Baheer into her family. She calls the younger
poets her “little sisters.” Amail was nearly ecstatic to hear that I’d met
Meena Muska face to face and that I’d found Zarmina’s parents.
Amail
recalled how she learned that Zarmina set herself on fire: shortly after the
incident, Zarmina managed to call from her hospital bed in Kandahar. She told
Amail that she had burns over 75 percent of her body. “She sounded so normal, I
didn’t think she was dying,” Amail said. Zarmina wanted Amail to call her
brother and impersonate a doctor offering treatment in Kabul, Amail told me.
She thought if she could make it to the city, she could start a new life. Amail
did what Zarmina asked, but she knew Zarmina would not make it to Kabul. The
next phone call she received from Kandahar came from Zarmina’s sister, who told
Amail: “All you can do is pray for her now. She is dead.”
When
I told Amail the story of Zarmina and her fiancé, she wasn’t surprised.
“Her
poetry was all about broken love,” Amail said. “She asked me, ‘Do you love
anyone?’ I said: ‘Why not? Am I not a human being? Do I not have eyes?’ Zarmina
only said: ‘I have so many problems, I don’t want to worry you. I’ll tell you
when we meet.’ ”
Amail
assumed that someday the resourceful young poet would reach the relative
freedom of Kabul. “She used to say you are the luckiest people since you can
meet with your friends openly,” Amail said. “You can learn from your mistakes
and write better poems.”
Flipping
through her notebook, she found a poem she wrote after Zarmina’s suicide,
called “The Poet Who Died Young”:
“Her
memory will be a flower tucked into literature’s turban.
In her loneliness, every sister cries for her.”
(source : nytimes.com)
