Poetry Of The Taliban : 3

Today, presenting some poems from the book “Poetry of the Taliban”, edited by Strick Van Linschosten and Felix Kuehn. : Being Poet

Blood Debt

by Abdul Matin Ibrahimkhil

Today I write history on my enemy's chest with my sword,
I draw yesterday's memories on today's chest once more.
Malalai wants a red spot by her lover's blood
So as to embarrass the rose in the heart of the garden,
Moscow still owes us our blood,
I write the terms of my debt on the chest of the arrogant.
They will ride the white horses in the red field,
Then we will install the white banner on the Kremlin's chest.
The day of red blood will become red with the Red's blood,
The knife that is stuck into the Chechen's chest today.
My enemy, go and read the history of heroism,
There is a page written about Macnaghten's chest.
The Pharaoh of the time sends arrows everywhere,
These arrows will finally strike Washington's chest.
If anyone looks with the evil eye towards my deserts
They will find fires on their gardens' chests.
I, Ibrahimkhil, am on the path of a chosen destiny,
It's no problem if I face difficulties on my way.

(from the chapter ‘Before Sept 11th 2001’)

 Zeal

by Pordel Bustan

Your love aside, what else is there?
It is like approaching the desert.
Like the dust on your footsteps.
Look! The crazy one lay down.
In your love up to the sky
Means rising up from the earth.
Those who burn with the fire of zeal
Are shackeld at this time.
Your cheeks in the spring,
Red like flowers.
Admonisher! Give us advice!
My head has burst.
With the heart, I behave correctly with everyone,
But they cheat me.
Your eyelashes never miss
When they are turned against someone.
Your looks have grabbed my heart,
Its heart's habits are like that of a thief.

Soul

by Shahzeb Faqir

The village seems strange; this is separation
as if my beloved has left it.
The grief of separation is so cruel that it is not scared
of anyone;
When the soul does nt leave the body it shakes.
Like a flower withering in the autumn,
Autumn has now come to my love.
I remain alone with my shaggy head of hear
Uncomprehending; my heart has been sad for a long
time.
In a flash, it put a hole in my entire world;
Each affair is like an arrow.
Oh Faqir! Better be sad.
Who told you love is easy?

(from the chapter ‘Love’)

(source : www.huffingtonpost.com)

Poetry Of The Taliban : 2

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.

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)

Poetry of the Taliban : 1

Poetry of the Taliban is an English language anthology of poems written by the Afghan Taliban that give an insight into the lyrical souls of the members of this miltant group. Kandahar-based researchers and writers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn have translated and edited more than 250 poems, sourced mainly from contemporary media -- specifically the Taliban's official website. The collection also includes samples of older poetic works that date back to the 1980s and 1990s.

Rather than presenting a cohesive ideology, the poems represent a melange of voices. Going beyond political and militant propaganda, these poems reflect a diversity of emotions such as "unrequited love, bloody vengeance and the thrill of battle, religion and nationalism, even a desire for non-violence," that are expressed through "images of wine, powerful women, song, legend and pastoral beauty." This anthology presents a complex image of the Taliban, one that complicates our sometimes monolithic image of the Taliban. "It was refreshing to be able to think about Afghanistan outside the usual tropes and patterns," say the editors.

Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn have lived and worked in Afghanistan since 2006. Together they founded AfghanWire, a network for researching and monitoring Afghan media. Poetry of the Taliban is on sale in the United Kingdom and will be available in the United States on July 17, 2012.

Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn discussed their book over email from Kandahar.

Afghanistan has a rich tradition of oral storytelling, poetry and music. Why do you think this aspect of Afghan culture has generally been overlooked by the West when trying to understand the Taliban?

A certain narrative of the war in Afghanistan, or of the country itself, has existed for a few years now. The groundwork was laid long before the events of September 11, 2001, in part by journalists who travelled in the country during the 1980s. But the main themes became very clear from 2001 onwards. As part of this, the focus has been on the foreign involvement in Afghanistan, rather than on Afghanistan itself (i.e. on its own terms). Literature, or the cultural heritage of the country, has always been a hard sell to editors back in the United States or in Europe, especially when these more marginal stories have to compete with events that strike closer to home such as dead or injured servicemen and women. That said, there have been people working in this field for many years, regardless of whether they've been covered in the media or not. Their efforts are available online to browse through, from Afghan women's short story writing and poetry to paintings and music.

What kind of experiences do these poems speak about?

As you might expect from a collection of over 250 songs, there is a diversity of themes covered. We split it into five individual sections, covering love and pastoral themes, religion, politics and social discontent, the battlefield, and the costs of war in human terms. You will probably find all the things you might expect to be here, but sometimes not in the form you had imagined. In "Hunter," for example, the poet imagines that he is a deer in a forest, and thinks of the relationship between the foreign soldiers trying to kill him as if they are hunters trying to bag a deer. Or there is a poem written by a woman chastising the men around her for failing to fight properly.

What were your criteria for selecting the poems in the anthology? Were you trying to encompass a certain range of subject matter and styles, as well as a historical span?

We had two separate selection methods for this volume. The poems written pre-2001 were chosen to represent the thematic and authorial diversity of the period. The poems written post-2001 are an almost complete collection of everything published on the Taliban's website between December 2006 and February 2009. In this respect, it's a representative sample for that time period. We felt it was important to include the earlier (pre-2001) examples to show some of the context out of which this emerged; we could have gone back even further to examples of talibs writing poems in the 19th century, of course.

The anthology has already been criticized for promoting sympathy for the Taliban. How do you respond to such commentary?

We understand where these criticisms are coming from. Troops from 50 different countries are currently fighting in Afghanistan, and each week brings news of more injured and dead. At the same time, though, we would make a distinction between sympathy and empathy. This collection was not complied to garner sympathy for the Taliban. What it does give the reader is a new window on an amorphous group, possibly allowing one to empathize with the particular author of a poem, letting one see the world through their eyes, should one want to do so. For this collection, we felt these songs brought something new to the discussion, and added a perspective on where those who associate themselves with the movement are coming from. From our own experience, we knew how important and resonant these songs were for people living in Afghanistan, and we thought it would be useful to present these to a broader community of scholars, poets and the general public.

The average reader in the West probably regards the Taliban as being profoundly hostile to culture. How do we reconcile incidents like the destruction of the Buddha statues at Bamiyan with the outpouring of poetic sentiment documented in your book?

There is a difference between the formal pronouncements or edicts of the Taliban's leadership and the fighters on the ground. That is as true for the Taliban as it is true for the British Army. In our introduction we also note the contradiction between the formal edicts issued by Mullah  Mohammad Omar (banning most kinds of music) and his private consumption of those same songs that he had banned. This is to be expected. The Taliban are not a monolithic movement, with fixed and unchanging attitudes. In many ways, our difficulties understanding the movement say more about us than it does about the Taliban.

What implications, if any, does this anthology have for seeing an end to the war in Afghanistan?

This collection was not conceived or published with a political agenda. In fact, it was refreshing to be able to think about Afghanistan outside the usual tropes and patterns. If there is any wider point to be made, it is simply that this is not a conflict that has a military solution. The war will end when the political conflict is tackled, which possibly must begin by challenging and questioning our stereotypes about the Afghan Taliban as well as Afghanistan as a whole.

(source : theatlantic.com)

Writers should welcome a future where readers remix our books

China Miéville by Murdo Macleod 

China Miéville at the Edinburgh international book festival, where he called for a uniform, blanket salary for writers, novelists and poets equivalent to the 'wage of a skilled worker'. : Being Poet 

China Miéville, author of novels including The City & the City and Embassytown, has described anti-piracy measures for literature in the digital age as "disingenuous, hypocritical, ineffectual" and "artistically philistine".

Speaking in Edinburgh at a debate on the future of the novel, Miéville said that just as music fans remix albums and post them online, so readers will recut the novel.

He and his fellow writers should "be ready for guerrilla editors", he said, adding: "In the future, asked if you've read the latest Ali Smith or Ghada Karmi, the response might be not yes or no, but which mix?"

There was, he said, a "blurring of boundaries between writers, books and readers, self-publishing, the fanfication of fiction".

The comments were made during the last of the five debates at the Edinburgh world writers' conference, which has brought together 50 authors from countries ranging from Scotland to Argentina and the Dominican Republic to Pakistan.

They include Kamila Shamsie, Ali Smith, Yiyun Li, Ahdaf Soueif and Jackie Kay.

The event, part of the Edinburgh international book festival, was a 50th anniversary restaging of the 1962 Edinburgh writers' conference.

The original event – notorious for its passionate exchanges between writers – was attended by such figures as Rebecca West, Muriel Spark and Mary McCarthy.

The effect of the internet and digital distribution on fiction, said Miéville, would not be about creating "enhanced" ebooks, which he called "a banal abomination".

Rather, the effect would be to heighten the openness of texts. "Anyone who wants to shove their hands into a book and grub about in its innards, add to and subtract from it, and pass it on, will … be able to do so without much difficulty."

But Ewan Morrison, author of Tales from the Mall, called Miéville's vision of the future "naive, and based on what I would call dot-communism, which is a spurious leftism based on collectivity, that we are all heading towards a world where information will be shared".

The problem of this new world was that it would be "demonetised" for writers, he said, "and therefore none of us will be making a living when we have all these books that are mashed up".

Poet John Burnside said he doubted the existence of a future online utopia, arguing against Miéville's view that the "original text will always still be there. It will not be stolen".

Burnside said: "You say that the text will always be there. I don't trust the state, big companies and religious nuts not to try to erase the text and replace it with their version – so that at the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov [its main character] ends up finding Jesus and moving to Utah and lives happily ever after.

"I am not arguing about the excitement of technology, I am just urging a lot of caution and a lot of mistrust of the kind of people with an axe to grind who may try to erase the texts we care about."

Miéville also called for a uniform, blanket salary for writers, novelists and poets, equivalent to the "wage of a skilled worker".

Such a move, he said, would cut against the "philistine thuggery of the market" that failed to sift the good from the bad. And, though it would cause writers at the top of the bestseller lists to lose income, such collectivisation would for most writers "mean an improvement in their situation, an ability to write full time".

Writers at the debate also spoke about novelists' negativity about the future of the form.

Poet Jackie Kay questioned the gloom, saying: "Just as religious people are often predicting the end of the world, so novelists are often predicting the end of the novel. Poets never talk about the death of the poem. Why do novelists have this extreme anxiety?"

Kamila Shamsie, the Pakistani novelist, talked about the creativity engendered by significant technological change. Writers such as Italo Calvino had emerged, she said, in the wake of the rise of TV and film, when the dominant storytelling form was changing from page to screen.

"The novel has to find somewhere else to go. If the threat of something new and different and bigger than you creates Calvinos, then it is not a threat," she said.

Towards the end of the debate, Kay came up with an impromptu play on words that may have summed up the mood.

"What's not novel about the novel is navel-gazing," she said.

Miéville spoke of a broadening of opportunity brought about by the internet's "long tail". He hoped, he said, that the English-language publishing sphere would start "tentatively to revel in that half-recognised distinctness of non-English-language novels".

He pointed out that "obscure works of Russian avant garde and new translations of Bruno Schulz are available to anyone with access to a computer. One future is of … decreasing parochialism."

Citing Ubuweb – the online archive for avant garde poetry – he added: "With the internet has come proof that there are audiences way beyond the obvious."

(http://www.guardian.co.uk)