Where Poets Are Killed or Married

 

Deccan Chronicle visits women poets in Kandahar who meet in secret in order to share landays, a form which you may remember from the pages of Poetry as reported on by Eliza Griswold. More:

Kandahar: With her kohl-rimmed eyes cast down, Nadia lilts through a folk couplet before a secret assembly of women poets on a forbidden subject that often gets people killed in Afghanistan -- love.

"Like a candle I burn all night, separated from my lover," the 20-year-old intones in Pashto. "I melt and fade like hot wax." The young university student is part of Mirman Baheer, a women's literary society that holds secret gatherings in Kandahar city, the spiritual birthplace of the famously misogynistic Taliban.

Her ode to love is a landay, two-line Pashtun folk poems that have become a symbol of cultural rebellion for women and an outlet for incendiary issues, from child brides to honour killings.

They are more commonly about romantic love -- sometimes overlapping with sex, marriage and heartache -- in a tightly gender-segregated society where any public display of it is seen as a shocking breach of tradition.

"Who will marry a woman who indulges in love poetry?" said Nadia, quoting her mother who forbade her from joining the poetry club. "People instantly judge: 'She writes about love, she must be a woman of loose morals.'"

News of the meetings has spread by word of mouth, but mobile phones are increasingly used to organise the clandestine gatherings. Single women and housewives swaddled in brightly coloured headscarves come together in a basement room for the poetry reading, some of them risking punishment or even death if discovered.

Continue at Deccan Chronicle.