Afghan 'Rebel Poet' Sulaiman Layeq's Epic Will Remain Unfinished

Prior to his death, Afghan poet and leftist revolutionary Sulaiman Layeq was determined to finish writing the 800-page epic poem that preoccupied him for the last forty years. "In the final months before his death," Mujib Mashal writes at the New York Times, "his children would bring Mr. Layeq the incomplete draft of his magnum opus that had occupied him…." More: 

In 800-pages of rhyming verse, the poet wrestles with the thoughts of the epic’s main subject: a young member of the Islamist insurgency that would eventually topple the communist government in which Mr. Layeq served as a minister into the early 1990s.

In verse after verse, chapter after chapter, the poem examines the life and thoughts of the insurgent, friends who had heard accounts from Mr. Layeq said. But the epic is also a treatise on why Afghanistan’s tribal and feudal injustices were never solved either by Marxist ideology or by Islamist militancy. Each ideology briefly held the country in its thrall, only to leave behind a legacy of chaos and blood.

But Mr. Layeq was unable to finish his masterpiece before dying.…

Continue reading at the NYT.