It has never been acceptable for women in Afghanistan to write poetry on any subject. But to write a poem expressing love for another has been considered a sin deserving capital punishment, not necessarily enforced by the authorities, but by the poet’s own relatives. One historic example is the poetry of the legendary Rabia Balkhi (910) – daughter of a powerful ruler of Balkh – which she dedicated to her lover Baktash, a commander in the army. Rabia’s brother Haris found out about this secret love affair through Rabia’s poetry. Her wrists were slit, leaving her to bleed to death. She wrote her last love poem in blood on the wall as she died:

I am captured by your love
trying to escape is not possible
love is an ocean without boundaries
a wise person would not want to swim in it
if you want love until the end
you must accept what is not accepted
welcome hardship with joy
eat poison but call it honey

Sadly, history repeats itself, most recently in 2005, when Nadia Anjuman, a young married woman and a well-known poet and journalist was killed by her husband in Herat, reportedly for writing poetry, any type of poetry.

Such cruelty towards women poets forces them to hide their talents, or, for the brave ones, to use male pen-names to conceal their identity. There are many ‘George Eliots’ in Afghan literature who have maintained a male identity until death. We find out about such women poets years after they have been buried, when the dust has truly settled. I would like to look at a few contemporary female poets, and admire their poetry, although some might say that yet again it is a male voice which addresses these issues…

There is another type of poetry in the Afghani Pashtun tradition, called Landai, anonymous and daring. Landai is a poem with two verses, shorter than a Haiku. It expresses forbidden erotic words and feelings, and often criticises authority and rigid religion. Even married women on occasion have resorted to Landai to declare their forbidden love with invitations like ‘come to the spring where I collect water. My husband is away.’ This type of poetry, no matter how disturbing to society, is tolerated, as entertainment, even though it often addresses serious subjects. Since nobody claims ownership of these poems, no reaction is required. There is no known target to hang or to stone to death.

It is not clear whether the women who wrote these erotic poems were really brave enough to have affairs with their lovers, but it is clear that they were brave enough to produce poems like these in a country where strict rules prevent women from having lovers:

The name of my lover is written on my body
I don’t want to wash
in case his name disappears.
Tomorrow is a celebration day
everyone wears clean clothes
I wear the same unwashed ones
they carry the scent of my lover.
Kiss me with your lips
but let my tongue be free
I want to tell you so many untold stories.
One night I dreamt of your death
in the morning my lips were cracked with dryness.

While women poets in Afghanistan still live in fear of being punished for describing their feelings, Afghan women who live in the West do not face such a fear. The internet has created opportunities for Aghan women to write freely, to write about explicit matters that even some Western women might not dare to address. Is this a reaction to centuries of not being able to write freely and not even having the basic right to a formal education?

Bahar Saied is one of the poets who lives in the West. She published her poems in Iran before the Iranian revolution, in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion, and in the West after she had left her homeland. Her poems are direct in criticising a society in which women have almost no role and where everything is decided by men. They attack religious leaders for using religion as a tool to suppress the voice of women. Here she expresses her feelings towards her lover without fear:

He kissed me once and stole my lips
and robbed me from sleep
I am scared if he touches my body
my patience will be invaded.
I have come to you to taste your body
my lips fall on yours, tasting your mouth
with my fingers I tear off your shirt
I taste the nakedness of your chest.
I am inhaling the perfume of your breath
and touching your body with my breast
tasting the burning of your body on mine.
Come and carve me, my body is yours
carve me in your heart in the night of dreams
come and carve me until morning
with beautiful touch and kiss.
I love the buttons on your collar
which ask me to open them
and throw myself on you.

Sanam Anbarin is another poet who has published a book of poetry titled, I Was Writing About You:

When my shirt
does not feel the rhythm of your heart
blood’s current
stops in my heart.
(…)
It is not a sin
if my lips are red with love
laugh at me or not
open the window or not
I don’t believe in winter’s subject matter
I know my way
If you come with me or not
I know my way alone
I know how to build a bridge between dawns.

Anjila Pagahi, who lives in Germany, is a revolutionary poet, standing against the violence of the Taliban and fighting for a better Afghanistan:

With the words Allāhu Akbar on your lips
you shed blood this way
your hands have the smell of hell
I know you follow Satan, you barbarian.

After the Taliban planted a bomb, concealed in a copy of the Quran in a mosque, Pagahi wrote:

You have made bomb out of the Quran
you cause so much misery.

Roya Zamani Hareva, an Afghan woman who lives in the UK, writes about social matters:

Your difference
is not superiority
difference is beautiful
that I am woman
and you man
is beautiful
you will be lost with ecstasy
in the waves of my hair
I seduce you with my gaze
why can’t we accept
and enjoy our difference?

The Afghan women poets who live in the West have been able to write openly, but that doesn’t mean that those women who live in Afghanistan have been quiet. The fall of the Taliban has given women the space to address social issues, criticise injustice and to write about the evil of the Taliban era.

Karina Shabrang writes about the soldiers fighting with the Taliban:

I found you again soldier
in your own country
like the lost unity
I found you again soldier.

The political situation in Afghanistan can be blamed for much of the misery in the country. Samira Popalzai, a poet from Kabul, writes about the politics of Afghanistan:

The shadows of politics
once again raised their flag
colourful with blood of our young men
this endless cruelty
breaks our bones
and deceives us.

These women poets encourage the Afghan people to participate in a democratic process, to establish a stable Afghanistan for the future. Their poems in support of the current elections can be seen in Afghan papers, magazines and online. The Taliban have been trying hard to disrupt the electoral process and prevent people from participating. Rahela Yar, a poet who lives in Germany, has published three poetry books entitled: Bud of Songs, Why the River Doesn’t Talk About our Cries and The Sadness of Songs. Here she is on the subject of the latest elections:

Someone brings material for explosion
someone is a suicide bomber
someone has cut off my finger for voting
God would you listen to my pain?

And Karima Shabrang, a poet from the northern province of Afghanistan, writes about her pride in being a woman:

I am a woman
a woman who is not unable
a woman who lives with pride
a woman who fights for her rights
I am a woman who would never surrender.

No one denies the fact that Afghan women haven’t yet gained the freedom to be able to shape the future of their country. The fear of the Taliban is strong enough to force women in the city to hide their faces behind veils, in contrast to what women were wearing between 1960-1990. However, this fear no longer silences women, who are becoming ever more vocal in expressing their personal feelings, as well as their feelings for a country that belongs to them too.

Bashir Sakhwaraz was interviewed in Words without Borders.

Maargir, The Snake Charmer is available from our partner Foyles.

Poetry by Afghan women is collected in the following titles, also available from Foyles:
Songs for Love and War
I am the Beggar of the Word 

The post The erotic and revolutionary poetry of Afghanistan appeared first on English PEN.

Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

In Spring 1997, I published a short story called “The Fruit of my Woman”. It was about a woman who starts to notice green blotches on her body, signalling that she is gradually becoming a plant, and about the man who lives with her, who ends up planting her in a pot on their balcony and watering her. She withers as winter sets in, disgorging a handful of tiny fruit. The story ends with the man clutching the fruit as he stares vacantly out from their balcony.

Immediately after writing the story, I thought that I might like to return to this idea in the future. Rather than fleshing out a backstory, I wanted to write a longer work which would allow for variations on the theme, as in a piece of music. It wasn’t until I’d published two full-length novels, which I’d already been planning, that I was able to get started on what eventually became my third novel, The Vegetarian, published in 2007.

The Vegetarian is made up of three parts, originally published in Korea as separate novellas; the first part is the one which shares a similar form to “The Fruit of My Woman”, in that it’s narrated from the husband’s point of view, with the voice of the protagonist, Yeong-hye, haunting the narrative in a series of monologues. But the tone and atmosphere are completely different. Unlike in “The Fruit of my Woman”, there are no paranormal events. The husband’s narration is chillingly matter-of-fact, and the nightmares which Yeong-hye’s monologues recount are particularly gruesome. Her hazardous attempt to ‘become vegetable – a pure being’ in order to vomit out ‘the violence of flesh/the human’ is constantly misunderstood as it progresses towards destruction. By the third part, “Flaming Trees”, Yeong-hye is refusing all food other than meat, believing that she is turning into a plant. The trees appear to blaze up like fireworks as the ambulance rushes her to the general hospital, in an agonising variation of the conclusion to “The Fruit of my Woman” – the withering of the tree-woman as winter approaches.

The novel took me three slow years to write. In the final year, when I wrote “Flaming Trees”, I also wrote a lot of poetry. In-hye, who watches over her younger sister Yeong-hye in “Flaming Trees”, is having trouble sleeping, disturbed by a recurring dream. In this dream she is standing in front of the mirror. Blood runs from the reflection of her eye. She raises her hand to wipe the blood away, but her reflected self remains stock-still, and the eye carries on bleeding. That year, thinking of those suffering sisters, I wrote a seven-poem cycle called “Bleeding Eye”. I also wrote several poems featuring plant imagery.

In this way, for me, poetry, short stories and novels are all closely intertwined.  So far, I’ve published three short story collections and five novels. Last year, my first poetry collection came out. Out of the hundred-plus poems I’d written, I chose sixty, and arranged them into five sections; I was able discern a similar feeling uniting those poems written while I was also writing a particular novel. Of course, these poems are independent from prose fiction, but they had undoubtedly been influenced by the questions and emotions that I’d lived with, the images that had absorbed me, while I was writing my novels.

I’m sometimes asked about the difference between writing poetry, short stories, and novels. I’ll usually also be asked what makes me choose a given form. This process is extremely personal and intuitive, and so it isn’t easy to clarify – the only thing I can say with any certainty is that the most obvious difference is that of time. You need at least a week when writing a short story, twenty days at most, whereas if you want to write a novel you’ll need over a year (my fourth novel took me four and a half years to complete). Poetry, by contrast, can be written in a very short amount of time. Of course, some poems end up nagging away at you for quite some time, but this can’t be compared with the labour-intensive work of producing a novel, which involves a strict routine of writing a fixed amount every day.

Selecting which form to use is a slightly more complex issue. When I write a novel I focus on internal questions. Questions are what motivates me to write; if I want take those questions as far as they can go, to see them through to the end, I need the novel’s tenacity. On the other hand, the idea for a short story will come to me as a single scene. I start to write and when I arrive at that scene, the one that gave me the idea in the first place, I know the story has come to its natural conclusion. A poem’s deepest connection is to language. It will come to me as a single line, which usually forms the beginning of the poem, but sometimes ends up in the middle or at the end. These intuitive flashes find their way to me whenever I’m unwell, or have to move house, when the flow of my life is interrupted by the trivial or significant. The year when I wrote the most poetry was the year when I felt most insecure. I wasn’t sleeping properly, didn’t have the concentration necessary for prose, and lines of poetry kept running around in my head. These eventually morphed into a play, so one afternoon I picked up my pen and turned it into a verse drama. The play would take an hour to read or perform, but took five hours to set down because I was limited by the speed of physical writing. Once I’d managed to drag that slow parade of images out of my head and onto paper I was utterly exhausted, but I also felt that I’d finally turned a corner.

I first published poetry and short stories when I was twenty three. Now that twenty years have flown by, I’m moving forwards slowly but surely, trying to maintain a precarious balance between everyday life and writing. Now, while putting the final touches to my sixth novel, to be published in June, I’m also taking notes of ideas for short stories so I can get started on them in the summer, and of the next novel, which I’ll begin in autumn. Sometimes poetry demands to be written, and brings other work to a halt to create a breathing space for itself.

Now and then I feel that I have nothing to fear, since, whatever the circumstances, I still somehow manage to write. Even when I find myself struggling, the agony of being unable to write will cleave open a fissure in life which I can then infiltrate. A new form, a new language, will be waiting there for me to grasp. And I do know now that this is neither optimism, or pride.

About the translator

Deborah Smith (@londonkoreanist) is an early-career translator of Korean literature, with The Vegetarian by Han Kang forthcoming from Portobello Books. She has received translation grants from the International Communication Foundation, and LTI Korea (forTheEssayist’s Desk by Bae Suah). English PEN funded her sample translation of Hwang Sok-Yong’s Princess Bari. She is currently studying for a PhD in contemporary Korean literature at SOAS.

• As part of the British Council Cultural Programme’, Han Kang will be appearing at London Book Fair 2014
• Read a Q&A with Han Kang at the British Council website.

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