Afghanistan: Essential Reading

Seamus Murphy/VII for The New York Times

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.

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Afghanistan: opium.

Afghanistan: militants.

Afghanistan: prisoners, insurgents, roadside bombs.

Afghanistan: exit plan?

Afghanistan: setbacks, fraud, firefights.

Disaster in Afghanistan. Death toll in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, Afghanistan...

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On the U.S. nightly news and on the Web, Afghanistan tends to look the same, which I why I urge you to read one of the most moving and heartbreaking articles I’ve encountered in recent memory: Eliza Griswold’s “Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry.” With little more than 5600 words, Griswold reveals an Afghanistan few have seen. Here is a small piece of Griswold’s piece in the New York Times:  

“I can’t say any poems in front of my brothers,” said [a 17-year-old girl using the pen name “Meena,” who lives in the remote town of Gereshk]. 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 atleast you’ll have something of me...” 

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If the above excerpt isn’t enough to convince you to read the profile of Miriam Baheer’s Literary Group, which meets in person at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Kabul, as well as clandestinely via mobile phone for those women and girls living in outlying provinces, consider the following rubaiyat, an Arabic quatrain written by a 15-year-old girl named Lima and 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.

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According to Griswold, of Afghanistan’s 15 million women, only 5 out of 100 graduate from high school and most are married by the age of 16, with 3 out of 4 into forced marriages.