LANDAYS

I call. Youre stone.

One day youll look and find Im gone.
The teenage poet who uttered this folk poem called herself Rahila Muska. She
lived in Helmand, a Taliban stronghold and one of the most restive of Afghanistans
thirty-four provinces since the U.S. invasion began on October 7, 2001. Muska, like
many young and rural Afghan women, wasnt allowed to leave her home. Fearing
that shed be kidnapped or raped by warlords, her father pulled her out of school
after the fifth grade. Poetry, which she learned from other women and on the radio,
became her only form of education.
In Afghan culture, poetry is revered, particularly the high literary forms that
derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet a landay an
oral and often anonymous scrap of song created by and for mostly illiterate people:
the more than twenty million Pashtun women who span the border between
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Traditionally, landays are sung aloud, often to the beat of
a hand drum, which, along with other kinds of music, was banned by the Taliban
from 1996 to 2001, and in some places, still is.
A landay has only a few formal properties. Each has twenty-two syllables:
nine in the first line, thirteen in the second. The poem ends with the sound ma or
na. Sometimes they rhyme, but more often not. In Pashto, they lilt internally from
word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content,
which is distinctive not only for its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the
piercing ability to articulate a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief,
or love. Within these five main tropes, the couplets express a collective fury, a
lament, an earthy joke, a love of home, a longing for the end of separation, a call to
arms, all of which frustrate any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a
mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.
From the Aryan caravans that likely brought these poems to Afghanistan
thousands of years ago to ongoing U.S. drone strikes, the subjects of landays are
remixed like hip-hop, with old words swapped for newer, more relevant ones. A
womans sleeve in a centuries-old landay becomes her bra strap today. A colonial
British officer becomes a contemporary American soldier. A book becomes a gun.
Each biting word change has much to teach about the social satire that ripples
under the surface of a womans life. With the drawdown of American forces in 2014
looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk when the Americans pull out.
Although some landays reflect fury at the presence of the U.S. military, many
women fear that in the absence of Americas involvement they will return to lives of
isolation and oppression, just as under the Taliban.
Griswold, Eliza, and Seamus Murphy. "LANDAYS." Poetry Foundation. Poetry
Foundation. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.
<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media/landays.html>.

Landays began among nomads and farmers. They were shared around a fire,
sung after a day in the fields or at a wedding. More than three decades of war has
diluted a culture, as well as displaced millions of people who cant return safely to
their villages. Conflict has also contributed to globalization. Now people share
landays virtually via the internet, Facebook, text messages, and the radio. Its not
only the subject matter that makes them risqu. Landays are mostly sung, and
singing is linked to licentiousness in the Afghan consciousness. Women singers are
viewed as prostitutes. Women get around this by singing in secret in front of only
close family or, say, a harmless-looking foreign woman. Usually in a village or a
family one woman is more skilled at singing landays than others, yet men have no
idea who she is. Much of an Afghan womans life involves a cloak-and-dagger dance
around honor a gap between who she seems to be and who she is.
These days, for women, poetry programs on the radio are one of the few
permissible forms of access to the outside world. Such was the case for Rahila
Muska, who learned about a womens literary group called Mirman Baheer via the
radio. The group meets in the capital of Kabul every Saturday afternoon; it also runs
a phone hotline for girls from the provinces, like Muska, to call in with their own
work or to talk to fellow poets. Muska, which means smile in Pashto, phoned in so
frequently and showed such promise that she became the darling of the literary
circle. She alluded to family problems that she refused to discuss.
One day in the spring of 2010, Muska phoned her fellow poets from a hospital
bed in the southeastern city of Kandahar to say that shed set herself on fire. Shed
burned herself in protest. Her brothers had beaten her badly after discovering her
writing poems. Poetry especially love poetry is forbidden to many of
Afghanistans women: it implies dishonor and free will. Both are unsavory for
women in traditional Afghan culture. Soon after, Muska died.
After learning about Muska, I traveled to Afghanistan with the photographer
Seamus Murphy on assignment with the New York Times Magazine to piece together
what I could of her brief life story. Finding Muskas family seemed an impossible task
one dead teenage poet writing under the safety of a pseudonym in a war zone
but eventually, with the aid of a highly-effective Pashtun organization called wadan,
the Welfare Association for the Development of Afghanistan, we were able to locate
her village and find her parents. Her real name, it turned out, was Zarmina, and her
story was about more than poetry.
This was a love story gone awry. Engaged at an early age to her cousin, shed
been forbidden from marrying him, because after the recent death of his father, he
couldnt afford the volver, the bride price. Her love was doomed and her future
uncertain; death became the one control she could assert over her life.
You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

Griswold, Eliza, and Seamus Murphy. "LANDAYS." Poetry Foundation. Poetry

Foundation. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.
<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media/landays.html>.

Although she didnt write this poem, Rahila Muska often recited landays over
the phone to the women of Mirman Baheer. This is common: of the tens of
thousands of landays in circulation, the handful a woman remembers relate to her
life. Landays survive because they belong to no one. Unlike her notebooks, the little
poem couldnt be ripped up and destroyed by Muskas father.
Nine months later Seamus Murphy and I returned to Afghanistan with the sole
aim of collecting these poems. For years we have wanted to collaborate on a
collection of words and images that capture the humanity and humor of Afghan life.
I wanted to gather poems from women before the U.S. pulled out and their voices
were lost. Like many long-suffering people, Afghans have learned to use laughter as
a survival skill. This is especially true for Afghan women. However, finding,
collecting, recording, and translating these little poems word by word posed an
extraordinary challenge. Gathering them led Seamus and me through the pages of
out-of-print collections, and in secret into refugee camps, private homes, a horse
farm, and several weddings. Since landays belong to the hidden world of Afghan
women, many wont share them in front of one another out of fear theyd later be
gossiped about. Some requested that their names be changed or that I not record
how I came by the landays that they whispered to me. One husband hurried up to
me after Id had tea with his wife and asked the subject of the landay that shed
given me. Separation, I told him. The poem was about sex.
To find these poems, we started in refugee camps as the poet and intellectual
Sayd Bahodine Majrouh did when he collected landays during the civil war of the
1980s*. Since landays belong to a rural tradition, and the rural Pashtun heartland is
a war zone, traveling to remote villages would endanger women as well as us. In
some cases, women asked that I come to their houses dressed in a burqa so as not
to be seen by spies or nosy neighbors. Slogging away in the same fashion that we
have for the past ten years as journalists, Seamus and I joked that this was
investigative poetry.
In one refugee camp, I was sneaked into a wedding party made up solely of
women. As is the custom, in order to demonstrate her extreme modesty read
virginity the bride sat entirely covered with a heavy white veil and crouched
against a wall while guests pressed money into her fist to pay to see her face.
Someone brought out a drum and the women began to sing poems about nato
bombing raids. I recorded their singing on my iPhone, which alarmed them so
intensely that on my next visit they took my phone from me and shoved it in a
corner under a stack of pillows. Refugee camps in the capital of Kabul were followed
by private homes, schools, and government offices in and around the eastern city of
Jalalabad, a centuries-old center of poetry and landays. Where I couldnt travel to
meet the women of remote villages, I asked local leaders, teachers, and others to
collect landays and bring them to me. These proved to be some of the most
interesting, since many such places were under siege by predator drones, and I
discovered that drones called bipilot, without pilot, or remoti tayara, remote
control flights had entered the language of landays.
Griswold, Eliza, and Seamus Murphy. "LANDAYS." Poetry Foundation. Poetry
Foundation. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.
<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media/landays.html>.

Much has been made recently of so-called Taliban poetry: poems that
express rage at the Americans or loyalty to the militants cause. Yet these
sentiments have little to do with love for the Taliban. Instead, they reflect a fedupness with foreign occupation and a deepening terror of living under the threat of
drone strikes. What I found, especially among women whod had to flee bombing
raids, or lost family members, whether Taliban fighters or farmers, is that they were
singing about their hatred of Americans and support the Taliban merely in reaction
to all theyd endured in our twelve-year war. These scraps of anthems were more
about Afghan identity than religion, although the two are often intertwined. I wanted
to explore the impact that the last decade of war has had on Afghan culture and to
share the sex and earthiness and outrage at military occupation, especially
bombing, that these pressurized poems barely contain. Yet heres the paradox:
without the U.S. presence, the plight of women in Afghanistan will be even more
dismal.
Translating these poems was an intricate process. I collected most of them in
person with two native Pashto speakers, both of whom were, of necessity, young
women. Over gallons of green tea at the cozy house that wadan occupies in Kabul,
we transcribed the poems in Pashto, which has the same characters and sounds as
Arabic, so I could sound out words although I had no clue of their meaning. On the
fly, wed rough out an English version in the car or during lunch to gauge whether
the landay merited the time it would take to render properly in English. Then, along
with a translator, I translated the selected poems word by word into English.
Working from that frequently nonsensical literal version, I sat with a handful of
native Pashto speakers academics, writers, journalists, and ordinary women
and went over each poem to make certain the translations made sense. My versions
rhyme more often than the originals do, because the English folk tradition of rhyme
proved the most effective way of carrying the lilt of the Pashto over into English.
The most useful note on translation came from Mustafa Salik, one of Afghanistans
leading novelists: Dont worry so much about being faithful to the Pashto. Get them
right in English so that people can enjoy them.
Of the many remarkable and generous individuals who made this project
possible, the first was the translator Asma Safi, who, despite the risk and scandal of
traveling with foreigners as a Pashtun woman, accompanied Seamus and me to
Helmand to find Rahila Muskas family in early 2012. To ensure her safety and
honor, her armed uncle, Safiullah, traveled with us. Asma Safi was planning our next
trip into the field when she died of a heart condition in a taxi on the way to the
Kabul hospital during the fall of 2012. This collection is dedicated to her.

Griswold, Eliza, and Seamus Murphy. "LANDAYS." Poetry Foundation. Poetry

Foundation. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.
<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media/landays.html>.