I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan

by Eliza Griswold (Translation), Seamus Murphy (Photographs)

An eye-opening collection of clandestine poems by Afghan women


Because my love’s American,
blisters blossom on my heart.

Afghans revere poetry, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet—a landay, an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation, homeland, love—these are the subjects of landays, which are brutal and spare, can be remixed like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary. From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, landays reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave.
     After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and set herself on fire in protest, the poet Eliza Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to learn about these women and to collect their landays. The poems gathered in I Am the Beggar of the World express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms, all of which belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Feminism, Asia, Womens, Middle East, Anthologies

160 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2014

About the author

Eliza Griswold is an American journalist and poet. She was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

(wikipedia)

Reviews

[7jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book on a poetry tradition in Afghanistan called landays, mostly practiced by Pashtun women, literate or illiterate, often sung and accompanied by a handrum (if not prohibited). (Note: at least one here is from a male, but generally majority of the practicers of this style are women.)

When I was a kid, I was a king:
Free to stroll with the girls.

The possible danger is always controlling society/family, death from them or suicide... it's never certain how long one can practice one's creativity, or reach other women, other people.

Our sercret love has been discovered.
You run one way and I'll flee another.

This book has photos accompanying the poems, and some have notes about them on the following page (don't get confused!). Landays are of two lines (9 + 13 syllables, the poem ending with a 'ma' or 'na' sound), with no rhyming necessary. This style was most likely brought in by Indo-Aryan caravans thousands of years ago, which shows in some landays.

Clim to the brow of the hill and sight
where my darling's caravan will tent tonight.

The landays are sometimes of very old source. One in particular is of interest, as it's supposed to be from the ancient Afghanistan heroine Malalai, the name inspiration of Malala Yousafzai,

I'll make a tattoo of my lover's blood
and shame each rose in the green garden

and they can be 'remixed' to fit the times (fe. in regards of clothing, having phones/online access, and whoever is occupying at the moment - the English, the Soviets, the Americans who are of both help and hindrance to women - and the occupier's weapons, like the drones).

My love is fair as an American soldier can be.
To him I looked dark as a talib, so he martyred me.

Some poems find voice also, besides what I've said above, on the radio competitions.
The themes in the book here, as chapters, are love, grief/separation, war/homeland. Pride in their country, dislike of the Taliban, mixed feelings on the (current) occupying forces. The poems express the women's wide range of feelings, including anger, frustrations, sorrow, humor, hope, naughtiness.

Making love to an old man
is like fucking a shriveled cornstalk black with mould.

The poems were collected in various places or given on scarps of paper through hands of another person. Getting them face to face from the poetesses themselves never guaranteed. There's a nice photo at the end of the book of one sneaky one taken of one meeting the book's collector had.

This is not a book one should pass by, but read. It is beautiful, despairing, hopeful, human view of a world we rarely see or know of. Worth a look...

In my dream, I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my dream, I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.

This is an amazing collection of poetry, for many reasons! One, the book itself is beautiful, a lovingly constructed artifact with poems by rural Afghani women and girls, essays and explanatory annotations by Griswold, and photographs by Seamus Murphy. What do we really know of Pashtun women? We know that girls have to fight to go to school. We know it is a severely patriarchal society. Who are these women in the burkas?! The poems in this volume that Griswold collected are one answer to the question, and the answer the poems give is sometimes surprising, often delightful.

Afghans are known for loving poetry, especially high literary work from the Persian or Arabic. But the focus of this collection is “people’s poetry” in the form of a folk couplet—a landay, an ancient oral form created by and for mostly rural and less educated people, intended to be anonymous. I think this collection is amazing, sometimes sweet, sometimes bawdy, sometimes angrily political (against some men, against Bush and the USA). The collection is startling in what it says about Afghani women. I love this book!

On the brutality of men:

You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

On romance/love/sex:

Come, let’s leave these village idiots
and marry Kabul men with Bollywood haircuts.

Become a beggar, then come to me.
No one stops beggars from going where they please.

Unlucky you who didn’t come last night,
I took the bed’s hard wood post for a man.

Separation, you set fire
In the heart and home of every lover.

May God make you into a riverbank flower
so I may smell you when I gather water.

Because my love’s American,
blisters blossom on my heart.

Poetry Magazine featured a section of the book in 2013; here you can also see some of the photographs, which are also amazing:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/medi...

[tee]

oh i won’t stop thinking of this for days, what a heartbreaking collection.
“i’m tired of praising exotic flowers / i miss sangin’s gardens; they were poor but ours.”
so well formatted as well?!—i loved the choice of the poems and their themes, the brief explanations that sometimes followed, the history and the photographs + it was also very nice to recognize of the original text, because pashto (the language in which they were mostly created) and urdu (that i can read/write/speak) have some borrowed/common words.

published in 2014, the introduction says—“although landays reflect fury at the presence of the u.s. military and rage at occupation, among other subjects, many women fear that in the aftermath of america’s presence they will return to lives of isolation and oppression as under the taliban,” reading which during aug 2021 made my heart sink.
“may god destroy the white house and kill the man / who sent u.s. cruise missiles to burn my homeland.”

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Landays, Afghan two-line poems, some centuries old, have an ephemeral quality, like a scrap of smoke in the air, or a remembered scent, hardly there. They are sung, or recited accompanied by a drum to keep time. Landays began among nomads and farmers and were sung around a campfire, though now both men and women use them in their daily life, as humor, as riposte, as an expression of grief or protest.

Eliza Griswold travelled to Afghanistan with the photographer Seamus Murphy when they’d heard a young woman was persecuted, and died, for writing poems. Her name was Zarmina. Zarmina also recited ancient landays, perhaps changing a word or two to reflect her own life. Griswold began to collect landays and with the collection she has shared with us, we are allowed deep into the national psyche.

Griswold explains her translation process, for which she won the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. First the translation would be literal and then she would work with academics, writers, journalists to achieve something in English approaching the power of the poem in Pashto. By every measure, she has succeeded.

It is extremely rare for a journalist to manage to portray with such depth, honesty, clarity, and humanity a culture foreign to readers. Griswold manages it in a slim book of poetry. On two facing pages she has placed one of Seamus Murphy’s photographs, and a two line poem. On the overleaf she explains the context of the poem and its meaning. Griswold’s restraint highlights the power of the landays.

Some landays are just about the length of a tweet.

Your eyes aren’t eyes. They’re bees.
I can find no cure for their sting.

Some landays recited or sung at celebrations are recorded and shared with relatives or friends. Landays are commonly heard on the radio, or are shared now via Facebook or texted on a phone. What was a form of entertainment around a fire during a celebration has lingered in the national consciousness and become a coveted means of self-expression.

What makes this book so precious is the fact that it could have been nothing--a failure. It must have felt that way many times during the time Griswold and Murphy were working on the collecting, translating, polishing of the landays they present to us. But they really did something here: we get a sense of popular culture, and of the centuries-old richness of Afghan ancient culture. We see, finally, the rich internal life under the burqa.

The final landay and story in the book is extremely affecting: a fifteen-year-old calling herself “the new Zarmina” agrees to meet the author in a market town teeming with militants. She is unwilling to have her landays recorded or translated into the “language of the enemy,” though she has several written in a thin notebook with an apple tree on its cover. She instead recites an ancient landay:

Separation, you set fire
In the heart and home of every lover.

Griswold herself is a poet and a journalist. Some years ago I reviewed her account of the area in Africa where the clash of religions seems to originate, called The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. The concept of that book also showed Griswold’s instinct to finger the pulse of a hotspot and take a reading. Griswold is more experienced now and she has gotten very good indeed at finding life where many others cannot.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Landays are two-line songs in which women of the traditional Pashtun in Afghanistan and Pakistan make pointed commentary about their lives. And what songs they are, if the translations by Eliza Griswold are in any way accurate: sharp, unblinking, often witty commentary on love (including desire) family and, inevitably in that part of the world, violence. The format is a nine-syllable line followed by one of thirteen that ends in the sound -ma or -na. Somehow, despite the economic hardship of the rural Pashtun lands and the cultural pressures, both traditional and Taliban, these women, may of them illiterate, have fashioned a remarkable art form, largely by singing to each other (although it seems that men occasionally are allowed to listen or even respond in kind). The concentration of expression, even taking into account Griswold's splendid translations, has a force quite unlike anything else I have ever read. "You sold me to an old man, father./May God destroy your home; I was your daughter." Not everything is a lament; some landays speak frankly of desire (including at times double entendres): "Your eyes aren't eyes. They're bees./I can find no cure for their sting." And although many of the landays are ancient, they respond to the times: "I lost you on Facebook yesterday./I'll find you on Google tomorrow." But, times in this part of the world being what they are, older songs are made new again by the bitterness of experience, as when a woman in a refugee camp uses one to express her anger at her husband for letting the family lose their home. And war leaves its scars even on this poetry: there is bitter criticism alike for the Taliban, the Russians, Hamid Karzai, and the Americans and their drones that kill from afar. Although the wars in Afghanistan are now closing in on their 45th year (counting since the coup in which Mohammed Daoud Khan deposed his cousin the king), there is some hope to be gleaned from "I am the Beggar of the World"--despite its title, despite the fact that Griswold must don a burqa for a meeting near the end, despite the self-immolation of one a young landay singer in response to a beating from her brothers. If Afghanistan, there are now radio programs into which the women can now call in and organizations for women writers to support each other. The endurance and the adaptation to the modern age of this most unexpected of great art forms, the landay, is in itself cause for rejoicing.

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned about this book through Poetry, which published a sizable excerpt from I Am the Beggar of the World in its June 2013 issue. At times during the past couple of years, I have wondered whether Poetry has been supplanted by other literary journals as the foremost magazine about verse in America, and whether I should therefore cease renewing my subscription. At such times, I reread some of the best pieces that Poetry has published in recent years, such as the excerpt from I Am the Beggar of the World in the June 2013 issue, or the feature on poems written by Honduran orphans in the January 2015 issue, and I remember that, yes, despite its shortcomings, Poetry remains the most important American magazine of its kind. And I Am the Beggar of the World is an important book.

Many contemporary Americans write poetry as a hobby, a recreation, a mode of relaxation, a route to aesthetic and spiritual pleasures, a form of self-therapy, a social activity, a professional activity, or, simply, a means of acquiring awards and honors that they can boast about on Facebook and Twitter, a badge of personal pride they can flaunt to outshine their neighbors, like a patch of prize begonias. These are all valid reasons for writing poetry, but when we surround ourselves with people who write poetry for any or all these reasons, we are liable to forget that poetry is capable of running deeper, closer to the bone. For there are people living in Afghanistan right now for whom poetry is literally a matter of life and death. There are contemporary Afghan women who, forbidden from attending school or working outside the home, at this very instant are putting themselves at risk of being murdered or driven to suicide for the sake of composing two lines of verse. For these women poets, poetry is a door to community, a gate to freedom, and a weapon of defiance: defiance of patriarchy, defiance of the state, defiance of both regional and foreign expectations that circumscribe what an Afghan woman is allowed to be. This is why I Am the Beggar of the World is important: it teaches us that there are places in the world right now where poetry still borders on death and therefore is still at its most alive.

The second reason why this book is important and should be read by all American readers, of course, is that, when one engages in a war, it is vital to attempt to understand the country that one has brought war to.

The landays collected in this book -- two-line poems, each exactly 22 syllables long in their original language -- are folk poems and, as such, they are apt to remind readers of folk poems from other eras and from other parts of the world. While reading this book, I personally was reminded of how, when I was a child, my family would pay regular visits to Saigon Bookstore in downtown Minneapolis, a dusty dingy hovel that reeked of medicinal mints where, in an effort to educate her American-born children about their ancestors' culture, my immigrant mother would buy reams of piano sheet music for Vietnamese folksongs like "Qua Cầu Gió Bay" (the title roughly translates as "The Wind on the Bridge Blew It Away"):

Yêu nhau cởi nón ối à cho nhau
Về nhà mẹ hỏi, qua cầu gió bay

(Translation: When we made love, we took off our hats
When I got home, Mother asked where my hat was, and I said the wind on the bridge blew it away)

To my mind, there is a uncanny resonance between that Vietnamese folksong lyric and the following Afghan folk poem sequence, from I Am the Beggar of the World:

[Girl:]
When you kissed me, you bit me,
What will my mother say?

[Boy:]
Give your mother this answer:
I went to fetch water and fell by the river.

[Girl:]
Your jug isn’t broken, my mother will say,
so why is your bottom lip bleeding that way?

[Boy:]
Tell your mother this one:
My jug fell on clay, I fell on stone....

The poems in I Am the Beggar of the World are accompanied by prose explications by journalist/poet Eliza Griswold, as well as starkly beautiful black-and-white photographs of contemporary life in Afghanistan taken by photographer Seamus Murphy. The poems were translated into English by Griswold with the assistance of many Afghan friends and associates.

[Jenna Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of landays but this collection was beautiful and heartbreaking. Landays are two-line storehouses of love, fear, longing, humor, and grief, remixed over time and passed through the mouths of Afghan women who often cannot write them down safely. Proof of the power of poetry that two lines can pack such a punch, and proof of the importance of journalism for preserving these stories. Is “investigative poetry” my new favorite genre??

“Mother, come to the jailhouse window.
Talk to me before I go to the gallows.”

“I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look back and find I’m gone.”

“In my dream, I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.”

[Rebecca Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another read for Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge.

This was my entry for "Read a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love."

I Am the Beggar of the World is intricate and culturally nuanced! I didn't even know what a landay was before I read this. So not only was the poetry beautiful, I learned a lot about oral story-telling in Afghanistan, too.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and heartbreaking, all at the same time. Exquisite in their brevity, managing to still pack a punch. That's the best way I can sum up these landlays, two line poems that are recited by Afghan women. The authors of the landlays are completely diluted in time. No one can say where most started. These are poems that have trickled down from generation to generation, a few words changing here and there to reflect the modern times but their essence remains.

Become a beggar, then come to me.
No one stops beggars from going where they please.

Accompanied by black and white pictures of Afghanistan taken by Seamus Murphy, Eliza Griswold translates these gems from their native Pashto and gives us a peek into the secret world of the Afghan woman. The landlays are about love, separation/grief, and war. They even speak of drones. When most girls have been denied the opportunity to go to school, this art form allows them to gain wisdom. Ms. Griswold provides context to some of the landlays which help broaden one's understanding of what is on the page.

They are so short, but some of them still haunt me now, even after I finished the book.

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

Everyone should read this.

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I totally loved this book.

Muska was a young Afghan woman who was not allowed to leave her home. Educating girls was considered dishonorable and dangerous. She wrote a poem learning now only from listening to the radio. She would set herself on fire. Her brothers beat her after discovering her writing poetry. It implies dishonor and free will. She would die soon after.

A good Pashtun girl shows no interest in the man she is about to marry. If she's discovered to be in love, she can be killed. Or she can kill herself to prove her honor.

Taliban hypocrisy: they pose as pious while raping women and boys.

Does part of the problem rest in Islam itself? Do I dare ask?

When the US and its allies leave, the chances for women will end. All of the women's programs will disappear.

A landay is a rhyming folk couplet. It is often anonymous, created by and for mostly illiterate people. Each one has 22 syllables: nine in the first line; 13 in the second.

Here are some translations:

You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home; I was your daughter.

Listen my friends and share my despair.
My cruel father is selling me to an old goat.

Is there not one man here brave enough to see
how my untouched thighs burn the trousers off me?

In my dream, I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.

Making love to an old man
is like fucking a shriveled cornstalk black with mold.
(Actually, were not that bad. I mean, we do have experience.)

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd recommend this to everyone

[Leanne Ellul · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding book. These poems are incisive because they are pure; they are sang/written out of experiences that are truer to any Afghan women more than anyone else. These poems unveil some harsh truths; in their conciseness they make us analyse a situation we may be not accustomed to, they make us analyse the word and the world. The impressions these poems leave reverb lasting implications. This isn't my first and last read, for sure.

[Kaion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't wait after reading Griswold's wonderful feature on landays in the June issue of Poetry Magazine: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media...

[Alex Linschoten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strongly recommend picking up a copy of ‘I am a Beggar of the World’, this edited collection of Pashto landays. Afghanistan finds substantive representation in these pithy & epithetic lines.

[Susie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning and heartbreaking sums this one up for me. I had not heard of landays, a traditional Afghan style of poetry, prior to this book, nor of the young Afghan teen who was beaten by her brothers after they discovered her writing poems. She set herself on fire in protest of being forbidden to write poetry and died shortly afterwards. The history and explanations, along with the photographs, that accompany many of the poems in this collection, bring the pieces and the pain to life. This is why I enjoy reading challenges as they introduce us to books and genres and writing styles that we might otherwise never have encountered. Reading this collection was a deeply impactful experience and I am so thankful to have come across the recommendations that convinced me to pick it up.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How do we surrender to this
doubleness
with the humor also known as grace?"

[Bella Giordano · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 - gooorgeous. Sincerely enhanced my perspective on the women of Afghanistan

[Monica Padolina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Separation followed me with an axe
Wherever I laid love's foundation, the axe smashed it

Beautifully written heartbreaking realities of Afghan women

[r. · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my dream, I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.
*
You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home; I was your daughter.
*
My lover is fair as an American soldier can be.
To him I looked dark as a talib, so he martyred me.
*
Because my love’s American,
blisters blossom on my heart.
*
In Policharki Prison, I’ve nothing of my own,
except my heart’s heart lives between its walls of stone.
*
My love is a suicide bomber who stalks
the home of my heart and waits to attack.
*
When my husband took another wife, I burned.
I don’t care about the flames of hell since I’ve been spurned.

[Brittany Picardi Ruiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my dream, I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.

This is a landay, an oral two-lined folk poem composed and sung by Afghanis. Consisting of twenty-two syllables—nine in the first line, and thirteen in the second—the poems usually do not rhyme, but in Eliza Griswold’s translations they often do, to add more zing to the English versions. The above landay, which provides the title phrase for this fascinating volume, gains even more poignancy when we know the circumstances behind it: in a refugee camp east of Jalalabad, an elderly woman named Ashaba watched over her dying husband. She felt helpless and afraid, emotions to which her landay gives a startling voice.

Landays are primarily composed and sung by Pashtun women in a culture where they are not to be seen or heard. That most of the women who compose and sing them are illiterate and voicing forbidden thoughts makes the folk couplets even more remarkable.

Griswold was initially drawn into the world of landays after hearing about an Afghani teenager who called herself Rahila Muska. Pulled out of school by her father, who feared she would be kidnapped or raped by warlords, Muska (“smile” in Pashto) turned to landays, which she heard on the radio. Soon she was calling the program to share her poems. When her brothers discovered she was composing poetry, they beat her. In protest, she set herself on fire and died. Here is the only landay that survives her (her notebooks were destroyed by her father and brothers):

"I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone."

Like many landays, this piece resonates because it speaks to the fate of most Afghani women, isolated by fathers and brothers in a society of arranged marriages, where a woman’s choice of her life partner is usually ignored. The lover in this poem, if not the male chosen by the family, may be afraid to respond to his beloved due to threats of violence. The second line of the landay can also be read as foreshadowing Muska’s demise.

For those who want to know more about the people of Afghanistan, how they view love and war, how they mourn, and how they survive, the poems and photographs in I Am the Beggar of the World offers much to entrance and disturb.

"When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others."

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is part photo-essay, part pop sociology/anthropology (if there is such a thing), and part a collection of poems. Eliza Griswold went to Afghanistan and spoke to many Pashtun women to gather these landays--anonymous oral folk couplets that get passed around through conversation and (now) over telephone lines and the internet, that can be sung for generations, that get shifted and altered and changed as women pick and choose which ones to sing or recite when and what words to alter in them, according to their relevance. The book is divided into three sections, the first devoted to love, the second to grief and separation, the third to war and homeland--which are, according to Griswold, the five traditional topics of the form. Griswold does not speak Pashto, and so she employed translators to help her get at the meanings of different landays, which she would then decided whether or not to render in English. There are notes accompanying many of the landays, explaining where Griswold was told the poems and bits of information about life for women in Afghanistan and the cultural experience that they are living through, what changes to the landay Griswold is aware of, and other information that is relevant to a particular couplet. Scattered throughout the collection are Seamus Murphy's photographs, glossed with locations and month and year of capture at the back of the collection. The photographs fit in as a counterpoint to the landays and notes, often (but not always) reflecting one or another element of the poem or poems near to a given image. This makes the whole book an interesting look at life in Afghanistan and the ways that the history of colonialism and war have impacted life there, and could serve as an important beginning of awareness of these aspects of life, as well as acting to preserve the voices of women of the country and expand their audience. Here are two of the landays: "Darling, come down to the river. / I've baked you bread and hidden it in my pitcher." and "In my dream, I am the president. / When I awake, I am the beggar of the world."

[Emmkay · Rating 4 out of 5]

A landay is a two-line, twenty-two syllable poem. In Afghanistan, they have been sung and recited for centuries, and are written or re-shaped to suit contemporary and individual circumstances. For women living under the yoke of patriarchy as well as foreign occupation, illiterate and with their movements restricted, shaping and reciting landays allows them to share thoughts on their lives, from the defiant to the tragic.

Just a pair of examples:
My love is a suicide bomber who stalks
The home of my heart and waits to attack.

You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

American poet and journalist Eliza Griswold and photographer Seamus Murphy travelled around Afghanistan to gather landays, which Griswold translated from the Pashto with an Afghan woman (whom I would have liked to have seen similarly named as an author, although she is liberally credited in the text) and Murphy illustrated. The collection is heavily and fascinatingly annotated to explain the circumstances under which they were gathered and the background. Some have been virtually unchanged for centuries, while others are very much up-to-date, for example with references to Google, Guantanamo, deaths due to drone warfare, or references that were once to the British or the Russians now being to the Americans. Very interesting and eye-opening indeed.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a short book, made even shorter by the numerous photographs within its pages and the fact that much of the book is taken up with short, two line poems called Landays, often just one to a page and never more than five. There is a short section introducing landays, Afghanistan and women within Afghanistan, as well as an occasional short page commenting on some of the landays. This shortness is good, because once I started it I did not want to put it down until I had finished it.

Landays are form of women’s poetry that probably originated over 3,000 years ago. It is a Pashto verse form, which means it is one used by the women in Afghanistan. With these poems the women of Afghanistan can exercise a degree of freedom that is denied them in other areas – although even this has hard and dangerous limits. However, with this freedom women usually make sharp comments on war, separation, homeland, grief, or love. Frequently scathing and frequently bawdy, they provide a different way of understanding these women and their lives, and through them what it means to live in Afghanistan.

[Katrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting to read this collection of poems for many reasons, firstly this is a poetic form which I had no knowledge of so it was a good exposure to something new. Secondly, and most significantly this book opened me up to a whole society who I knew little about. Other than in the odd novel and the snapshots of Afghanistan published in the news this is a country which is largely beyond my radar and I have to say most of what I know is based upon war or the men.

This collection, and the journalists commentary which runs alongside these poems, introduced me to a strong, independent, sexual, sarcastic group of women. These women may live within the strict bounds of patriarchy but they are just as fierce as a woman living in a more equal world.

[Tricia Madden · Rating 5 out of 5]

The landays and stories of women who wrote them are powerful and important. I went to a reading by the author and was so moved after hearing what lengths women in Afghanistan go to in order to share the poems, often risking their lives. Their stories show how the human spirit triumphs when oppressed. Hearing what these young girls have to say makes a huge case for funding schools for girls in Afghanistan.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moving collection of traditional two line poems paired with striking photographs give a voice to Afghan women. Full review here:
https://roughghosts.wordpress.com/201...

[Hameeda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took me to my childhood with my grandma and cousins in our homeland Afghanistan. I do remember some of these Landay sung by my grandma and cousins.

[Maha A · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this!
God help all Afghani women...

:

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to other.

[Annie Yotova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Landays are short poems (usually sang and not recited) which have exactly 22 syllables - 9 in their first line and 13 in the second one, and always finish with -na or -ma. They don't get written and invented as much as they get changed and modified with time - they are part of the oral tradition of the Pashtun women who live mainly in Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. As girls in these area get pulled out from school very young and get locked into a house until they get married (after which they get locked in a different house), these poems become their only connection to the external world and to any kind of knowledge. There are some landays sang by men but most of them are only ever uttered by women. And they get adapted - most women know hundreds of them and by replacing words and contexts, they can be made relevant in many situations - the old ones singing of the British are not about the Americans, technology slowly shows up in them (these days they get exchanged as text messages or on facebook or other online platforms - the author traced a series of them on a facebook page which would have taken decades to get changed that way in the old world but now took hours). And even if they are everywhere, most women hide them - they are considered a bad thing in the very strict Islamic world of Afghanistan; the drums that were used to keep the rhythm while women sang them to each other had been outlawed and women can get in serious trouble when they sing them.

Eliza Griswold decided to collect some of these poems because of a young woman who set herself on fire to escape her world. That young woman used to belong to an illegal female literary group which uses the radio to share poetry - their own, landays and anything in between. Meeting the women who sing them in the middle of a war zone was never going to be easy (and with her not speaking the language, her translators were young women and in the society they live in, they often needed to be explained what some of the more baudy poems said.) Getting the women to trust her enough to actually share them was even harder. And then came the translation - because of their very formal requirement on length, they are usually almost obscure and trying to render them in English (or any other language) is not easy (even if you do not try to keep the number of syllables in tact - which these translations don't). The process was a kind of double translation - the translator into English, word by word, then Griswold into something which is understandable as English. That process meant discarding some which just could not work in English - too flowery, too abstract or too hard to figure out.

So what do the Pashtun women sing about? Pretty much everything. Some of these couplets are almost pornographic (in a flowery way mostly). Some of them are violent and wish for someone's death. Some of them describe the stark reality they live in. And some are optimistic and hopeful. Griswold adds notes on the symbolism and meaning of some of the images in a lot of these small poems. Her notes also trace how these were found and heard, painting a picture of the life of the women of the country. Seamus Murphy adds a lot of photographs of Afghanistan in the early 21st century - a country in the middle of a war. I wish some of these were not just black and white - while for some the lack of color enhances them, some probably would be a lot more effective if they were in color.

The poems themselves are not that impressive as poetry, not in English anyway. They sound almost mundane or like clever puns. But add to that their back story, add the story of the women who sing them and they become a lot more. They are the literature of a population which is essentially illiterate and kept that way; the voice of the women who have no other voice that anyone bothers to listen to. And they tell the stories of their lives - of the fact that a Pashtun woman should never show that she is in love (or she is considered a fallen woman), of their inability to sing (singers are considered to be prostitutes), of their longings and desires - and not only from the romantic types. They are the couplets that mothers sing when their sons get killed in the war or when they disappear in a jail. These are the words that allow the voiceless to scream.

Even if you do not care about the poetry, the book is worth it because of the background and the photographs. But don't dismiss these short poems - they stay with you and haunt you. Some will make you chuckle, some will make you laugh and some will make your heart bleed. But then, isn't that exactly how poetry is supposed to work?

[Gloria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I attended a talk about landays, an ancient oral and anonymous from of poetry created by and for mostly illiterate women in Afghanistan. This book was referenced in the talk and I sought it out at our library. These cadenced couplets were translated into English through a laborious process by a team led by the author; she is an American poet/journalist who visited Afghanistan to collected these landays. The book was published in 2014, so I can't imagine how difficult it was to meet women, gain their trust and collect their poems in the years prior.

It's a heartbreaking collection about love, loss, grief, separation and war. The book jacket states, "the poems...express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, and a call to arms, all of which belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa." It's true and I couldn't have said it better. There are 100 landays, some with explanation and added insight, and some left to the reader to ponder. Some are strong reactions to the Americans there at war. The book also contains many black and white photographs of Afghanistan; I would have preferred color.

I found this to be an interesting read, with some very thought provoking and even disturbing content. It took about an hour to read.

Here are few examples of the landays about love and relationships that were most meaningful to me.

I'll make a tattoo of my lover's blood
and shame each rose in the green garden.

My love is a suicide bomber who stalks
the home of my heart and waits to attack.

Your eyes aren't eyes. They're bees.
I can find no cure for their sting.

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

In my dream I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.