I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m 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 Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces since the U.S. invasion began on October 7, 2001. Muska, like many young and rural Afghan women, wasn’t allowed to leave her home. Fearing that she’d 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 woman’s 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 woman’s 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 America’s involvement they will return to lives of isolation and oppression, just as under the Taliban.
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 can’t 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. It’s not only the subject matter that makes them risqué. 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 woman’s 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 women’s 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 she’d set herself on fire. She’d burned herself in protest. Her brothers had beaten her badly after discovering her writing poems. Poetry —  especially love poetry — is forbidden to many of Afghanistan’s  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 Muska’s 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, she’d been forbidden from marrying him, because after the recent death of his father, he couldn’t 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.

Although she didn’t 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 couldn’t be ripped up and destroyed by Muska’s father.

On that trip in the winter of 2012, I also began to collect landays. One afternoon in Helmand, our search for the dead poet led us to an agricultural seminar where women were learning to grow vegetables rather than the more lucrative cash crop of poppy. When I asked if anyone knew a landay, one woman named Gulmakai leapt to her feet and uttered the following poem.

Making love to an old man
is like fucking a shriveled cornstalk blackened by mold.

The room of maybe sixty women gasped and burst into laughter, but I didn’t understand the Pashto, and because the poem was about sex, neither did my unmarried translator, Asma Safi, who was earnest and twenty-five. Sex, marriage, love — all can be the same thing, so a literal rendering of this poem goes something like this: Love or Sex or Marriage, Man, Old / Love or Sex or Marriage, Cornstalk, Black Fungal Blight. In other words, mystifying. It wasn’t until later when Asma’s uncle drew us a picture of a healthy, young cornstalk next to a decaying, blighted one that we — or rather, I — understood what the landay meant. I tried to contact Gulmakai again — she had given me her brother’s phone number — but she didn’t have his permission to speak.

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 won’t share them in front of one another out of fear they’d 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 I’d had tea with his wife and asked the subject of the landay that she’d 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 couldn’t 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.
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 fed-upness with foreign occupation and a deepening terror of living under the threat of drone strikes. What I found, especially among women who’d 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 they’d 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 here’s 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, we’d 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 Afghanistan’s leading novelists: “Don’t 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 Muska’s 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.

Related authors

A Bigger Table: 50 Years of the Chicago Poetry Center

Walt Whitman: Citizen Poet

Marie Ponsot

Snake

Gerald Stern: Still Burning