Seamus Murphy (2) (1959–)

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.… (plus d'informations)

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?… (plus d'informations)