In March we featured three selections from Eliza Griswold’s I am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, a collection of folk couplets from the women of that country. In an interview about the project, Griswold reflects on how her dual perspective as a journalist and poet informed her work:
I see the world in both ways—and at the same time. The book arose from being in Kabul and knowing that so much of the meaning of daily life gets missed in the headlines. News isn’t designed to talk about daily life in its nuances, but poetry is.
With the photographer Seamus Murphy, I came across this book of landays that had been gathered by Sayd Majrouh in the ’80s, during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. These were poems told by women in refugee camps on the Pakistan side of the border. In English, the book’s title translates to Songs of Love and War, but the French title—which is closer to the Pashto title—is Songs of Love and Suicide. There is this reality for many Afghan women whereby suicide is a form of self-expression.
For many years, I would sit and Google the word “landays,” thinking nobody was ever going to send us to Afghanistan to collect poetry. But one day I came across this story of a young woman who had killed herself, and she killed herself because her family wouldn’t allow her to write poems. That’s as much as this little news squib said, and the one poem that survived her was one of these landays. The reason it survived was because they are anonymous. They’re collective, they’re oral, there is no crushing or burning. Her father had ripped up her notebooks, but he couldn’t destroy this poem.
Seamus and I set off to tell the story of this young woman, but at the same time to figure out if it was feasible to collect these poems. And what we found was that it was indeed feasible. These poems were more alive and prevalent in Afghan life than we had understood.
The Dish 