Farzana Marie

In Load Poems Like Guns, Farzana Marie has gathered and translated the works of eight contemporary Afghan women poets. Farzana, who first traveled to Afghanistan as a volunteer teacher in 2003 and returned in 2010 as a member of the U.S. Air Force, was drawn in her time there to the beauty of the Dari language and the resilience of Afghanistan’s poets. Now, Farzana is a poet and PhD candidate at the University of Arizona’s School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies where her studies focus on Persian literature, specifically contemporary Afghan women’s poetry.

While the Persian-speaking world has a rich poetic history, during the past few decades of war and violence the Afghan literary scene has suffered greatly. In recent years, however, the Afghan literary scene has experienced a rebirth as the exiled returned home and relative freedom of expression was reestablished. Many of the poets Farzana gathered into Load Poems Like Guns are activists, journalists, mothers, and elected officials in addition to being poets. Their poems, Farzana says, are not passive. Instead, these women capitalize on the power of language and art to impact not only culture but politics.

You first visited Afghanistan as a civilian and later as a member of the U.S. military. How have these two experiences influenced you?

Afghanistan has gotten into my blood. I love being there and have felt at home there in a special way, since I first went just before my 20th birthday in 2003. I think in part it’s the poetry, because I love poetry and so do Afghans, in a very different way than in the U.S. The Dari (Persian) language flows slow and sweet like honey, and I have always been enthralled listening to it. I was very thirsty to learn it, to be able to communicate, be able to understand the stories and jokes and poetry. I felt it was the least I could do in response to the constant hospitality I received.

People think of Afghanistan as a war-zone, but life goes on rather normally for Afghans: you work, you play, you shop, you get stuck in traffic, you eat ice cream. When I went there in the military, one of the hardest things was being separated from this daily life. My team and I were always trying to find ways to overcome the barriers both physical and mental, that the U.S. and international forces as well as the State Department, had built around themselves. These barriers made it difficult for them to connect with the community or to make good military and aid decisions.

Of course, something that has impacted me deeply, as it has all of us who serve there, is losing people. I have lost dear friends, both civilians and military, in Afghanistan. When losses like these grip us, I think it’s really easy to get bitter. But I think we can also take the bricks of that grief and build something with them. The profound losses drive me to action, to make sure that these precious investments are not in vain, that America’s involvement in Afghanistan this time does not end in disaster, as it did in the 1990s. I co-founded the nonprofit Civil Vision International with this long-term vision in mind, and I believe is still very possible. The energy and vision of the young generations of Afghans, in a country where 70% of the population is under the age of 30, give me great hope every day!

How did the Load Poems Like Guns project get started?

The Load Poems Like Guns project began with an independent study course under Dr. Kamran Talattof at the University of Arizona in spring of 2013, focused on translating the work of the Herati poet, Nadia Anjuman, a young poet who was killed by her husband in 2005.

With grants from the Taleghani and Roshan Foundations, I was able to go and spend part of the summer of 2013 in Kabul and Herat, researching Nadia Anjuman’s life and work. I met some wonderful poets while I was there--Elaha Sahel and Somaya Ramesh, especially, whose hospitality and friendship have really helped to bring this project to life. They introduced me to many others in the literary community, and through those connections I have been able to find and translate this work.

By the following year, the project had expanded to an anthology of women poets from the city of Herat, and I returned to Afghanistan in 2014 with a grant from the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies to collect more poetry and conduct more interviews with poets in Herat, as part of my broader dissertation research as well as to complete this project on Herati poets. The book found a home with Holy Cow! Press, who have been fantastic to work with and supportive of the whole vision.

Can you tell us a little bit about the history of poetry in Afghanistan and the region?

The history of poetry in Afghanistan and the larger Persian-speaking world is ancient and rich. The Persian civilization was known for its love of culture and literature as far back as Biblical times, and notably flourished during the reign of Cyrus the Great about 2500 years ago. To this day, Afghans revere well-known texts from the 10th century, like Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings (Shahnameh) and works by famous poets Rudaki and Rabi’a Balkhi (the first known woman poet originating from what is Afghanistan today). In contemporary Afghanistan, poetry is a colorful thread in the cultural fabric of everyday life. Even those who are illiterate often have countless lines and poems memorized, from favorite classical poets such as Mowlana (known in the West as Rumi, also born in today’s Northern Afghanistan) and Sa’adi as well as modern Afghan poets such as Raziq Fani and Qahar Aasi. Pashto poetry also boasts a prolific and storied past, populated with names like the peace-loving mystical poet Rahman Baba and and the warrior-poet-scholar Khushal Khan Khattak, both of the 17th century.

During the last few decades of violence and war in Afghanistan, poetry has remained a resilient form, but the artistic community has suffered greatly through various persecutions and large-scale exile. In the 1980s, during the Soviet invasion, much of the literary community in Afghanistan relocated to Peshawar, Pakistan where they continued to publish journals and books, communicated with colleagues back in Afghanistan, and carried on resistance activities through writing. When the Taliban invaded in the 1990s, the situation for artists and writers became even more dire, as women were banished from schools and universities, most forms of art, media and publication were banned, and topics even for male poets and writers were severely restricted. The stream of exiles that had begun to flow in the 1980s continued, and many writers emigrated during this time to Iran, Pakistan, India, Europe, the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Those who remained in Afghanistan often continued their literary activities underground, including groups of women who met in secret to read literature and share their writings.

Today, Afghanistan is working to rebuild new generations of writers and to bolster its literary community and publishing industry in a time of relative freedom of expression. People compose and share poetry today in a variety of ways: sometimes it is recited or sung orally, as with the the Pashto landay form, a pithy two-line verse that is largely an art-form belonging to women. In larger cities, there are literary groups, printing presses and resources for poetry to be written down and published. Many writers both in Afghanistan and living abroad use social media, especially Facebook, extensively to share their work.

The poets featured in the book are all women from Herat. Who are they? What are their lives like?

The eight poets featured in the book are important voices in the 21st century literary scene in Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city and a historic center of art, culture, and business. Six of the poets are alive today, and five of them are living in Herat. One of the poets featured in the book is Nadia Anjuman, who was the first woman to publish a book of poems in Herat after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Her book was published in 2005, and she was killed shortly after that by her husband, who was jealous of her literary success. I tell this story in much more detail in the book. Another of the poets, Fariba Haidari, the author of several collections, is now living in Sweden, but her work was published and is still widely respected back in Herat. The poets are also journalists, activists, mothers, and elected officials. I’ve included a brief biographical note for each of them directly preceding the selection of their poems.

Load Poems Like Guns presents the original poems, in Dari, beside your English translations. Why present them like this? Is anything lost in translation?

It was important to me to include the original Dari in the book as well, so that those who speak it could enjoy the poems in both languages, and to invite the music and the voice of the original poems to be heard. There is always loss in translation, but my goal was to honor the poems by conveying the meaning, and also making them enjoyable and readable in the English. I was struck recently by a wonderful comment from Fady Joudah (a Palestinian-American poet) about how a translated poem should not necessarily read as if it was written in the host language. He noted that “hosts have to be great guests too.” The way I think of it echoes this idea but is a little different. The translated poem is an honored guest in a new house, in a new language. As translators, we do everything we can to make that poem feel at home, but it will, and it must, stand out in that new context with its own uniqueness and elsewhere-ness.

Lastly, can you explain where the title, Load Poems Like Guns, comes from, what it means?

The title, Load Poems Like Guns, is the first line of a poem by Somaya Ramesh, one of the featured poets. In the original, it literally reads, “Load your poems with gunpowder.” I was very taken with this image, and it corresponded with what I see many Afghan women doing through poetry: taking hold of the power of language and art to shape culture and politics, to resist extremist ideologies, and to fight for a place for their bodies and voices in contemporary life. These poems are not passive. They are very active, and the poets themselves are often activist leaders, placing themselves on the front lines of Afghan women’s battles for respect, justice, and freedom.