ராஜபார்வை - RAJAPAARVAI

 

 

Nadia Anjuman Herawi (Nadja Anjoman)

Anjoman was born in Herat, Afghanistan, in 1980. She graduated from Mehboobe-e Herawi high school and was in her third year at Herat University studying Literature and Humane Science at the time of her death (2005). She was a many-faceted Afghani poet, perhaps, literally silenced by death at the young age of 25 under highly suspicious circumstances. On November 4, 2005, she was found dead at her home in Herat. The chief of the Herat police crime unit, the investigating  official, stated that her husband, Farid Ahmad Majid Mia [or Nia], a literature graduate, lecturer in philology and administrator on the Herat University faculty, had confessed to slapping her, but not to killing her, and was claiming that she committed suicide. People believe that her words (Poetry) brought her early doom.

In Afghanistan, when the Taliban had been in power, much restrictions were clamped on girls. They were denied the right to laugh out loud, or to wear shoes that made any noise. Further, girls’ studies were limited to studying the Qur'an (Koran). Girls were expected to marry at the age of14 or 15. As the first one to seek education in her family, she had to fight with her family besides facing the enforced curbs by Taliban. Anjomon was able to ‘escape marriage’ up to when she was 20 and by that time she had 60 to 70 poems to her credit. She wrote mostly about women's lives, ''because” women “suffered a lot.''. But even when the Taliban was driven out from power, Nadia Anjoman and women like her were still not free.

Christina Lamb, an award-winning journalist/writer, considered as an expert on "things Afghanistani," in her book about the celebrated ‘Sewing Circles of Herat’, to which Anjuman also belonged has reported that Anjoman’s own “family was furious, believing that the publication of poetry by a woman about love and beauty had brought shame on it."  

In such a setting, her poems were reckoned as “dangerous, simply because a woman had chosen to speak her own mind.” To be a woman and dare to be a poet was her ‘fault’. To add to this, she freely spoke her unmanacled mind electing herself as an advocate and spokesperson for women like herself. Her first book of published poetry, Gul-e-dodi ("Dark Red Flower"),(2005) had become popular in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. That may have created a backlash strong enough to cost her life. Anjoman may be gone, but she is not forgotten.

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THE POEM

[Anjoman wrote her poems in the Dari language, a dialect of Farsi .She generally didn’t provide tittle to her poems. This poem is translated by Mahnaz Badihian, from the original.]

No desire to open my mouth
What should I sing of...?
I, who am hated by life.
No difference to sing or not to sing.
Why should I talk of sweetness,
When I feel bitterness?
Oh, the oppressor's feast
Knocked my mouth.
I have no companion in life
Who can I be sweet for?
No difference to speak, to laugh,
To die, to be.
Me and my strained solitude.
With sorrow and sadness.
I was borne for nothingness.
My mouth should be sealed.
Oh my heart, you know it is spring
And time to celebrate.
What should I do with a trapped wing,
Which does not let me fly?
I have been silent too long,
But I never forget the melody,
Since every moment I whisper
The songs from my heart,
Reminding myself of
The day I will break this cage,
Fly from this solitude
And sing like a melancholic.
I am not a weak poplar tree
To be shaken by any wind.
I am an Afghan woman,
It only makes sense to moan

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[ An Excerpt from "A NATION CHALLENGED: CULTURE; Afghan Poets Revive a Literary Tradition" by Amy Waldman, New York Times, December 16, 2001:

“HERAT, Afghanistan, Dec. 15 ... During the reign of the Taliban around 30 women, at the risk of death studied literature privately at the home of Muhammad Ali Rahyab, a professor of literary theory and methodology at Herat University. The sign outside his walled home advertises sewing classes [hence, the legendary "Sewing Circles of Herat"]. Professor Rahyab has three daughters  and this fact might have subconsciously motivated him to teach women in secret. He said that he believed in the power of literature, even in a society where most people are illiterate, because what starts among a small group of readers can easily spread. He held that Afghans were far more likely to respond to poetry than political analysis. So in the name of forging a new literary cadre of women, each week he would convene his students to discuss the reading they had done at home, whether Tolstoy, Balzac or Dickens. They would also discuss their own stories and poems, and he found a deep well of talent among his students. One of those talents was Nadia Anjoman [commonly, Anjuman]. “]

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