Post by jeannerené on Aug 23, 2009 18:28:47 GMT -8
Kabul
Of something that is like the wind,
Of something that is like the sea,
Of something that is like the moon,
Of something that is like bread,
of the thirst of a poem sad and alive
I must write.
The crash of thousands explosions
- throughout the day,
through the night -
Of the outstretched hand of thousands of beggars
in the wounded streets
of this new city -
I must write.
Of the impatient laments of the rain
Of the death of nature,
Of the death of joy,
Of drinking throughout the night
Of the dark cuts of sadness,
The machine guns, the bombs and the blood,
I must write.
So many wind,
burnt faces by the sun,
So many men dishonoured, desperate
Who come home with bundles of hunger,
With a burden of scars,
Of something which is like tears,
Of something which is like blood,
Of something which is like Kabul
I must write.
************************
From Huffington Post
www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/a-poet-braves-afghanistan_b_264543.html
John Lundberg
Posted: August 23, 2009 07:02 AM
Two months ago, the Afghan poet Latif Pedram published the poem "Kabul" in the French newsletter Nomade. It is a poem of witness, sorrowful but necessary, that speaks to the city's violence and struggle--something Pedram learned about firsthand when, almost a decade ago, the Taliban forced him to flee Afghanistan. He has since returned to find that the "new city" of Kabul is no better than the old.
Not content solely to bear witness, Pedram has twice tried to enact political change, running for president as leader of the multi-ethnic Afghanistan National Congress Party he helped create. During his first campaign in 2004, he caused a stir by speaking out against hard-line religion, in favor of women's rights, and by bluntly criticizing Hamid Karzai for ruling as a puppet of the United States.
Pedram's views--too radical for Afghanistan--earned him just over 1% of the vote, but they certainly got him noticed. In February of last year, the Afghan government placed him under house arrest to prevent him from stirring up too much trouble this election cycle. Undeterred, Pedram ran for president again. ''Whether I win is not very important,'' he has said, ''I want to create a new way of thinking.''
Pedram's desire for a "new way of thinking" was stoked by the suffocating rule of the Taliban. He was the director of the 55,000 volume Library of the Foundation Nasser Khosrow when the Taliban burned it down in 1998, destroying many thousand-year-old treasures of Persian Literature. He described the scene in his essay "The Library is on Fire," which he published in the French publication Autodafe.
Through the little window of the hideout where I took refuge, I watched the Taliban burn books on the city's main public square...It was as if Genghis Khan, disguised as Mollah Omar (the Taliban leader) had entered the city with his army to repeat the most tragic event of our history. At that moment I too did not have the strength to speak...Through this repetition of a tragedy so often repeated in the history of our civilization, Afghanistan shamefully entered the twenty-first century.
Later in the essay, Pedram stresses the importance of poetry as a means of artistic and cultural expression in Afghanistan--it was allowed to exist when other art forms had been snuffed out. As Pedram explained,
Only poetry, of all the artistic and cultural forms, has a certain freedom of expression in Afghanistan...poetry offers great possibilities for expression; rhetorical figures, and the use of symbols and metaphors do not make the censors' task easy.
Pedram himself has become a symbol. And so long as his government fights what he sees as necessary progressive change, he has no plans to make its task easy either.
Of something that is like the wind,
Of something that is like the sea,
Of something that is like the moon,
Of something that is like bread,
of the thirst of a poem sad and alive
I must write.
The crash of thousands explosions
- throughout the day,
through the night -
Of the outstretched hand of thousands of beggars
in the wounded streets
of this new city -
I must write.
Of the impatient laments of the rain
Of the death of nature,
Of the death of joy,
Of drinking throughout the night
Of the dark cuts of sadness,
The machine guns, the bombs and the blood,
I must write.
So many wind,
burnt faces by the sun,
So many men dishonoured, desperate
Who come home with bundles of hunger,
With a burden of scars,
Of something which is like tears,
Of something which is like blood,
Of something which is like Kabul
I must write.
************************
From Huffington Post
www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/a-poet-braves-afghanistan_b_264543.html
John Lundberg
Posted: August 23, 2009 07:02 AM
Two months ago, the Afghan poet Latif Pedram published the poem "Kabul" in the French newsletter Nomade. It is a poem of witness, sorrowful but necessary, that speaks to the city's violence and struggle--something Pedram learned about firsthand when, almost a decade ago, the Taliban forced him to flee Afghanistan. He has since returned to find that the "new city" of Kabul is no better than the old.
Not content solely to bear witness, Pedram has twice tried to enact political change, running for president as leader of the multi-ethnic Afghanistan National Congress Party he helped create. During his first campaign in 2004, he caused a stir by speaking out against hard-line religion, in favor of women's rights, and by bluntly criticizing Hamid Karzai for ruling as a puppet of the United States.
Pedram's views--too radical for Afghanistan--earned him just over 1% of the vote, but they certainly got him noticed. In February of last year, the Afghan government placed him under house arrest to prevent him from stirring up too much trouble this election cycle. Undeterred, Pedram ran for president again. ''Whether I win is not very important,'' he has said, ''I want to create a new way of thinking.''
Pedram's desire for a "new way of thinking" was stoked by the suffocating rule of the Taliban. He was the director of the 55,000 volume Library of the Foundation Nasser Khosrow when the Taliban burned it down in 1998, destroying many thousand-year-old treasures of Persian Literature. He described the scene in his essay "The Library is on Fire," which he published in the French publication Autodafe.
Through the little window of the hideout where I took refuge, I watched the Taliban burn books on the city's main public square...It was as if Genghis Khan, disguised as Mollah Omar (the Taliban leader) had entered the city with his army to repeat the most tragic event of our history. At that moment I too did not have the strength to speak...Through this repetition of a tragedy so often repeated in the history of our civilization, Afghanistan shamefully entered the twenty-first century.
Later in the essay, Pedram stresses the importance of poetry as a means of artistic and cultural expression in Afghanistan--it was allowed to exist when other art forms had been snuffed out. As Pedram explained,
Only poetry, of all the artistic and cultural forms, has a certain freedom of expression in Afghanistan...poetry offers great possibilities for expression; rhetorical figures, and the use of symbols and metaphors do not make the censors' task easy.
Pedram himself has become a symbol. And so long as his government fights what he sees as necessary progressive change, he has no plans to make its task easy either.
