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The vivid starlight
above poet Partaw Naderi's remote Afghan village was undiminished by city
glow. And as a young boy, when he sat by the beautiful river that flowed
through the northern province of Badakhshan, his imagination was inspired.
"When I looked to the
river, I thought the river was a creature with a soul, that it is alive,"
says Naderi, who is in residence at the University of Iowa International
Writing Program this fall. "And sometimes I thought how nice it would be if
I was a wave of this river, to roll to faraway places."
These experiences of
nature made such an indelible impression on Naderi that when he became a
poet, an heir to the rich, 1,000-year tradition of Persian/ Dari verse, they
emerged as recurring images in his reflective, passionate and spiritual
work. (Samples of his writing are available for PDF download at
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp/WRIT/WRITmain.html.)
"Day by day, the
human being tries to understand everything," observes Naderi, who earned a
science degree in college. "And now we know a lot of things. We know about
the stars, and the galaxies. But if you compare your understanding to the
universal, you've got nothing. The learning of the human being cannot reach
to the ultimate."
But the idyllic
peace of Naderi's youth was replaced, in his maturity, by decades of violent
upheaval in Afghanistan -- a Soviet-backed communist regime opposed by the
U.S.-backed Mujahideen, followed by the fundamentalist totalitarianism of
the Taliban, and now the bombing, invasion and occupation by the U.S.-led
coalition that responded to 9/11. As a result, the natural images that fired
his youthful poetic imagination were transformed into symbols of both
despair and hope for his country.
"I have spent my
life in a very dark age in my country," he says. "When you live in darkness
you should talk about the stars, because it means you are not happy with
darkness. Stars can also be a symbol for your wishes for your country's
future."
Not long after
Naderi began writing poetry in the 1970s he was arrested by the
Soviet-backed regime and condemned to the notorious Pul-e-Charki prison.
"The Party believed in that time that prison was where you re-educated the
people," he says with a laugh. "But most of the prison belonged to different
jihadi groups, who organized there."
Sentenced to five
years as a political prisoner, he was freed after three years as part of a
mass prison release ordered as part of a reconciliation initiative by Afghan
President Najib.
Back in society, he
became a member of the central council of the Afghanistan Writers
Association, but the ascendancy of the Taliban put an end to that. Deprived
of all income as the nation's literary life was shut down by the
religious-fundamentalist rulers, Nadedi remained another year in Kabul,
subsisting by selling his books and seeking anonymity behind a beard and
turban.
"In that time the
Taliban was too busy finding commanders and government officials," he says.
"But in the end they started to research about the literary life." So,
feeling he would soon come under fundamentalist suspicion, he fled his
homeland in 1997 and took a job as a producer with the BBC Persian Section
in Peshawar, on the Pakistani frontier, where he remained for five years.
In 2002, after the
U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban, Naderi returned to his homeland,
intent not only on reclaiming his own life as a writer, but also on
rebuilding Afghanistan's society and resuscitating its culture.
He become the
president of the Afghan PEN Association, the international organization that
promotes literary freedom, and attended at the 69th Congress of PEN
International in Mexico City. Now he is the editor of Jamea-e-madani (
Civil Society) the magazine of the Afghan Civil Society Forum (ACSF). The
Afghan Civil Society Forum, which promotes civil discourse, reconstruction
and social activism, is accessible on the Web in English at
http://www.acsf.af/English/index.htm.
Naderi has returned
to Afghanistan, but many of the country's intellectual exiles have not --
and may not, as long as there is no prospect of an income -- and he is
uncertain about the future, where the promise of democracy has been a
disappointment.
"People were very
happy because Taliban fell," he explains. "But now the people want
electricity, and drinking water and education. Can there be democracy
without electricity? In the last four years, there is no economic production
in Afghanistan. The people are jobless. The education situation is very
bad."
As a result, he
says, the Afghan people, who had no previous experience with democracy, are
now identifying democracy with the disillusionments and deprivations they
have experienced. "The government is not able to defend itself without the
assistance of the international community," he observes. "They are just
trying to make money for themselves. There is no vision.
"People now think
that democracy is bribery, that democracy is corruption, that democracy is
weakness."
The people voted
enthusiastically in presidential election that elected Hamid Karzai, he
says. But by the time of the most recent parliamentary elections,
disillusionment had already reduced the voters by half: "After the election
the cabinet was the same. There was no important change. The government was
weaker than before. In the parliament election, 50 percent didn't vote."
But what, Americans
might ask, could poets have to do with reversing these corrosive trends? In
America, poets are marginalized, and their readership is a tiny academic and
intellectual elite.
Not so in
Afghanistan, Naderi asserts. As an article in the Guardian explained when he
toured the UK, "In Afghanistan . . . poetry has played a decisive role in
recent history. 'The mujahideen sang poems going into battle,' Partaw says.
'The communist government tried it too. Then when the Taliban arrived in
Kabul, they were reciting poetry. . . . We say poems are part of our
mother's milk and that all of our culture came through poetry.'"
Naderi explains, "In
Afghanistan we have big figures in our classic poetry, but few figures in
prose. In other words I can say that Persian/Dari has been started by
poetry. Short stories started maybe 50 years ago in Afghanistan, but poetry
has a long history. Because of our tradition of mysticism, we believe that
poetry is a talent that God gives to very few, special of his people. A
mother sings poems to her baby in the cradle. Everyone has some poems on the
top of their heads. And then when we die, there are some poems on our
epitaph."
And journalist Curt
Hopkins observed, "Poetry is like a weed: the last plant to die, the first
to grow again after a fire. It unfurls in garden and forest alike,
indiscriminant, sprouting in the cracks of broken sidewalks and pushing up
to light through fields of rubble and minefields. When it finally flowers it
is as good a sign as any that a society has retained or recovered some part
of its vitality. In Afghanistan, with poetic traditions stretching back to
the 6th century BC and peaking in the 14th AD, the sturdy weed of poetry is
growing again."
Whether the new
poetry of Afghanistan is a cradlesong or an epitaph is in the balance.
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STORY SOURCE:
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Iowa City, IA 52242-2500.
MEDIA CONTACT: Winston
Barclay, 319-384-0073,
winston-barclay@uiowa.edu |
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