First published 2015
Poet Eliza Griswold travels to Afghanistan after hearing about a teenage girl who set herself on fire when forbidden to write poetry. Griswold seeks to understand and preserve landays, ancient folk couplets created by Pashtun women across Afghanistan and Pakistan. These brutal, spare poems pass between more than 20 million mostly illiterate women who use them to express rage, longing, protest, and love. The poems travel from Facebook posts to ancient caravan songs, reflecting three decades of war and contemporary Pashtun life under drone strikes and occupation. As the U.S. withdrawal approaches in 2014, these voices face extinction. Working with photographer Seamus Murphy, Griswold collects these anonymous oral poems that function like remixable rap verses. The landays reveal women who refuse to remain silent beneath blue burqas, speaking instead of war, separation, homeland, and forbidden love through an art form that makes no attempt at literary sophistication yet carries devastating power.
Genres: history, gender-studies, anthropology, biography-memoir, 21st-century, ethnicity, activism, cultural-studies
Vibes: emotional, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, protest
Setting: Afghanistan, Pakistan
Period: 2014
160 pages · Paperback · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Content warnings: war