Introduction to Landays: A Voice For Pashtun Women

Landay: two-line "folk poems" sung in Pashto. 

Pashto: one of the official languages spoken in Afghanistan, spoken by Pashtun peoples (Afghanistan and Pakistan). 

Taliban: Islamic fundamentalist political movement. Primary ethnic group of Taliban is Pashtun. Controlled Afghanistan's government from 1996-2001. 


(Photo: from "The New Face of Central Asia" by Ambassador (ret.) Michael W. Cotter)



Main Text

Eliza Griswold's  "Landays: Poetry of Afghan Women"  (PDF version on MyMC/in student e-mail)

"From the Aryan caravans that likely brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago to ongoing U.S. drone strikes, the subjects of landays are remixed like hip-hop, with old words swapped for newer, more relevant ones. A woman’s sleeve in a centuries-old landay becomes her bra strap today. A colonial British officer becomes a contemporary American soldier. A book becomes a gun. Each biting word change has much to teach about the social satire that ripples under the surface of a woman’s life." (Griswold)

Below is a video supplement directed by Seamus Murphy, the photographer, and produced with Eliza Griswold. The first landay from our handout is performed around the four-minute mark in Pashto, then translated into English.


Pashto Landay - Afghan Women Poets from Franco Pachtoune on Vimeo.

• Let's review the handout, which includes Eliza Griswold's definition of landays and provides examples of "the social satire that ripples under the surface of a woman's life" along with the poems spoken aloud in Pashto in the video. 

• I highly recommend watching this entire video as part of your work for the forthcoming essay.

Read & Think Alouds: Landays

ENGL 101

Read the landays and take notes as you make inferences while reading and thinking out loud:

“A landay has only a few formal properties. Each has twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line, thirteen in the second. The poem ends with the sound “ma” or “na.” Sometimes they rhyme, but more often not. In Pashto, they lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content, which is distinctive not only for its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the piercing ability to articulate a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love. Within these five main tropes, the couplets express a collective fury, a lament, an earthy joke, a love of home, a longing for the end of separation, a call to arms, all of which frustrate any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.” (Griswold)

Think Aloud: while reading, discuss the connection between images/actions in the first and second line of each landay. Also, pay attention to the relationship between men and women in each, especially when pronouns seem vague.

You sold me to an old man, father.

May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

•

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.

When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

•

Today I spilled the spinach on the floor.

Now the old goat stands in the corner swinging a two-by-four.

•

Widows take sweets to a saint’s shrine.

I’ll bring God popcorn and beg him to kill mine.

•

Send my salams to my lover.

If he’s a farter, I fart louder.

•

I dream I am the president.

When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.

In these last two, pay attention to the speaker’s relationship to war:

My Nabi was shot down by a drone.

May God destroy your sons, America, you murdered my own.

•

God kill the Taliban’s mothers and girls.

If they’re not fighting jihad, why do they oil their curls?