By Sayd Majrouh, Marjolijn de Jager (Tr)
Other Press (2010)  www.otherpress.com
$14.95; 128 pp.; ISBN-10: 1590513983
(Reviewed by Rebecca Kaye, phati’tude Literary Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 3)

SONGS OF LOVE AND WAR: AFGHAN WOMEN’S POETRY is a collection of two-line poems — called landays — improvised and sung by thousands of anonymous female voices. The poems stem from an oral tradition among Afghan women and it is only through the efforts of the editor, poet and visionary Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, and two diligent translators, André Velter and Marjolijn de Jager, that they have become accessible to us in Songs of Love and War. As Majrouh explains in his wonderfully succinct introduction, the landay (literally, the “short one”) is a form of Pashtun poetry centered on the invocations of women. With very specific rules of versification, the landay is comprised of two lines, nine and thirteen syllables, which enthrall the audience with brief and touching melodies. Majrouh also offers insight into the historical and cultural context of these mournful songs which tackle themes of female beauty, defiance, male honor, exile, battle and death as well as sexual and political power struggle and disempowerment.

One of the most striking qualities of Songs of Love and War is that you do not have to be familiar with the tumultuous political history or the displacement of the Afghan People to appreciate the beauty of the landays; you do not have to know of the treatment of women nor the loss of home and country to understand and empathize with their lament. The act of reading the lines is enough; the strong, simple language sings,their melodies imprinted as both foreign and familiar, a powerful reminder of a forgotten mother tongue of longing, loss and insatiable hunger for change.

Lines such as “the woman in exile never stops dying” reflect a pathos and an understanding of displacement that is universal, a “cry of separation” that could have arisen from any era, any country and from any individual facing oppression. Similarly, the landays that address sensuality and sexual longing are frank and empowering,speaking to the boundlessness of human desire: “My mouth is yours, devour it and be not afraid. It is not made of sugar that might be dissolved.” Majrouh uses such displays of sentiment as a springboard for the examination of how the landays function as the sole outlet for Pashtun women to air the subversive personal and political frustrations that they must keep hidden from the society of men: “See the dreadful tyranny of husbands: He beats me then forbids my weeping.” The poetry of Afghan women is a forbidden art as much as the sexuality and the derision towards the “gesticulations of masculinity” that they express are forbidden fruits from which the Pashtun women have willingly and copiously eaten.

While Songs of Love and War is unquestionably universal in the scope of its lament, the knowledge Majrouh imparts in his notes on the poems, concerning the specific context of repression that engendered this poetic form, renders the directness and sparseness of the landays even more poignant. What is ultimately so very striking about Songs of Love and War is that the authoresses say in few words that which ought not to be spoken at all. While the men around them defend their virility and the statutes of patriarchy with recourse to an established canon of religious texts, the nameless, faceless multitude of Pashtun women, growing out of an environment of scarcity and exercising a “profound and pure restraint,” patiently weave the substance of their rebellion twenty-two syllables at a time. Songs of Love and War is the result of this sustained effort and is essential reading for anyone interested in the powerful emotions of love, loss, defiance and longing that mark the human condition.

SAYD BAHODINE MAJROUH earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Montpellier, later serving as the Dean of the Department of Literature in Kabul, Afghanistan, and then as the Governor of the Province of Kapia. After the Soviet invasion, he went into exile in Peshawar, Pakistan, where he founded the Afghan Information Center. The literary heir of Rumi and Omar Khayyam, his epic, Ego-Monstre, constitutes the whole of the major poetic work of twentieth-century Afghan literature. He was assassinated in 1988 in Peshawar.

MARJOLIJN DE JAGER was born in Indonesia, raised in the Netherlands, and has been living in the US since 1958. She is an award-winning literary translator from French and Dutch to English, with a special interest in francophone African and Middle Eastern women writers.

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