ABSTRACT
This chapter examines 21st-century, post-Taliban themes and trends in Afghan women’s Persian Dari poetry, focusing on the socio-political layers of its most prominent motifs. It argues that women’s contemporary poetic expressions constitute contextually and culturally powerful means of indirect women’s activism in Afghanistan. Utilizing a multi-disciplinary approach involving literary translation and analysis complemented by ethnographic interviews and methods, this project identifies prominent contemporary Afghan women poets and major themes in their poetry, examining how their work interacts with and addresses social and political spheres, expressing and exposing issues such as gendered violence, corruption, government oppression, religious tradition, and the trauma of war and exile. I have divided this into three sections: (1) war’s objects, people, and consequences; (2) body language: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin; and (3) silence. This chapter makes a timely contribution to scholarship on contemporary literature in Afghanistan. It engages in new contextually informed literary analysis of poetry previously unavailable outside Afghanistan, enriched by interviews with poets and literary scholars in Afghanistan. One of the effects of this research is to decisively interrupt simplistic assumptions or perceptions that Afghan women on the whole are uneducated, oppressed, powerless, or resigned to their fates. On the contrary, their poetry reveals the incisive efforts of educated and politically informed women to shape the intellectual, artistic, and socio-political circumstances of their time.
