fri 29/03/2024

theartsdesk in Kabul: Talking Books in Dari and Pashto | reviews, news & interviews

theartsdesk in Kabul: Talking Books in Dari and Pashto

theartsdesk in Kabul: Talking Books in Dari and Pashto

A literary culture with low rates of literacy is introduced to the audiobook

One Friday afternoon this spring, a friend led me to a low, dusty room in an education institute in the Afghan capital, Kabul. A few dozen men sat in neat rows. Most were young and wearing leather jackets, a few were older and in tweed jackets or suits. One wore a turban and chapan, a warm winter padded coat. All were keen writers who together are thriving members of a literary circle, a solace of imagination, creativity and wonder far from the fighting and the headlines of Afghanistan's bitter war.

First, a young man opened the meeting with a Quranic chant. Then the first author stepped up in front of his critics. Noor Gul Shafaq, 22, an Afghan radio journalist with lank, dark hair and wearing jeans, began reading his most recent short story. De Har Kar Dactar, “Doctor Know-It-All”, is a fast-paced satirical yarn about an Afghan doctor living in the countryside who is barely qualified, lazy and pompous, and quite useless as a doctor, but in his own eyes the specialist of specialists, an eminent physician who can cure all ills. The audience listened in silence, chuckling occasionally or calling out suggestions when the speaker stumbled or lost his place.

The recital seemed warmly received. “It’s very well done, well paced, and it’s funny,” said my friend and guide Mahboobullah Khan. “He’s a very talented boy. His story gives the real life in the countryside, what poor people have to put up with. The doctor is also a victim of this country’s poor education. The story is sensitive to his lack of learning but it's rightly hard on him for trying to fool everyone when in fact everyone knows what he really is.”

The critics can be tough, though. One man, a Dr Zagram, told the young author he did his writing and his country a disservice by using the local dialect rather than formal, written Pashto. As if to make a point, he gave the audience a homily on the art of short-storytelling, structure, plot, use of words and style. Another speaker - Jalan Zahzai, a poet - lamented the nature of Afghan culture portrayed in the young author's story.

The literary circle is called Baheer, or Caravan, and is the largest Pashto literary association in Kabul. It is an entirely spontaneous, homegrown civil society organisation that receives no outside funding and has resisted all attempts at international or Afghan government sponsorship. Literary associations like this, in Pashto and Dari, are flourishing in Afghanistan’s three main cities, Kabul, Mazar and Herat, but also in the more conflict-ridden and conservative provinces like Khost, Kandahar, Helmand, Nangahar, Ghazni and Kunduz.

Baheer began across the border in the northern Pakistani town of Peshawar in the 1980s, among the large numbers of Afghan refugee intellectuals. “The format of the meeting is always the same,” said Khan, who is himself writing a book on Afghans in the Indian film industry, to be titled Khans in Bollywood.  “These meetings are quite formal and taken very seriously but not everyone turns up to each session,” said Khan.

I wondered if the peer review was disheartening. My neighbours disagreed. “Not at all,” said the man on my left, who introduced himself as Abdul Wahil Sulamal, 47, from Southall in west London. “I come twice a year for this,” he said. “It’s my home. These people are my family and I need to be with them. I write my stories, I bring them back and they help me. I can’t live without it.” For young writers, Baheer is a much treasured masterclass, a chance to present  work to renowned and published authors and to seek advice and support. “There are lots of us who drop in from abroad, from Germany, the UK, from wherever… we come,” said Sulalmal. After decades of conflict and poverty, Afghanistan has glaringly low levels of literacy: 49 per cent for men aged 18 to 25 and 18 per cent for women. And yet, this country also has a long literary tradition and a great appetite for storytelling and poetry.

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This week in Kabul sees the launch of Talking Books, a weekly radio programme that serialises in six parts some 40 works of world literature into Afghanistan’s two official languages. The programme is translated as Wayandoya Keta’aboona in Pashto and Keta’abha’a-i-Goyenda in Dari. The first book to be translated, abridged and adapted will go on air in May and it will be broadcast by some 15 local radio stations in provinces across the country, including in areas in the south blighted by fighting such as Helmand and the more remote provinces like Badghis and Jawzjan. The initiative is funded by the US Department of State, and spearheaded by an Afghan NGO, Media Support Partnership Afghanistan.

The range of books covered is wide and includes not just classics of Western literature but many popular Afghan authors, names barely known in the West like Saduddin Shpoon, Safia Haleem, Ajmal Pasalai, Nasir Ahmad Ahmadi and Rahimullah Basharat. Their stories will be broadcast alongside classics including Pride and Prejudice, Les Misérables, Romeo and Juliet, Oliver Twist, Kim, A Farewell to Arms and the classical Arabic love story, Laila and Majnoon.

This is an opportunity to listen to novels produced 50 to 200 years ago in other countries, to know that experiences that we humans endure are similar

My own particular favourite is Tolstoy’s posthumously published masterpiece, Haji Murad, based loosely on a 19th-century Muslim tribal chieftain’s own account of his defection from the Chechen revolt and the volatile warlord Shamil to the Tsar’s Russian army in a desperate attempt to save his family. It is a stirring story of moral dilemma, of a man caught between two despots and of family loyalty and bravery in the face of battle. This will surely resonate well with an Afghan audience.

The books were chosen by a panel of Afghan experts, university professors, writers, poets, playwrights and journalists. Isaq Negargar, who was imprisoned in the early 1980s by Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet government for translating Animal Farm into Dari, was involved in choosing and abridging Talking Books.

“I was very much emphasising the foreign literature in my choices. Afghans need to be exposed to the outside world,” he told me. Safia Haleem, a former BBC World Service producer and editor who plays a similar role in the project, agreed. “This is an opportunity to listen to novels produced 50 to 200 years ago in other countries, to know that experiences that we humans endure are similar,” she said. “I think Afghans will listen to Charles Dickens and be fascinated to learn what hard lives children lived in Britain.”

But she also said competition amongst writers in Afghanistan is becoming tough and standards are rising. “There are so many new and talented writers producing good work that needs to be aired and Talking Books gives them a chance, something to aspire to.” Unusually, the donor has neither interfered in the choice of books nor placed pressure on the project to demonstrate any particular audience. The mandate of the series is simply to entertain through literature.

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In a country where most villages have no electricity and towns and cities experience constant shortages, Afghan men and women are prodigious radio listeners. According to a recent survey nearly 89 per cent of men and 77 per cent of women tune in for radio news, information and entertainment. Communal listening is not only popular but visible. Even on the streets around Kabul where television is gaining the edge, it’s not uncommon to see Afghan men strolling together with a radio, sitting under a tree in Sharinaw Park or in a chaikhana, the local tea house. But in a country with such high illiteracy, what will ordinary Afghan men and women make of these stories?

In a quiet, expansive Hazara neighbourhood of Kabul, down a dusty rutted street where vast, newly-built villas in cake-icing colours tower over traditional adobe single-storey dwellings, I found Mohammed Akbar, the director of Media Support Partnership and a poet in his own right. The large window behind his desk is coated with a thick grey bomb-blast film that renders the stunning view of the Hindu Kush mountain peaks encircling the city into sepia tones.  Normally effusive in his greetings, Dr Akbar was transfixed by a manuscript before him.

For some women, membership of Baheer has been fatal. In February this year a young woman was killed by her brother for joining the group

“It’s The 39 Steps. It’s the first time I read it,” he said. “What a story. I can’t put it down.” He was editing the translated and abridged script. “Afghans will love it. This book takes you right out of yourself. It transports you far away from the troubles and off to another place.”  We were joined by Delafruz Zeerak, a well-known Afghan journalist, broadcaster and the producer of Talking Books, as well as a mother of two. She is also unhesitating in her belief in the project.  “You do not have to be literate to enjoy a story or understand the poetry of words read out loud,” she said. In broken English she reminded me that Afghanistan has a rich literary history both ancient and modern with thriving oral and written traditions which are not always obvious to an outsider.

The novel is a relatively new form of expression in Afghanistan. While Afghan literature dates from 1800 BC, the novel was introduced at the turn of the 20th century by Mahmud Tarzi, a poet and free-thinking Modernist who is most commonly known as the father of Afghan journalism. Exiled in Turkey as a young man, Tarzi was an avid linguist and a voracious reader of the European novel. He was a devout man who believed firmly in a separation between state and religion. He returned to Kabul in 1901 having translated the entire works of Jules Verne into Dari and Pashto. In his bi-weekly newspaper Seraj-al Akhbarm published between 1911 and 1919, Tarzi provided a platform for Modernists, constitutionalists and young writers. For the first time, new works of literature experimented with classical forms, introducing personal thoughts, themes from everyday life, adventure, romance and love. Up to 1929, Afghanistan witnessed a spurt of cultural development, publications and journals flourished until traditionalist forces prevailed in a tug of war that continues to this day.

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A week later, I took a treacherous lift up to the seventh floor in the Education Ministry for a meeting of the women's section of the Baheer literary circle.
Here, around a dozen women gathered, along with two men from the men's group I attended. One is a young doctor and the other is Alam Gul Sahar who helped establish the women’s section of Baheer.

“We go there, they come here, as we feel like it,” said Sola Niazi, a Media Support journalist. “We need to hear each other's work.” Niazi was born in Paktika, which has some of the lowest enrolment rates for women in the country but her family moved to Kabul in the 1990s and are encouraging of their daughters’ education and independence. The women at today’s meeting are aged between 18 and 55. “Most are from poor or middle-class families. They are not rich or privileged,” she said. “We have girls and women who’ve barely or never attended school, but you hear their poetry and you wouldn’t guess.”

For some women, membership of Baheer has been fatal. In February this year a young woman was killed by her brother for joining the group. The boy suspected his sister’s poetry was an indication of romantic involvement. “Brothers are more difficult and treacherous than fathers,” said Delafruze Zeerak, the Talking Books producer. “They’re like a police force.” Niazi turned to me. "We write because we have seen so much sorrow," she said. "Here are women who take risks to attend this group; that’s what writing is about and that’s all we can say.”

As the meeting began, Nazifa, 18, read out a Ghazal, a poem of rhyming couplets with a refrain. Niazi and Zeerak offered praise and suggestions. “It’s a really good poem about love," said Sola. "There are just a few problems with the structure.” Other poems follow, and more discussion is held on style, meter and the use of words required for a Ghazal.  “We deliver more than a university,” said Sola.

Green tea and lemon sponge cake was brought in by two male waiters in formal uniform. Just as I was leaving Saira Sharif, a female MP for Khost, arrived. She’s not a novelist or poet but a friend who works to support the group as well other educational and cultural activities in her province. She’d come to help the women prepare for the spring festival, Nawroz. “I’m not here in any official capacity,” she said. “I come because I love what these women are doing. They have so much they need to say. We have a sea of sorrow in our hearts. Our men need to hear that.”

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Comments

Absolutely fascinating - we need more such positive, horizon-expanding pieces (and projects) at a time like this.

Fascinating piece, indeed. How right you are that Tolstoy's 'Haji Murad' will have such strong local resonance. Also reason to celebrate is upcoming full translation of his 'War and Peace' into Pashto, direct from the Russian original.

What an inspiring piece; I remember the BBC giving advice over the establishing of an Afghan 'Archers' style soap but this takes things to a different level. I do hope too that this finds a place as an item on BBC R4 such as 'Woman's Hour'.

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