=special feature: afghan women's writing=

Poetry is one of the strongest forces of Afghan culture.  We learn our traditions, our manners, and our religion through poetry.  The folklorist Margaret Mills called Afghanistan, “The most literary illiterate society.”  While the majority of our grandmothers could not read or write, they learned classical and modern Dari poetry through the rich oral tradition and passed it down to their children.  Our kitchen was always buzzing with gossip and poetry, religion and fairytales, philosophy and recipes.  For Afghans, poetry belongs to the average person and so in this collection you won’t see any professional poets.  Instead you have housewives, students, scholars, and doctors writing poetry.  Many of these poets have learned English as a second language, yet joyfully they experiment with their adopted language.   Afghan women’s poetry is about displacement, healing, and rebuilding.  As a result the poetry is fragmented.  Dari words float within the English lines.   The poetry is haunted with longing and gazing out from windows, which are portholes back to some sliver of Afghanistan. Afghan women’s poetry is also hopeful, promising to return to heal the war-torn land and within these promises one can sense the guilt of leaving the others behind.  If women are the true chroniclers of war, since it is we who survive, then the wars in Afghanistan mark each poem written by these Afghan refugee poets from across the United States and Australia.