Women in Poetry

Woman, a pleasing but short lived flower,

Too soft for business and too weak for power.

A wife in bondage, or neglected maid;

Despised if ugly; of she's fair, betrayed. 

(II. 1-4) An Essay on Women, Mary Leapor.

Women through the ages oppressed and suppressed, under the dominance of men; equally capable, although not in might but, in intelligence, kept yoked to marriages and family duties. The emergence of women in the field of writing was like a breath of fresh air, from Aphra Behn to Mary Wollstonecraft to present writers. We are used to having men writing about our curves; how our hair fall past the roundness of our shoulders, how sensuous these images are. Now, our bodies are the subject of our own tales; the arch of our back to the ups and downs of our lives.

The more conservative the society is, the more difficult it is for the women there to write, yet the produce is more hauntingly beautiful. Here is an article on "Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry", by Eliza Griswold.

In the article "Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry", Griswold wrote on the struggles of Afghan women or poets against their families and society, to be heard. The members of Mirman Baheer Association, a women's literary society in Kabul, reach out to young poets via radio then be connected through secret meetings or discrete phone calls. The poets will then speak their mind or poems and it will be transcribed by the members of Mirman Baheer.

Zarmina, pen-named Rahila, was a poet-martyr. However, to the members of Mirman Baheer, she was only the most-recent. "There are hundreds like her" said Ogai Amail, the member of the society who did the interview with Griswold.

Zarmina set herself on fire in protest to her brothers after they found her writing poetry and brutally attacked her. To Zarmina, her writing love poems was her comfort to her broken engagement.

To the women in Afghan, Pashtun poetry has long been a form of rebellion, contradicting the notion of them being submissive or defeated. Landai, meaning a 'short, poisonous snake' in Pashto, refers to the two-lined folk poems that can be just as deadly. Deriving their powers from ominous layers of stress and tension of the poet's inner and outer world, landais explores rage, conflict, irony, sarcasm, loss and desire.

"A poem is a sword" said Saheera Sharif, founder of Mirman Baheer, not a poet but a Parliament member from the province of Khost. Renowned Pashtun poet and former parliamentarian, Safia Siddiq said "In Afghanistan, poetry is the women's movement from the inside."