writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

HISTORICISING WOMEN THROUGH FICTION AND POETRY IN
AFGHANISTAN AND BEYOND
809
Anders WIDMARK *
Writing on Afghanistan and the Pashto‐speaking region I often find myself returning to a Pashto
proverb saying: “When two bullocks fight, it is the shrubs and other plants that suffer.” 1 I read this as
a multi‐layered metaphor of the present situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, illustrating how war
not only concerns the contending parties of a conflict, but also those caught between, i.e. the
civilians, affected either directly, indirectly or structurally. Nearing a fourth decade of crisis in the
area, the narrative keeps focusing on the male urban and elite experience, but the lives of ordinary
people, women and children are rarely addressed.
Historically, Afghan literature, mainly referring to the two official languages of Afghanistan:
Pashto and Dari, has been characterised as highly referential, committed, and allegorical of its
societal surroundings; an aesthetics that tends to stress a conjunction of literature with the world of
public events and society. One often comes across texts infused by some levels of self‐experience
and local commitment, that is, texts that intertwine “history” and “story”. The autobiographical
element is not always self‐experienced but can be drawn upon a collective experience. In view of
these characteristics and at the same time considering the last three decades of conflict in the area it
is not farfetched to assume that it is this reality that is processed in contemporary Dari and Pashto
literary texts.
Right from early formative period of modern Afghan literature in the 1930s, a central literary
theme has been the plights and sorrows of Afghan women. These representations have mainly been
penned by male writers. Women’s lives continue to be narrated and problematized mainly from a
male point of view; however, over the last decade there has been a distinct surge of women writers
mediating their own lives through prose and poetry. As such, readings of Afghan literature, I argue,
can function as means to (re)map aspects of female experience, emotion, and history, that is, the
analysis of literature, as works of art and as fields of cultural production, may present us with
knowledge through which we can attempt to historicise women in Afghanistan and beyond.
Even though women’s writing in Dari and Pashto emerged already in the 1950s with pioneers such
as Magah Rahmani and Zaytun Banu, very few studies engage this production. As far as Dari is
concerned, the efforts of the prolific Afghan writer and publicist M. H. Mohammadi have been crucial
in introducing women’s writing to a wider readership. 2 The convention in works on Pashto literature
has been either to ignore the existence of women writing in Pashto completely or to trivialise the
topic within a condensed framework of ruralism and traditionalism. Reduced descriptions such as
this, in their capacity of excluding or being selective, are misleading and will only serve to reinforce
the public mind with ideas of Pashtun women as being something distant, backward, and “in need of
saving.” 3
Although Afghan women have gained ground in the administrative and political life of Afghanistan
over the last decade, they are still marginalised at many levels and remain nearly invisible when it
comes to the academia. History is written as if there were no women in Afghanistan. I admit to the
fact that writing a political history based on the literary works of Afghan women would be an
unrealistic task, however, I am at the same time convinced that literary texts as such, especially in
the context of Afghanistan, lend themselves well as evidence in writing alternative history, such as a
history of emotions. Thus, notwithstanding my subject position, being a philologist trying to make
sense of text through the world, or perhaps better, to make sense of the world through text, the
theoretical framework here is that of the history of emotions, that is, “history not just from the
bottom up but from the inside out.” 4 Although this paper focuses solely on the works by women I
defend myself from the notion that women should be “inherently more emotional than men,” 5 as
*
Uppsala University Department of Linguistics and Philology.