Sun Tzu is responsible for the age-old cliché about knowing your enemy. I wonder, then, what he might have made of Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. This is a new collection of verses translated from Pashtun and Urdu. The poems originally appeared on Mujahedeen websites, in newsheets or on scraps of paper.
You might expect the poems to be reactionary or propagandistic — and, for sure, there is blood and thunder. But reviewers also talk of empathy, aesthetic sensibility and the familiar worries of young men in love. Michael Semple, the EU’s former representative in Afghanistan, said:
‘This is an essential work. The book holds its own as an apolitical work of aesthetics, but actually is full of political meaning. It delves into the Afghan imagination and discovers aesthetic wealth that those content with the superficialities of press releases or think tank reports could not dream of.’
While William Dalrymple remarked:
‘This extraordinary collection is remarkable as a literary project — uncovering a seam of war poetry few will know ever existed, and presenting to us for the first time the black turbaned Wilfred Owens of Wardak. But it is also an important political project: humanising and giving voice to the aspirations, aesthetics, emotions and dreams of the fighters of a much-caricatured and still little-understood resistance movement that is about to defeat yet another foreign occupation.’
Afghan exceptionalism is a silent theme of these poems. Collectively, they are underscored by an intense sense of Afghanistan’s independent history, of Pashtun identity and of the region’s historic artist achievements. They also express the tension between that aesthetic culture and conservative Islam’s proscriptions; many of the poets are riven with religious doubt, which poses questions about their motivations for fighting.
In this light, you strain to see the Taliban as a homogenous entity — as NATO has throughout most of this unhappy conflict. Even so, each line of verse speaks volumes about the galvanising effect subjugation has had on these disparate people.
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