Born of a fury

As the battle rages between the American and British military PR over which brigade is being the most effective force for change in Afghanistan, it’s easy to forget that this proud country has its own ideas about what it needs in the future.

As the battle rages between the American and British military PR over which brigade is being the most effective force for change in Afghanistan, it’s easy to forget that this proud country has its own ideas about what it needs in the future. In Lost Voices of Afghanistan (Radio 4, late on Saturday evening) we heard from those whose thoughts have long been buried beneath the cruelty, corruption and religious bigotry of the past three decades. These writers responded to a request from the BBC World Service to send in poems about their experiences of the years of bombing by first the Russians, then the Americans.

‘Right now 4,000 marines with 600 lamplighters from the towers of the world are aiming at the horns of a goatkid, which is grazing feebly in the shades of the poppy fields and waving its beard along with the weeds of the field,’ says the poet Fazlullah Zarkoob, evoking in just a few words the consequences of the military occupation. The Afghanistan we see on our TV screens is a land of bare, desiccated mountains and parched plains, overrun by straggly lines of guerrilla fighters. The country these poets recall is of lush valleys populated with apricot orchards, pomegranates, quinces and vines.

At times their verses sound like the aweful threats of the Old Testament prophet Amos. ‘Wake up…the sweet sleep of early morning is prohibited to you,’ says Ahmad Reza Rezai, describing the terrible lives of the child orphans, living in Kabul and Kandahar, aged four or five, with sores on their feet, but no shoes.