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. Their country has become the ‘land of placelessness’, of ‘the market of lethal weapons’, no longer of bread and honey, where ‘nightingales drown in a river of blood’.

One Afghan nurse wrote in from Canada, where she now lives, with a poem provoked (it would be odd to say ‘inspired’) by the effect on her of an incident she witnessed in Kabul where she stood by and watched as the parents of two children sold them off to get money to feed themselves and their other children. ‘If I were the Queen of the Whole World,’ writes Zarlasht Hafeez, ‘I would gather all the guns and weapons from the warlords… If I were the Queen of the Whole World I would remind the powerful ones about the might of God…’

Presented by the foreign correspondent Jonathan Charles (and movingly produced with the music of Afghanistan by Laura Parfitt) this was an all-too-brief half-hour of distilled passion, born of a fury at what has been lost but refined by the realisation that the only hope lies in holding fast to what is good. As the poet Isaq Negargar tells us, to be ‘dedicated as a skilled jeweller cutting gems of hope for tomorrow’s ring’.

The pronounced international flavour of this programme sounded unusual on Radio 4. The new Controller of the station, Gwyneth Williams, has announced changes to the schedule that will probably irritate some loyal listeners (the demise of Taking a Stand, On the Ropes and Between Ourselves, for example). But she promises us instead ‘more flexible scheduling’, which translates to mean a quicker response to world events, such as the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, and programmes with ‘more international sensibility’. ‘I don’t mean more foreign programmes,’ she adds, hastily. ‘But a subtle understanding that what happens in the world affects our local decisions and everyday lives.’ Those lost voices from Kabul and Kandahar took us right to the heart of what peace in one country can mean to another.

Back in April 1936, 100 million listeners around the world tuned in to the half-hourly reports of Frank Willis from the Moose River mine in Nova Scotia. Two miners had been trapped underground for a week, and Willis was sent by Canadian radio to find out what was happening. His epic reportage gripped the imaginations of his listeners as the rescuers raced against the rising waters and the ebbing energy of the two surviving men, lost in utter darkness.

This week’s Between the Ears (produced by Sara Jane Hall for Radio 3) reminded us of the true cost of warm houses and lit motorways in an audio narrative which wove together Willis’s broadcasts with the clanking of pit cages, the screeching of metal against rock and the dead silence of that pitch-black netherworld. We heard, too, from Mark Nowak who keeps a blog dedicated to those miners caught up in accidents (coalmountain.wordpress.com). Day-by-day he records mishaps in China, Zambia, South Africa, America, Moravia, reminding us that the miracle in San José, Chile (when 33 miners were saved) was just that — a one-off.

Willie McGranaghan, who still mines in Scotland, told us how the coalface, just 27 inches wide, becomes his second home. He’s never bothered by claustrophobia, he claims. But every day when he and his crew go down the pit they remind each other, ‘We’ll look after each other.’ Not something we feel the need to say as we catch the 8.15 (or sit down in front of a 27-inch computer screen). But perhaps we should.