Farrar Straus and Giroux
I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan
Key Metrics
- Eliza Griswold
- Farrar Straus and Giroux
- Paperback
- 9780374535186
- 8.2 X 6.1 X 0.6 inches
- 0.4 pounds
- Poetry > Middle Eastern
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
An eye-opening collection of clandestine poems by Afghan women
Because my love's American,
blisters blossom on my heart.
Afghans revere poetry, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet--a landay, an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation, homeland, love--these are the subjects of landays, which are brutal and spare, can be remixed like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary. From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, landays reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave.
After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and set herself on fire in protest, the poet Eliza Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to learn about these women and to collect their landays. The poems gathered in I Am the Beggar of the World express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms, all of which belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.
Author Bio
Eliza Griswold, a contributing writer covering religion, politics, and the environment, has been writing for The New Yorker since 2003. She has written and translated four books of nonfiction and poetry.
She is the author, most recently, of “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” a 2018 Times Notable Book and a Times Critics’ Pick, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, in 2019.
Griswold has held fellowships at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New America Foundation, among others, and has been awarded various prizes, including the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, a pen Translation Prize, and the Rome Prize for her poetry.
Her second book of poems, “If Men, Then,” will be published in 2020. She is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.
Source: The New Yorker
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