I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan

by Eliza Griswold (Translator), Seamus Murphy (Photographer)

Overview

I Am the Beggar of the World presents 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466880665
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/09/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Eliza Griswold, a Guggenheim fellow, is the author of a collection of poems, Wideawake Field (FSG, 2007) and a nonfiction book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (FSG, 2010), a New York Times bestseller that was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. She has worked with Seamus Murphy in Africa and Asia for more than a decade. She lives in New York City.

Seamus Murphy has photographed extensively in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America. His photography from Afghanistan, begun in 1994, chronicles the tumultuous life of the Afghan people. A collection of this work, titled A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan, was published in 2008 and was produced as an award-winning film. He has won seven World Press Photo Awards. He lives in London.

Eliza Griswold has written and translated five books of nonfiction and poetry (all published by FSG) and was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which was also a New York Times Notable Book and Critics’ Pick. Griswold has held fellowships at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New America Foundation, among others. She has been awarded various prizes, including the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, a PEN Translation Prize, and the Rome Prize for her poetry. Currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, she has written for The New Yorker since 2003.
Seamus Murphy has documented life and change around the world. He has won seven World Press Photo awards for work from Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Gaza, Lebanon, Peru, Ireland and England. His depiction of Afghanistan and the Afghans over more than a decade was published as a book, A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan.

Editorial Reviews

03/31/2014
Landays, 22-syllable folk couplets sung anonymously by women, have long been the dominant form of social satire and gender subversion in Afghan poetry, and Griswold’s translations mark a stunning handling of their complex “beauty, bawdiness, and wit.” Flanked by Murphy’s photographs, with their striking blend of wartime journalism and human compassion, Griswold’s couplets are peppered with brief prose passages in which she delves into the cultural and historical traditions that inform the humor and gravity of her translations. Among her many accomplishments is elucidating the “fury at the presence of the U.S. military and rage at occupation” while also detailing the fears surrounding the end of American occupation, including a return to lives of isolation and oppression for Afghan women. “My lover is fair as an American solider can be,” begins one couplet. “To him I looked dark as a Talib, so he martyred me.” In Griswold’s version of this 19th-century landay, the Pashto word Angrez (English) is no longer translated as “British soldier,” pointing with stark irony to the landscape of contemporary military occupation, and signaling a collection that may indeed be remembered as a groundbreaking work of translation and poetic journalism. Photos. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Griswold's translations mark a stunning handling of [landay's] complex 'beauty, bawdiness, and wit.' Flanked by Murphy's photographs, with their striking blend of wartime journalism and human compassion, Griswold's couplets are peppered with brief prose passages in which she delves into cultural and historical traditions that inform the humor and gravity of her translations . . . a collection that may indeed be remembered as a groundbreaking work of translation and poetic journalism.” —Publishers Weekly

“Eliza Griswold and Seamus Murphy have made a book that is necessary reading for anyone who has ever made assumptions from a distance about what a burka-wearing woman might be like, and for anyone who cannot fathom how poetry could get you killed. In other words, this book is a must-read for every U.S. citizen . . . Griswold's and Murphy's work might be a crucial turning point in the education of Americans about the real world—and the place of poetry in it.” —Daniel Bosch, The Daily Beast

“The book's greatest strength is the complicated spectrum of voices that it allows these women, whom we wouldn't otherwise know anything about. I Am the Beggar of the World casts Pashtun women as vibrantly self-aware and autonomous . . . Griswold finds a way to present these poems and images in juxtaposition so that they evoke a multiplicity of voices and views, giving an almost democratic quality to the anthology's populace.” —Jay Deshpande, The Millions

“*Starred review* From heartbreaking indictments of fathers who sell their daughters into slavery to humorous, techno-savvy posts on a Pashto Landay Facebook page, Griswold's selections illustrate the rich potential of this poetic form, at once contemporary and timeless. Murphy's stunning photographs complement the text perfectly, capturing children at play in refugee camps outside Kabul, smiling U.S. soldiers pointing squirt guns, and armed militants marching through the mountains. A timely, indispensable, and unforgettable poetic documentary.” —Diego Báez, Booklist Starred Review

“I Am the Beggar of the World, translated by journalist and poet Eliza Griswold, with photos by Seamus Murphy, collects passionate, polemical, and traditionally secret two-line folk poems by Pashtun women on topics ranging from education, war, and personal autonomy to marriage, faith, loss, and homeland.” —Elle

“I Am the Beggar of the World is a great and satisfying work. I applaud Eliza Griswold and Seamus Murphy. It is an essential look at the women of Afghanistan and the voices of dissent at risk of being suppressed when the American forces withdraw.” —Sahera Sharif, Member of Afghanistan’s Parliament, founder of nationwide women’s literary circle, Mirman Baheer

“The poems in I Am the Beggar of the World cut like a knife—they are short, sharp—and leave you bleeding. They are the most direct voices of the inner life of Afghan women, and prove that these women, despite all hardships, are still standing. These two-liners make the reader feel close to the women that we've seen so often on the screen wandering like blue-clad ghosts on the dusty roadsides. A heart is a heart anywhere in the world.” —Åsne Seierstad, author of The Bookseller of Kabul

“I Am the Beggar of the World is a revelatory book about Afghanistan, one sure to turn all the stereotypes about the country's women on their heads. The poems, equally art and reportage, are often poignant, more often witty, even pungent. They, along with the accompanying text and photographs, illuminate the beauty of the country and its culture, the sadness of its history, and the humor, the hopes, the bitterness, and even the contradictions its women—no different than women anywhere—carry in their hearts. This is an important book, but to describe it only that way is to neglect how deeply pleasurable it is to read.” —Amy Waldman, author of The Submission

“Eliza Griswold brings a poet's sensibility, a folklorist's skills, and a journalist's savvy to these startling and incendiary folk poems by Afghan women, which she has so daringly collected and translated. With its arresting photographs and heartbreaking two-liners, I Am the Beggar of the World enlarges our sense of the work that poetry does in the world.” —Edward Hirsch, author of The Living Fire

“This is poetry of a rural tradition that is as world-wise, war-wise and uniquely sophisticated as any collection of writing by women, anywhere.” —Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Twin Cities

From the Publisher

03/01/2014
The landay is a two-line folk poem invented and shared by Afghan women, an old form still very much alive. These present-day landays offer a peephole into the society of those who have taken great risks to write them. While poetry writing is now permitted in Kabul (it was banned previously by the Taliban), it is still frowned upon in rural areas; authors often refuse credit for their work. Love, oppression, war, and politics are the prime topics. Along with Seamus Murphy's photographs, translator Griswold's commentary decodes the messages, which are not always this clear: "Darling, come down to the river/ I've baked you bread and hidden it in my pitcher." Griswold recounts her difficulties collecting the landays and relates a horrific story of one suicide. Less grim is the fascinating mix of old and new: "Daughter, in America the river isn't wet./ Young girls learn to fill their jugs on the Internet." VERDICT Following up on a New York Times Magazine article ("Why Afghan Women Risk Death To Write Poetry"), Griswold and Murphy, along with their heroic Afghani interpreter, Asma Safi, have documented an artistic movement that is at once delightful and courageous. [See "What's Coming for National Poetry Month in April?" Prepub Alert, 11/18/13.]—Ellen Kaufman, New York

Library Journal