How can you get the comfort of a moon from a silver leaf?
- from Nazm by Nadia Anjuman
Eat poison, but taste sugar sweet.
- from Love by Rabeha Balkhi
I’m the woman who has awoken… my nation’s wrath has empowered me.
- from I’ll Never Return by Meena
Roxana of Amu Darya, beloved wife of Alexander the Great closed her husband’s eyes upon his death and kissed him, as she said, to catch his parting soul. She had accompanied him on his final campaign, south from her homeland in what is now Balkh, Afghanistan all the way into the heart of Hindustan. She was eight month’s pregnant. Her name meant, “glimmering star”, and though it was a tactical move to marry her, it is probable the story is true that the general fell in love with her at first sight. She would have had the looks of a southern Uzbek, what might be a true amalgamation of all things Asian. Her spirit would have been that of the original gypsy. When Alexander’s hardened climbers took the impenetrable mountain fortress of Sogdian Rock, he must have been ripe for such a poetic end to his ascent of the final stronghold in the Persian Empire. He would have entered a courtyard and the eighteen-year old Roxana would have been waiting in an open doorway, welcoming fate not with fear so much as curiosity. On the day of their wedding, ten thousand soldiers also married; east and west became one.
Alexander started to wear Persian clothing. Some among the ranks did not find this becoming. Polluting his line with the tribal blood of his enemy was downright heresy. By the time they reached the Indus River, the soldiers would go no further, the first time Alexander lost the moral support of his men. Things unwound from there. The king died a slow death in Babylon, leaving no definitive heir. Eventually, in the dispute over succession Roxana and her son, Alexander IV would be deposed as common criminals to prison. The ambitious general Cassander would finally have them poisoned, and their bodies buried without ceremony or markers of any kind. His treachery was not altogether unrewarded. Soon after obtaining rule of Macodonia, Cassander died of dropsy.
“Remember,” said Alexander, “Upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.” It is not unreasonable to think Alexander had Sophocles in mind, in particular the story of Antigone, when he spoke those words. The famous tragedy predated him by only a hundred years. Alexander held culture to a higher level than sheer power. Pillow talk would have surely been substantive. He would have spoken wistfully of the heroine and her standing for a higher law than the rules of state. Curled in her stone cell, her seven-year old Alexander Aegus in her arms, his little body succumbing to the poison sooner than hers, fancy has it the still young Roxana summoned the courage of Antigone, choosing death before consigning her status to that of concubine, mother of a bastard son. If her love-struck husband had not been bitten by that malarial mosquito, if he had lived to fifty instead of thirty-three, long enough for his son to know himself, long enough to follow his own advice concerning conduct, where would Afghanistan be now?
Instead of being united in blood, east and west have only spilt one another’s blood ever since. Through it all the spirit of Roxana has slept in the heart of Asia, waiting for each chapter in history where sheep fall once again for the leadership of lions, what her husband professed to be his greatest fear. On those occasions she exploded onto the scene without warning, as if she had never slept but merely waited, ready to spring, willing the power of words over the power of swords, walking once again into martyrdom for the freedom to speak the truth. Twelve hundred years ago it was Rabeha Balkhi, first woman to write classical Persian poetry, also from Balkh. Her brother, incensed over her professed and requited love of a slave in the very lyric that brought her fame, threw her into a tomb while he disposed of the object of her dalliance. When he returned, he found Rabeha had slashed her wrists, and upon the walls of the tomb were written in blood the words of her final poem.
In 1880 it was a village woman from Khig, on the edge of the Maiwand battlefield where the British were overwhelming the Afghan army. Her name was Malalai, a young bride who like many of the others was tending to the wounded and hauling water from the well. With morale collapsing, Malalai took off her veil and shouted at her sweetheart who had joined the retreat, “Young love, if you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, by God someone is saving you as a symbol of shame!” She took a bullet holding up the colors of her country, and through her words and her death inspired the Afghan soldiers to turn the tide, resulting in one of the most notorious defeats in British history.
In the 1980’s it came through the spirit of Meena, her name as singular as her mission: promoting the human rights of women and children through a Soviet occupied Afghanistan. She founded the still strong alliance of women called R.A.W.A., began the publication of a magazine testifying and bringing the attention of the world to the plight of her people that had fallen into darkness. She was cut down at thirty years of age, tied up and strangled by two Afghan cronies of the KGB.
As recently as 2005 it was Nadia Anjuman, only in her mid-twenties when she died, the result of an as yet unresolved murder. She had been among the secret “sewing circles” in Herat during the nineties, when the Taliban forbade the education of women. It was there under the guise of doing “women’s work” she read literature and began to write poetry. Her words spoke passionately of love, betrayal, and persecution, and had just been collected in a book entitled Gul-e-dodi (Dark Red Flower). She knew the consequences would be swift. In her case it was not poison or suicide or a bullet or strangling that extinguished the spirit; this time it was a beating.
The word “martyr” has never caught on in the secular west. Until recently it was reserved for dusty hand-painted religious texts from the middle ages. Even though American history is littered with martyrs, from Nathan Hale to Dr. King, we hesitate to use that word to describe our fallen, and we certainly never use it in reference to the thousands who walked knowingly into battle. We prefer to use “hero”. Today we associate “martyr” with Moslem extremists who have used the term liberally not only in reference to the suicide bomber but to anyone innocent (and of the right population) who is killed in the fray not of their own choosing but quite by accident; he or she is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. According to this definition, everyone killed in the attacks of 9/11/2001 are martyrs. In truth they were treated as such in every way but name. The innocent bystanders as much as the rescue teams were elevated to more than simply heroes and heroines, they are symbols. Of what? America and the American way, we say, though beyond that the details get a little fuzzy. We’ve lost the knack for the power of words.
Not so here in this part of the world. We learned that lesson the week President Bush used the word “crusade”. Add a woman into the equation and the power is ratcheted up. Malalai Joya, the expelled Member of Parliament who dared to speak truth to the emperor’s new clothes, must travel around in a burqa and hire bodyguards given the number of attempts on her life. There is a chance, though, she will not complete the cycle of martyrdom. At some point it becomes a matter of balance for the Cassanders of the world; she may be more of a problem dead than alive. Of course there is always the rogue, a disenfranchised narcissist looking to be the warrior he never was. At any rate, it is safe to assume Malalai does not want to be a martyr. There is work to do. Even though at face value her words almost dare someone to facilitate her destiny, their only volition is to bare all, to trust in the scope of what our first man on the moon may have meant by a giant leap. “Never again,” says Malalai, “will I whisper in the shadows of intimidation. I am but a symbol of my people’s struggle and a servant to their cause. And if I were to be killed for what I believe in, then let my blood be the beacon for emancipation and my words a revolutionary paradigm for generations to come.” The men in Karzai’s government whose resumes include crimes against humanity may be smug, even righteous, but here in the land of Roxana cum Alexander even they know enough to sit up straight in their chairs.
Will that suffice? Not remotely possible. The spirit borne of that courtyard meeting atop Sogdian Rock so many centuries ago will have cause to rise again and again well into another century, not only in Afghanistan but all over the world, east and west, all the way down to Alaska and up to Patagonia. To what end? Perhaps a clue can be found here, in Mehan orphanage. This morning as almost every morning I was greeted with the bright blue eyes of yet another Malalai. Before she danced off to school she made a point of stopping at my open door. “Good mooorning Ian-jan!” she said with a song in her voice. I don’t know if and when the spirit of a martyr can be detected, but I cannot imagine such a fate for Malalai. In her village there is only one doctor. Not only is the ratio untenable, this doctor being a man, husbands will not send pregnant wives for prenatal care. Malalai wants to change all that. She is not brilliant, nor particularly brave. In photography class she couldn’t quite grasp the lessons as some of her peers had. She thought she might win the prize at the end of the day. She was so excited; she just had to know the results. I couldn’t stall any longer and told her the sad news that she hadn’t made the first cut. “I did not win,” she said, not disbelieving nor with even a hint of protest or self pity. She stated a simple fact, smiled, and thanked me. Even though Malalai may not be brilliant or highly competitive, she has an undeniable gift to move people’s hearts into action. That is why I call her “butterfly”. It may be her eyes, her buoyancy, or the way she moves through the orphanage (she has a way of being all places at all times); whatever it is I believe she has the potential to transform her world as part of a new generation that for once in this country does not know despair.
And Farzana Nori will write songs from the words of the great Sufi poets, and Mahbooba will give speeches before the skeptical crowd of shakers and movers in the United Nations, one by one dismantling their agendas with words she and her lineage have empowered, words like “tablet”, “blooms”, “mark” and “steel”, and if that is not enough Masoom Farzana will appear on the scene, and with her defiant fist resting on her loving palm she will report to the world that the glimmering star of Asia was neither battle prize nor concubine, but the key to humility in men, even Great men, before nature.
The Afghan government doesn’t like my presence. On the phone the other day, Brendan O’Brien, Chief Consul in the U.S. Embassy encouraged me to think about leaving the country. How, in light of all I just described, could I possibly go? Safely tucked away in this orphanage, I read the poetry of Nadia Anjuman and I am humbled by the essentially practical approach to her truly dire situation.
Do not ask of my blooms great looks.
On hands, feet, and tongue strands of steel
on the tablet of time, this will be my mark.
There are four finalists in the photography competition. Fared Gul, Fawad, Mahbooba and Zainab. Tomorrow we will pack our cameras and go on a mission to the refugee camp only four miles from here. The students must somehow tell the story of a thousand families that this week fled Helmand Province ahead of an unprecedented Coalition Offensive. This time, the story must be told without words.
