Laila Sarahat Rushani (1337-1383)
by Sharif Fayez
Laila Sarahat Rushani is considered a leading modern Afghan female poet. Her father, Sarshar Rushani, was a known journalist, who was tortured and brutally killed by the ruling wing of the communist Khalq party in Afghanistan. She was born in Charikar, the capital city of Perwan province north of Kabul. She graduated from the Faculty of Letters of Kabul University in 1977. She lost her young sister in Australia. While still mourning the tragedy of her sister, she lost her mother. Her poetry is largely an expression of the pain and tragedy she experienced during the war.
She was one of the few poets who remained in Kabul and directly experienced its devastation and the killing of thousands of innocent civilians. She is known for her strong spirit of protest, her courage and intellectual resistance against the communist regime and Taliban’s reign of terror, which permeate much of her poetry.
Laila Sarahat wrote both classical and modern poetry. Her poetic collections include The Continuing Scream ,The Green Dawn, From Stones and Mirrors, and A Night Story. She was forced to leave Kabul after the Taliban militia intensified their abusive treatment of women. She went to the Netherlands in 1998, where she lived as a refugee. She published Eve in Exile, a literary journal in Farsi while living in the Netherlands.
on July 21, 2004, she died of brain cancer at the age of 46 in a hospital in the Netherlands. On July 29, her body was received at Kabul Airport by a large number of Afghan poets, intellectuals and her friends and relatives, who mournfully escorted her funeral to Shuhadai-e-Saliheen cemetery for burial.
Unlike many young poets and intellectuals of her time, who either espoused the communist ideology or those who became disillusioned after a period of cooperation with the communist regimes, Rushani never compromised her commitment to her art and spirit of justice and integrity. For this reason, the Afghan literary community adores her as a paragon of intellectual freedom and courage.
Most of her poems teem with images of captivity, darkness, loneliness, wandering, escape, revenge, absurdity and nothingness, which sometimes assume metaphysical dimensions. Rushani wrote both traditional fixed forms and modern free verses, such as ghazals and quatrains. Since writing modern poetry has always confronted censure and prejudice by a number of traditionalists and the literate public, most modern Afghan poets, like Rushani, have also dabbled in writing classical lyrical poetry, with modern images and themes. In fact, the most successful modern poets are those who have written both fixed and free verses. In some of her poems, as in those of several other Afghan poets, who experienced the monstrosity of the Soviet occupation, the color “red” becomes a terrifying obsession, as in the following two pieces:
Flames
The flames that devoured the houses
Were red
And left ashes
The blood they shed and poured
On the calendar of the year
Are still red
The autumn leaves
The dismal sunset color
Were red
Red
Even the color of my nightmares
Are all red
Red, red
My darling,
When you said you would come to me
With a bundle of red flowers
I trembled
Trembled
Trembled
Addicted to Loneliness
You will not come
You will not come
Where my spring is so empty
Of the breathing sound
Of swallows
The night is full of nothingness
Nay, the night is full of thick fear
The night is full of the poetry of silence
The night is full of the murmur of silence
You will not come
You will not come
The night is like a lagoon
In whose depth my heart is rotting
Slowly, slowly, slowly
I envied
The sparrows that loved flying
Oh!
How much I love to fly
But an invisible string
As long as time
Has bound my wing
The night is addicted to its darkness
And I to loneliness
You don’t know
What it means to be addicted to loneliness
You don’t know
You will not come
Fossils
Look, this old impotent imp
Is turning back the pages of history
Turning the bloody twenty-four seasons
Into twenty-four minutes
Why didn’t the fossils remain silent?
This aging slave
This unthinking stinking imp
Likes to inscribe the fate of the standing palm trees
With the pencil of the wind
The clowns
Are aping heroes
And the fossils are taking lives
And the heroes, mounting their horses,
Heralded the spring, but palpitated in blood
The spring was brutally sacrificed
Fossils, fossils, fossils!
May you become mute fossils again!
The palm trees are standing
And history will not turn back
Assamayi Mountain
Oh Assamayi
in your stony breaths
is the spirit of a thousand silent sparks.
Oh stone, oh patience
your height is faith’s firmness --
history’s sublime poem
Oh mountain
the myth of sacred pride
is inscribed
in your conscious mind
The endless pain of this city
Is for so long
Engraved in your cold stony vein
Oh stone, oh patience
oh silent witness of crimes.
what wound was swelling
in your inner-stone’s bleeding heart
that suddenly sundered your heart?
Oh stone, oh patience!
____________________________
A part of Assamayi mountain, the highest mountain in south of Kabul, cracked in 1991.
