Try to conjure the image of a woman in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The image that comes to mind is probably featureless, shrouded from head to toe in a voluminous blue burqa. Next, picture yourself wearing the garment, surveying the world through a mesh grille. Hot. Claustrophobic. Hidden. Women like Nadia Anjuman Herawi—a Muslim poet whose work gained notice in Afghanistan, as well as in neighboring Iran—helped push back the veil just enough to reveal a face of probing intelligence. In 2005, Herawi’s face was obscured again, the victim of domestic violence. She was 25.

As an Afghan woman, Anjuman was faced with a conundrum. Hers was a writer’s disposition. She needed to read, to learn and to put pen to paper—to translate her impressions into words. She needed to do these things to breathe. As she explained in one of her poems, “From this cup of my lips comes a song; It captures my singing soul, my song.”

However, under Taliban rule, women were not allowed to sing. From 1996 to 2001, women were forbidden to be educated after age eight, and up to that time, their studies were confined to the Qur’an. Women were not allowed to work, and were discouraged from leaving their houses. So intent were the Taliban and its supporters on silencing women that they were not allowed to laugh out loud or wear shoes that made noise.

A secret education

In response, Anjuman did what any sensible woman would do: she joined a sewing circle. This was not just any sewing circle, but one of the renowned Sewing Circles of Herat. Located throughout the western region of Afghanistan, these sewing circles were really clandestine schools were women were educated in history, mathematics, science, literature, and medicine. Under the pretence of perfecting her needlework, Anjuman met with a group of 30 or so women at the home of Herat University professor Mohammed Ali Rahyab. There, the women embroidered their minds with the study of literature.

The women would come to Rahyab’s home carrying bags full of cloth and scissors. If anyone had dug deeper, they would have found notebooks and pens beneath. Once safely inside, the women pulled off their burqas and sat on cushions around a blackboard, where the 47-year-old professor officiated. The students’ lessons covered a variety of banned Western literature: Tolstoy, Balzac, Dickens.

Christine Lamb, reporter for London’s Sunday Times, documented these meetings, both for the Times and for her acclaimed 2002 book, “The Sewing Circles of Herat”: “Once they got inside, instead of learning to sew, they would actually be talking about Shakespeare and James Joyce, Dostoyevsky and their own writing,” wrote Lamb. “It was a tremendous risk they were taking. If they had been caught, they would have been, at the very least, imprisoned and tortured. Maybe hanged.”

Similar risks were being taken all over Afghanistan. According to a UNICEF report, some 29,000 girls and women were secretly educated in the Herat province alone during the Taliban’s reign. It was a full-scale revolution of the mind. For women like Anjuman, this revolution was an act of self-preservation.

Zena Karamzade was in her second term as a medical student when the Taliban banned female education. The 23-year-old was pondering suicide before a friend told her about the secret classes being held throughout Herat.

“We didn’t live under the Taliban,” Karamzade said. “We just stayed in our rooms like cows. If we did go out, we had to be accompanied and wear a burqa, which is like being imprisoned in a closed space.” “With the carbon dioxide you breathe out and not enough oxygen coming in, after a while your lungs feel like exploding,” continued Karamzade, whose family still requires her to wear the burqa in public. “The only time we felt human was in the sewing class.”

A poetic people

This underground educational movement is one more chapter in a rich tradition of Persian literature based in Herat. While researching her book, Lamb discovered an intertwined history of women and art dating back to the beginning of the 15th century, when Queen Gowhar Shad cultivated numerous poets, architects, and painters. It is easy to view the anti-intellectualism of the Taliban as representing the whole of Afghanistan, but, like all Persian societies, the country has long cherished a special resonance with poetry.

There is a Persian proverb that holds that “good poets are like angels of heaven.” Rahyab, likewise, emphasizes the sway that poetry holds over the Afghan people.
”If we want to say something or make a statement, we will do it with a poem,” he said. “A line of poetry can put an end to a family problem, even trouble in a village.”

Keeping poetry alive under Taliban rule was a Herculean task. Though women got the worst of it, a pall was cast on the entire poetry-loving nation. The Afghan passion for art and beauty was challenged by bans on music, dancing, movies, and most books. The aesthetic pleasures outlawed were myriad, ranging from the flying of kites to the owning of pet parakeets, from the use of cameras to the wearing of white shoes. These strictures represented an unnatural graying of a culture. Anjuman’s writing is a tribute to her will to translate grayness into hope. Poems like “Memories of Light Blue”—translated by David Tayyari, perhaps imperfectly but beautifully nonetheless—are kaleidoscopic in their imagery:

You, exiles of the mountains of oblivion
You, diamonds of your names sleeping in quagmire of silence
You, the ones your memories faded, memories of light blue
In the mind of muddy waves of forgotten sea
Where are your clear-flowing thoughts?
Where did your peace-marked silver boat moon craft go?
After this death-giving freeze, the sea calms
The clouds, if they clear heart from bitterness
If daughter of moonlight brings kindness, induces smiles
If the mountain softens heart, grows green and turns fruitful
Will one of your names, above the mountain peaks, become the sun?
Sunrise of your memories
Memories of light blue
In the eyes of tired-of-flood-water fish and
Scared-of-rain of darkness
Will it become a sight of hope?

Speaking her pain

Rahyab took comfort in helping women like Anjuman find their voices.
“We were poor in everyday life,” he explained. “Why should we be poor in culture, too? If we had not done what we did to keep up the literary spirit of the city, the depth of our tragedy would have been even greater. A society needs poets and storytellers to reflect its pain—and joy.”
And so, at the professor’s home, women denied the right to do anything except sew threaded together an education, reading prolifically and sharing their own stories and poems. Rahyab was impressed with the women’s writing, and Anjuman was among the best of his students. As seen in poems like “Strands of Steel,” she developed a voice that was singularly resolute. The life of an Afghan woman was, in many ways, that of someone imprisoned. It was a state she questioned and mourned in nearly every poem. She sought to bend the steel bars she felt surrounding her with the power of her words: “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.”

Anjuman’s need to tell the story of Afghan women calls to mind the Persian proverb, “Whatever is in the heart will come up to the tongue.”

The bravery of Anjuman and her schoolmates cannot be overstated, nor can the risks taken by professors like Rahyab. While young women discussed Tolstoy and other literary fare, Rahyab’s children played outside. If they spotted a Talib or a stranger, his daughters would hurry back to the house and warn him. His post would quickly be taken up by his wife, armed with a half-finished garment she kept at the ready.

New York Times reporter Amy Waldman met Anjuman when the young writer was 20. By that time, she had written some 70 poems. Many of these were in the ghazal style, a traditional Persian form consisting of couplets sharing a rhyme and a refrain. Favored by mystic Sufi poets like Rumi and like Hafaz, a ghazal is characterized by themes of love and loss. Anjuman, who read her work to the reporter in a high voice, caught Waldman’s attention.

“One of those talents, Nadia Anjuman, is a neighbor,” Waldman wrote in a Times article. “Swathed in black, she curled up like a cat in her professor’s study, black eyes peering from an elfin face.” After the Taliban was toppled in 2001, the women were able to discard the sewing ruse and meet publicly. Anjuman—a graduate of Mahbub-e Herawi secondary school—began to attend Herat University, where she studied literature and the humanities. Her seeming liberation continued in 2005 when Anjuman, then a third-year student, published her first book of poetry, “Gule-e-dodi.” Depending on the source, the book’s title translates to “Dark Red Flower,” “Dark Flower,” “Smoke-veined Flower,” or “Flowers of Smoke.”

An unhappy union

By that time, Anjuman—who had fended off marriage since age 14—had wed Farid Ahmad Majeednia, a 27-year-old philology lecturer at Heart University, and given birth to a son. Anjuman resisted the pairing and it was not a happy one, according to Anjuman’s friends.

According to her close friend at Herat University, Nahid Baqi, Nadia’s status as an educated woman and a writer did not grant her immunity from the domestic problems common to Afghan women.

“She was a great poet and intellectual but, like so many Afghan women, she had to follow orders from her husband,” said Baqi.

Many of Anjuman’s friends felt that the poet was being tightly controlled by her husband. In one instance, Anjuman failed to attend a ceremony to which she was invited honoring famed Afghan singer Amir Jan Sabouri. Anjuman’s husband and her mother-in-law—who had opposed the match in the first place—may have been punishing her for daring to publish her poetry.

“Friends say her family was furious, believing that the publication of poetry by a woman about love and beauty had brought shame on it,” wrote Lamb in a November 2005 memorial.

On November 5, 2005, the tense situation reached a tragic climax. Anjuman was brought to the hospital after having been beaten by her husband. She died soon afterwards. Her husband confessed to slapping her during an argument but contends that her death was a suicide, that she took poison after they argued. Anjuman’s friends and family deny this. Anjuman felt that suicide violated the laws of Islam. What’s more, bruising on her face indicated more than a slap. Both Anjuman’s husband and his mother were arrested in conjunction with the poet’s death, but they were eventually released. They refused to allow an autopsy, and today the death is classified as a suicide.

Sorely missed

Majeednia, who is the head of the Herat University Library, says he is still grieving the loss of his wife: “Now, almost two years later, my hands and legs still tremble when I think of her death and her absence.”

While friends report that the writer was working on a second book of poetry at the time of her death, Majeednia claims that Anjuman’s poems were written only about the Taliban period and that she stopped writing after their marriage.
“All of her poems are a narration of sorrow and sadness, which is a result of being imprisoned behind home walls,” says Majeednia.

This statement minimizes Anjuman’s indomitable will to write, and falsely indicates that the imprisonment of women ended with the fall of the Taliban. In reality, many of the same restrictions on women that prompted Anjuman to write the poem, “Useless,” still persist: “Happy the day I break the cage/When I will leave this solitude and sing with abandon/I am not a weak tree that sways with every breeze/I am an Afghan girl, and it is right that I always cry.”

Fundamentalist attitudes toward women, many of them pre-dating the Taliban’s 1996 rise, continue to flower. In 2002, the Human Rights Watch organization concluded that women in Afghanistan faced many of the same challenges that they faced under Taliban rule. Many Afghan women reported that they continued to wear the burqa in order to avoid harassment. Women continued to be attacked for not adhering to Taliban rules. In April of 2002, Reuter’s reported that a woman teacher in Kandahar had been assaulted with acid. The attack took place shortly after handwritten pamphlets were distributed throughout the city, warning men not to allow their daughters to go to school or their wives to go to work.

A too-common tragedy

According to Human Rights Watch, it is still right that Afghan women cry. The United Nations, which condemned Anjuman’s death, concurs. “This is a tragic loss for Afghanistan,” said UN spokesperson Adrian Edwards in 2005. “Violence against women remains dramatic in Afghanistan—in its intensity and its pervasiveness …Domestic violence is a concern. This case illustrates how bad this problem is here and how it manifests itself. Women face exceptional challenges.”

Anjuman’s story is bittersweet. Her death cannot take away the fact that she overcame these exceptional challenges to become a published Afghan woman poet. Her poems have been translated into several languages, including English, French and Italian. Many poems are available online.

Though only 25 at the time of her death, Anjuman is gaining increasing notice as a Persian poet of importance. One of her admirers includes literature expert Leili Anvar, who has translated a selection of Anjuman’s poems into French. She is working on an anthology of Afghan poetry, and plans to dedicate several pages to Anjuman. “When one considers her age, the extreme maturity of her work is astonishing,” said Anvar, adding that Anjuman’s work evokes “a great sorrow directly linked to her status as a woman and an Afghan.”

Anvar describes Anjuman as showing “a great mastery of Persian free verse and of the music of language.”

Mohammad Daud Munir, one of Anjuman’s Herat University professors, characterizes her work as showing “a deep and comprehensive thought,” while Ahmad Said Haqiqi, head of the Herat Literary Circle, said she was “becoming a great Persian poet.”

In that word “becoming” lies one of the great tragedies of Anjuman’s death. Given how hard she fought to release her song, it is likely she would have produced an impressive body of work, given a few more years.

Denied those years, a bit of Anjuman’s story and those of women like her may be found in Christine Lamb’s “The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan.” The book is available through Amazon and at most large book retailers.

- Sarah Torribio