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4.32 AVERAGE
4.32 AVERAGE
jenna_le's review
5.0
I learned about this book through Poetry, which published a sizable excerpt from I Am the Beggar of the World in its June 2013 issue. At times during the past couple of years, I have wondered whether Poetry has been supplanted by other literary journals as the foremost magazine about verse in America, and whether I should therefore cease renewing my subscription. At such times, I reread some of the best pieces that Poetry has published in recent years, such as the excerpt from I Am the Beggar of the World in the June 2013 issue, or the feature on poems written by Honduran orphans in the January 2015 issue, and I remember that, yes, despite its shortcomings, Poetry remains the most important American magazine of its kind. And I Am the Beggar of the World is an important book.
Many contemporary Americans write poetry as a hobby, a recreation, a mode of relaxation, a route to aesthetic and spiritual pleasures, a form of self-therapy, a social activity, a professional activity, or, simply, a means of acquiring awards and honors that they can boast about on Facebook and Twitter, a badge of personal pride they can flaunt to outshine their neighbors, like a patch of prize begonias. These are all valid reasons for writing poetry, but when we surround ourselves with people who write poetry for any or all these reasons, we are liable to forget that poetry is capable of running deeper, closer to the bone. For there are people living in Afghanistan right now for whom poetry is literally a matter of life and death. There are contemporary Afghan women who, forbidden from attending school or working outside the home, at this very instant are putting themselves at risk of being murdered or driven to suicide for the sake of composing two lines of verse. For these women poets, poetry is a door to community, a gate to freedom, and a weapon of defiance: defiance of patriarchy, defiance of the state, defiance of both regional and foreign expectations that circumscribe what an Afghan woman is allowed to be. This is why I Am the Beggar of the World is important: it teaches us that there are places in the world right now where poetry still borders on death and therefore is still at its most alive.
The second reason why this book is important and should be read by all American readers, of course, is that, when one engages in a war, it is vital to attempt to understand the country that one has brought war to.
The landays collected in this book -- two-line poems, each exactly 22 syllables long in their original language -- are folk poems and, as such, they are apt to remind readers of folk poems from other eras and from other parts of the world. While reading this book, I personally was reminded of how, when I was a child, my family would pay regular visits to Saigon Bookstore in downtown Minneapolis, a dusty dingy hovel that reeked of medicinal mints where, in an effort to educate her American-born children about their ancestors' culture, my immigrant mother would buy reams of piano sheet music for Vietnamese folksongs like "Qua Cầu Gió Bay" (the title roughly translates as "The Wind on the Bridge Blew It Away"):
Yêu nhau cởi nón ối à cho nhau
Về nhà mẹ hỏi, qua cầu gió bay
(Translation: When we made love, we took off our hats
When I got home, Mother asked where my hat was, and I said the wind on the bridge blew it away)
To my mind, there is a uncanny resonance between that Vietnamese folksong lyric and the following Afghan folk poem sequence, from I Am the Beggar of the World:
[Girl:]
When you kissed me, you bit me,
What will my mother say?
[Boy:]
Give your mother this answer:
I went to fetch water and fell by the river.
[Girl:]
Your jug isn’t broken, my mother will say,
so why is your bottom lip bleeding that way?
[Boy:]
Tell your mother this one:
My jug fell on clay, I fell on stone....
The poems in I Am the Beggar of the World are accompanied by prose explications by journalist/poet Eliza Griswold, as well as starkly beautiful black-and-white photographs of contemporary life in Afghanistan taken by photographer Seamus Murphy. The poems were translated into English by Griswold with the assistance of many Afghan friends and associates.
Many contemporary Americans write poetry as a hobby, a recreation, a mode of relaxation, a route to aesthetic and spiritual pleasures, a form of self-therapy, a social activity, a professional activity, or, simply, a means of acquiring awards and honors that they can boast about on Facebook and Twitter, a badge of personal pride they can flaunt to outshine their neighbors, like a patch of prize begonias. These are all valid reasons for writing poetry, but when we surround ourselves with people who write poetry for any or all these reasons, we are liable to forget that poetry is capable of running deeper, closer to the bone. For there are people living in Afghanistan right now for whom poetry is literally a matter of life and death. There are contemporary Afghan women who, forbidden from attending school or working outside the home, at this very instant are putting themselves at risk of being murdered or driven to suicide for the sake of composing two lines of verse. For these women poets, poetry is a door to community, a gate to freedom, and a weapon of defiance: defiance of patriarchy, defiance of the state, defiance of both regional and foreign expectations that circumscribe what an Afghan woman is allowed to be. This is why I Am the Beggar of the World is important: it teaches us that there are places in the world right now where poetry still borders on death and therefore is still at its most alive.
The second reason why this book is important and should be read by all American readers, of course, is that, when one engages in a war, it is vital to attempt to understand the country that one has brought war to.
The landays collected in this book -- two-line poems, each exactly 22 syllables long in their original language -- are folk poems and, as such, they are apt to remind readers of folk poems from other eras and from other parts of the world. While reading this book, I personally was reminded of how, when I was a child, my family would pay regular visits to Saigon Bookstore in downtown Minneapolis, a dusty dingy hovel that reeked of medicinal mints where, in an effort to educate her American-born children about their ancestors' culture, my immigrant mother would buy reams of piano sheet music for Vietnamese folksongs like "Qua Cầu Gió Bay" (the title roughly translates as "The Wind on the Bridge Blew It Away"):
Yêu nhau cởi nón ối à cho nhau
Về nhà mẹ hỏi, qua cầu gió bay
(Translation: When we made love, we took off our hats
When I got home, Mother asked where my hat was, and I said the wind on the bridge blew it away)
To my mind, there is a uncanny resonance between that Vietnamese folksong lyric and the following Afghan folk poem sequence, from I Am the Beggar of the World:
[Girl:]
When you kissed me, you bit me,
What will my mother say?
[Boy:]
Give your mother this answer:
I went to fetch water and fell by the river.
[Girl:]
Your jug isn’t broken, my mother will say,
so why is your bottom lip bleeding that way?
[Boy:]
Tell your mother this one:
My jug fell on clay, I fell on stone....
The poems in I Am the Beggar of the World are accompanied by prose explications by journalist/poet Eliza Griswold, as well as starkly beautiful black-and-white photographs of contemporary life in Afghanistan taken by photographer Seamus Murphy. The poems were translated into English by Griswold with the assistance of many Afghan friends and associates.
queerromani's review
5.0
Griswold's work is an indispensable collection that is both lyrical and laden with complex themes of abandonment, ecstasy, violence and occupation. I suggest reading this rather short and powerful collection and recommend it to your friends. No background is needed since each set of landays is given some context.
colinlusk's review
4.0
These poems, and the stories behind them are a powerful reminder of the wit and energy of afghan women, whose position in society is marginalised, almost literally out of sight, behind the veil. It's a very short book, but each pair of lines packs a punch and the pictures are strong too.
sruti_'s review
5.0
Beautifully translated poems that display some of the complexity of Afghan womanhood.
janetinbeantown's review
3.0
The poems and explanations were beautiful and enlightening, but the photographs did not always seem relevant to the content, and the layout was challenging.
yesterday_forever's review
5.0
Interesting view into the life of women living a very different life from mine.
heidihaverkamp's review
5.0
So simply written; both the landays, 22-syllable, 2-line poems, and Griswold's explanations of where she collected them and what they refer to in Afghan women's lives. The photographs make it all come alive. A vivid window into women's lives in contemporary Afghanistan. For Episcogeeks out there, Eliza Griswold is PB Frank's daughter, although she's talented and genius enough that she doesn't need a set of famous shoulders to stand on to earn renown for herself.