Your Life for a Love Poem

Learn about landai, a two line poetic form (perfect for Twitter!) practiced by the women of Afghanistan and about the risks they take for the right to self-expression. Eliza Griswold (The Tenth Parallel, Wideawake Field) has a great piece about Afghan women's poetry in The New York Times Magazine, Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry,

Like most folk literature, landai can be sorrowful or bawdy. Imagine the Wife of Bath riding through the Himalayan foothills and uttering landai so ribald that they curled the toes of her fellow travelers. She might tease her rival: “Say hello to my sweetheart/If you are a farter [tizan, one who farts a lot], then I can fart louder than you.” She might make a cutting political joke: “Your black eyelashes are Israel/and my heart is Palestine under your attack.” She might utter an elegiac couplet: “My beloved gave his head for our country/I will sew his shroud with my hair.”

“A poem is a sword,” Saheera Sharif, Mirman Baheer’s founder, said. Sharif is not a poet but a member of Parliament from the province of Khost. Literature, she says, is a more effective battle for women’s rights than shouting at political rallies. “This is a different kind of struggle.”

There's more, including a slideshow, at the Pulitzer Center website. More in this form can be found collected in Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women's Poetry. Samples from the book here. Also of interest, there is a new collection of poetry by Taliban authors, Poetry of the Taliban. The editors were interviewed in The Atlantic recently, 

The average reader in the West probably regards the Taliban as being profoundly hostile to culture. How do we reconcile incidents like the destruction of the Buddha statues at Bamiyan with the outpouring of poetic sentiment documented in your book?

There is a difference between the formal pronouncements or edicts of the Taliban's leadership and the fighters on the ground. That is as true for the Taliban as it is true for the British Army. In our introduction we also note the contradiction between the formal edicts issued by Mullah  Mohammad Omar (banning most kinds of music) and his private consumption of those same songs that he had banned. This is to be expected. The Taliban are not a monolithic movement, with fixed and unchanging attitudes. In many ways, our difficulties understanding the movement say more about us than it does about the Taliban.

Sounds like what we need is an Afghan poetry slam.

Bamiyan Buddhas

Today's culture break takes us back to Cheryl Benard, author of a mystery set in Peshawar, Pakistan, Moghul Buffet, which we read many years ago. More recently, she has been working on an effort to protect and restore the Bamiyan Buddhas, The Bamiyan Project. You may recall that these are the giant sculptures that were created in the sixth century and destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban regime.  The video below from Al Jazeera is a few years old, but it's still a good introduction to what is happening. If you have some time and want to learn more about the Bamiyan Buddhas' history, I recommend getting hold of the film The Giant Buddhas. Take a moment and step away from the headline news about the war and contemplate the symbolism of healing these monuments to peace.

The Next Chapter for Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute

I've written before about my desire to salvage some good from the Greg Mortenson story and the charity, Central Asia Institute (CAI), he founded for the sake of the Pakistani and Afghan children the charity serves and the American children who have invested in it. We read two books by Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, and our Loyal Readers certainly believe that promoting education of girls in the remote regions of these countries is very important. So what's happened since 60 Minutes and Jon Krakauer questioned some of CAI's origin story and exposed the non-profit's dubious accounting? There have been some developments in the possible rehabilitation of Mortenson and CAI, so I've assembled a few links to bring us up to date.

First, the Montana Attorney General has issued a report. According to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, the AG found that funds had been mismanaged and that Mortenson should pay $1 million in restitution to CAI, but that there was no basis for criminal prosecution. Admonitions were also made regarding the structure of the charity's governing board and Mortenson's future relationship to the organization. Mortenson has already repaid about half the money he owes to CAI and the board has a timetable for restructuring. For more about CAI's response, here's a brief audio interview from WBUR's Here & Now with Anne Beyersdorfer, CAI's acting director. If the governance reforms are implemented, this may go some way towards answering the critics (see, for example, Non-Profit Quarterly from last year). CAI's website has improved somewhat, with more information about the status of their projects, and a blog with regular updates from the field. Also of interest, last year Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty sent a reporter to assess the status of some CAI-built schools and found some thriving, while others appear to be struggling, suggesting a lack of oversight. Mortenson still faces a civil lawsuit from a group of disgruntled readers who claim that parts of his story were fabricated and that they were therefore mislead into buying his books and are asking for compensation and punitive damages. The lawsuit has just had it's first hearing but there is some skepticism that the case will move forward as that kind of accountability for a memoir would be unprecedented. The outlook for CAI over all does seem to be improving, and I hope that with new leadership and even greater transparency in the coming year, the good that the organization has already accomplished will be reinforced and future mentions of the charity on this blog can focus on the Afghan and Pakistani children whose needs captivated us from the start.

For March: A Woman Among Warlords by Malalai Joya

For March, we have chosen A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice by Malalai Joya. Mark your calendars (March 18, 6:30 PM at Vroman's in Pasadena) for discussion of this inspiring young woman's life and Afghanistan's future,

Malalai Joya was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2010. An extraordinary young woman raised in the refugee camps of Iran and Pakistan, Joya became a teacher in secret girls’ schools, hiding her books under her burqa so the Taliban couldn’t find them; she helped establish a free medical clinic and orphanage in her impoverished home province of Farah; and at a constitutional assembly in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2003, she stood up and denounced her country’s powerful NATO-backed warlords. She was twenty-five years old. Two years later, she became the youngest person elected to Afghanistan’s new Parliament. In 2007, she was suspended from Parliament for her persistent criticism of the warlords and drug barons and their cronies. She has survived four assassination attempts to date, is accompanied at all times by armed guards, and sleeps only in safe houses. 

Joya takes us inside this massively important and insufficiently understood country, shows us the desperate day-to-day situations its remarkable people face at every turn, and recounts some of the many acts of rebellion that are helping to change it. A controversial political figure in one of the most dangerous places on earth, Malalai Joya is a hero for our times.

Our March Author: Greg Mortenson

This month we are reading Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Education in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Greg Mortenson. We've already discussed Three Cups of Tea, his first bestseller about building schools in Pakistan and we recommend you check out our previous related posts.  Stones, which brings the school-building story forward into Afghanistan was released at almost the same time President Obama announced his plans to increase troop strength in Afghanistan in December 2009 so a discussion of the way forward in Afghanistan dominated interviews with the author, such as this one from On Point or try this Bill Moyer's interview.

 BILL MOYERS: How is your work going to be impacted by the fact that it's going on in a society where the war is being escalated?

GREG MORTENSON: Well, our work will go on whether or not the U.S. has military there or not in that we work so closely with the elders. With the deployment of troops there, I, I've got a lot of mixed feelings on it. The first thing is that when President Obama had nine meetings to ascertain or decide whether or not to deploy troops to Afghanistan, those meetings were held in secrecy, behind closed doors. There was no public debate. There was no congressional hearings. There was no media involved.

We can't run democracy in secrecy. And it doesn't matter whether it's George Bush or Obama. That was one of my main concerns is-it's a big decision. The other thing is that there was no consultation with the elders or the shura in Afghanistan. Every province has three to five dozen shura. And these are elders. They're poets. They're warriors. They're businessmen, a few women. And they're not elected, but they've kind of risen up through the ranks. And these to me are the real people with integrity and power in Afghanistan. So when this decision was made to deploy troops, none, there was no consultation with the troo-- with the elders. And they felt very marginalized by it because, you know, want to go into another country, we want to be able to at least have a part and a say in it. And it's not that difficult. You can do it at a district level, or local level, or at a national level. It's, you know, I think half of diplomacy is just showing up. You know, we've got to actually just show up and start to talk and then maybe we could get somewhere. 

NYT columnist Nick Kristof is a big fan. See Dr. Greg and Afghanistan and 1 Solider or 20 Schools? and the NYT's Elizabeth Bumiller explores Mortenson's relationship with the US military: Unlikely Tutor Giving Military Advice.  For a lighter perspective on Dr. Greg there is this interview from travelblog World Hum.

Not all of us are going to come back from a trip and start a foundation to fund education projects.
I hope not.

What do you recommend for the rest of us?
One of the things is to try to continue just one of your relationships that you made on your trip. Whether it’s a hotel worker or a guide, just keep in touch with somebody. I also think there are so many more travel companies that are giving five or 10 percent to local organizations. 

And maybe what you saw was very beautiful, but you probably also saw some things that were not too pleasant. I think we shouldn’t try to bury them. We should talk about those things, whether it’s child labor or slavery or environmental degradation. The power of one is very powerful.

Finally, if you do nothing else, just take in this page from the Central Asia Institute showing a map and growing list of all the schools which have been built in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And then for a glimpse of some of the children, watch this short Christiane Amanpour report from CNN.

Listen to the Banned

This month we are reading The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger by Alec Wilkinson. We will have more Seeger resources to explore in an upcoming post, but among other themes, the book explores Seeger's experiences as a blacklisted musician in the 1950s and with censorship of his performance on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the 1960s. Freemuse, the independent international organization which advocates freedom of expression for musicians and composers worldwide, awarded Seeger their Freemuse Award in 2009 for his commitment to musicians' freedom of expression.  You can hear his grandson's acceptance speech here. 
 
This year, Freemuse has an album out (for the music lover on your holiday gift list?) called Listen to the Banned, a collection of songs from artists around the world who have faced censorship or had their music banned. Artists from Afghanistan to Zimbawe are featured and you can learn more about their music and struggles to be heard at the website for the project.  Here's a glimpse of one of them, Mahsa Vahdat of Iran, the Freemuse Award Winner for 2010.  Women in Iran can practice various musical forms but cannot sing in public for mixed audiences. They can participate in women-only concerts, but Mahsa Vahdat refuses to perform for women only. Here she is explaining her commitment to freedom of musical expression:





Here's a sample live performance:



Try here and here for more.

Our January Author: Mahvish Khan

Mahvish Khan, author of this month's selection, My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me, has her own website: Mahvish. You'll find pictures from Guantanamo, Afghanistan and the detainees and their families there. Guantanamo is a popular place for photo essayists. See also these provocative photo collections from TIME, Edmund Clark at lens culture and more from the Boston Globe.

Video of talks given by Khan are available from Authors@Google and ForaTV.




To follow up on the status of prisoners mentioned in the book or others you may have read about or written an Amnesty action on behalf of, you can consult the NYT's Guantánamo Docket. The Washington Post has a Guantanamo Bay Timeline that could be useful as well. Two of the NGO's featured prominently in the book are the Center for Constitutional Rights and Reprieve. CCR runs down all the Supreme Court cases concerning Guantanamo inmates and Reprieve does a good job of featuring the stories of their various detainee clients. Reprieve's director, Clive Stafford Smith wrote in the LATimes in 2007,

In more than 20 years trying death-penalty cases, I have visited all the worst prisons in the Deep South, yet none compares to Camp Six here. To the military, this tribute to Halliburton's profiteering is state-of-the-art; to the human being, it is simply inhumane.

The ACLU is always a worth a look too: Close Gitmo & End Military Commissions. And of course, you should check out Amnesty International USA's Counter Terror with Justice page, especially the current actions on behalf of detainees.

NPR reports on Guantanamo poetry and Harper's adds a poem from Jumah al-Dossary, who also penned this account of his imprisonment for the Washington Post, I'm Home, but Still Haunted by Guantanamo, leaving us with a little hope,

In Guantanamo, I was very angry with the people who had decided to hold me thousands of miles from home without charging or trying me. I was very angry with the people who kept me in isolation even when I was at my most desperate. I was very angry about having no rights at all. I was not angry with Americans in general and I even drew comfort from some, such as my lawyers and the kind soldier. But I could scarcely comprehend how U.S. policy had allowed me to be treated as I had been.
On the plane ride home, though, I decided that I would have to forgive to go on with my life. I also know that Sept. 11 was a great tragedy that caused some people to do dark things that they would not otherwise do. This knowledge helped me forget my miserable existence in Guantanamo and open my heart to life again...

Would that we could leave this behind us too, but the matter of what happens after Guantanamo still confronts us. I leave you with this post, Obama & the Guantanamo Mess: A Way Out? by David Cole from the New York Review blog as a signpost for discussion.

The trashy Sunday supplement Parade occasionally has an interesting tidbit, and today is a case in point: an article on Greg Mortenson, author of the best-selling Three Cups of tea, which we read a year or so ago. Here's the link. It seems that Greg is still active in both Pakistan and Afghanistan and doing some good, which (if true) is a change from the usual dismal news from that area. This article is no doubt related to his forthcoming book, which Martha mentioned in her blog last month.

PS: Also in today's LATimes is a review of the latest by Ha Jin, of whom we read The Crazed in 2004. I found this review particularly interesting because it discusses his life since he fled China after Tienanmen and switched to writing in English, which he now teaches at Boston U. (Couldn't find the review online, but it's by Julia Klein.)

Our November Author: Jason Elliot

Alas, there is not much available online to help us get to know Jason Elliot, author of Mirrors of the Unseen, only a 2001 Salon interview focusing on Afghanistan and this Guardian article on Islamic art.

Afghanistan: Attacks on Schools

A timely supplement to our reading of Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea:

The New York Times reports on attacks on female students attending schools in Afghanistan.

Shukria, the slain 13-year-old, was considered a polite girl who reverently studied the Koran. Saadia, the other student killed, was remarkable in that she was married and 25. She had refused to let age discourage her from finishing an education interrupted by the Taliban years. She was about to graduate.

The article includes a photo essay.

A recent Amnesty International report Afghanistan: All who are not friends, are enemies: Taleban abuses against civilians offers up some grim statistics:

• At least 172 violent attacks on schools took place in the first six months of 2006 compared with 60 for the whole of 2005.
• 75 students, teachers and other school staff were killed in attacks between 2005 to 2006.
• Between 2005-2006, 359 schools were closed in the provinces of Kandahar, Paktika, Zabul, Ghazni, Khost, Helmand Uruzgan and Daikundi due to security concerns for children and teachers, denying access to education for around 132,800 children.
• 183 schools were burned in arson attacks across the country between 2005-2006.
• Six children have died as a result of school attacks in 2006.

See also Afghanistan: Women Still Under Attack.

One reason attacks like these continue is the lack of accountability for past human rights violations. Put pressure on the Afghan government to end impunity here.

Pasadena Event: Women's Day Film Screening

Saturday, March 10 11:00 a.m.
Laemmle's One Colorado Theatre
42 Miller Alley
Old Pasadena, CA 91103

Amnesty International USA's Western Region & Stop Violence Against Women Coordinator Sakinah Kahn are pleased to support:

A Screening of "View from a Grain of Sand" Followed by a Q & A with filmmaker Meena Nanji.

Tickets: $10

Combining vérité footage, interviews and archival material, Los Angeles based film maker, Meena Nanji has fashioned a harrowing, thought-provoking, yet intimate portrait of the plight of Afghan women in the last 30 years from the rule of King Mohammed Zahir Shah to the current Hamid Karzai government to the activist work of RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Over a period of five years, she spent months in a refugee camp in Pakistan , where she documented the efforts of three women to rebuild their lives and help others in the process: Shapire, a teacher; Roeena, a physician; and Wajeeha, a social activist.

See this Variety review for more about the film. And please visit the Afghan Women's Mission website, a unique Pasadena-based human rights resource!

Seating is limited. Please call 323-632-5558 for tickets.

Crafts from RAWA's Income Generation Project will be on sale at the event. All proceeds will benefit RAWA's vital social programs.

For more information please call (323) 632-5558 or send an email to rawasupporterssouthcal@hotmail.com.

Shadow Company Screening October 22

Shadow Company Trailer
,

Amnesty International Group 22 - Pasadena/Caltech is pleased to host a screening of Shadow Company, this Sunday, October 22 at 4:30 PM at the Caltech Y Lounge (1350 San Pasqual Street, Pasadena - map - follow two curving walls forming a gate to a path-- our building is just beyond). The screening is free and there will be refreshments! Discussion and action opportunities will follow film. Please join us!

Film Description:

No one can forget the horrifying images: photos of Iraqis kept at Abu Ghraib prison naked, bleeding, humiliated, and some dead. Since the first reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib became public in 2004, subsequent military investigations have found that contractors and employees of private companies contracted by the U.S. government were involved, along with US soldiers, in the torture and abuse of the detainees.

What you may not know is that the use of these private military contractors (PMCs) in the "war on terror" is expanding, as they fulfill even sensitive military functions, like interrogation and translation services, in addition to logistical support and security services in conflict zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

"Shadow Company," by Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque, is a documentary film that explores the history of mercenaries, the PMC industry and regulation of it - with exclusive interviews with security contractors, journalists, historians and owners of contracting companies. With tens of thousands of armed contractors in Iraq alone, it is clear that the rules of war have changed - and it is up to everyone to learn how these rules have changed and why.

Amnesty action on military contractors here.

Torture Awareness Month: The Road to Guantanamo

Another post to mark Torture Awareness Month ...

Here is Amnesty International's official response to the the Guantanamo suicides and while most of my Loyal Readers signed the petition to close Guantanamo ages ago, this is the kind of action that bears repeating. For more AI perspective, Eric Sears, Director of Amnesty International USA's Denounce Torture Initiative, discussed Guantanamo on KPCC's Airtalk yesterday.

This seems as good a time as any to point out that as part of Torture Awareness Month, Amnesty is partnering with the creators of the film The Road to Guantanamo opening later this month:

The Road to Guantanamo is the terrifying first-hand account of three British citizens who were held for more than two years without charges in the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Known as the “Tipton Three,” in reference to their home town near Birmingham, the three were eventually returned to Britain and released—still having had no formal charges ever made against them at any time during their ordeal. The film has already engendered significant controversy due to its critical stance toward the American and British governments. Additional controversy was generated because of the cast members' detainment by British immigration authorities upon their return from the film's premiere at the Berlin film festival.

Part documentary, part dramatization, the film chronicles the sequence of events that led from the trio setting out from Tipton in the British Midlands for a wedding in Pakistan, to their crossing the Afghanistan border just as the U.S. began its bombing campaign, to their eventual capture by the Northern Alliance and their imprisonment in Camp X-Ray and later at Camp Delta in Guantanamo.

One of the "Tipton Three" was interviewed this week on NPR for his reaction to the suicides, and don't miss the article on the film's website about the censoring of the movie poster (uncensored version above) by the Motion Picture Association of America,

Thus, the MPAA's decision puts it at odds with the U.S. government, which has repeatedly defended techniques, including hooding prisoners, as not legally torture, and not inconsistent with the basic American values the MPAA tries to uphold. In a 2003 Department of Defense report, hooding was given a green light, as not inconsistent with the United States' obligations under international conventions or U.S. law. The report also approve prolonged standing, though stipulated that it "should never make the detainee exhausted to the point of weakness or collapse." And that it not be "enforced by physical restraints."

Which means that the MPAA required a change in the image that removed something not deemed torture (hooding) and focused the image on the bound hands and extended arms that clearly depicts someone forced to stand (or worse, hang) under restraint to the point of collapse, which might well be torture.

Kirby Dick, director of "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," a new film devoted to the MPAA and its ratings system, said that's not the only irony in the MPAA's decision. He compares the MPAA's secrecy to the secrecy that has governed so much of what has happened at the prison in Guantanamo and other U.S. facilities where suspects in the war on terror have been held.

"It's also interesting that the image is of someone whose vision is being blocked -- and that's the image that they're blocking," Dick said. "When you get into censorship, the irony never stops."

Time to open our eyes! The film opens in Pasadena on June 23.