Swords and pens

On Monday, July 10, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page piece (column 4, quirky story placement) titled, "For Afghan Cabbies, A Poetry Tradition Spurs War of Words." The headline after the jump used the phrase "Fight a War of Words."

Briefly: two associations devoted to the recital of Afghan poetry exist in Washington, D.C. One takes a more scholarly approach, primarily discussing classical works rooted in Sufisim; the other spends more time in performance of contemporary Afghan poetry.

The author of the article, Masood Farivar, clearly doesn't trust WSJ readers to be interested in a story about Afghan poetry. I imagine a thought process along these lines: "Hmmm, where's the source of tension? Two groups, they're different, difference produces conflict... fighting poets, that's it!! I've got the story!"

(Too, he seems to be playing into U.S. perceptions of Afghans as never having left behind their warring clannishness: "But having given up battling over the merits of the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, exiled Afghans here have found a new outlet for factional debate: how to celebrate the ancient Afghan art of poetry reading.")

The real story isn't about the conflict. Of course people who are passionate about something, who love poems that reach deep inside them on emotional, cultural and intellectual levels, will occasionally passionately disagree about what they think is the best or right way to honor poetry. But I'm sure that the number of people who even perceive these two groups as seriously in conflict--let alone "at war"--is small compared to the total number of people who attend the poetry readings. Maybe Farivar thinks readers will be amused by the thought of poetry-lovers fighting. And maybe he's right. But he lost the chance to find and tell the real story.

Here's the part that interests me: In the early 80s, "At the end of 12-hour [cab-driving] shifts, dog-tired and sometimes hungry, they'd sit cross-legged in a circle. Over cups of tea and candies, they tackled some of the most technically difficult poems written by the great Sufi poets.... Every now and then, when they found themselves stumped, they'd call upon a ... former Kabul University professor... chipping in 25 to 50 cents each, they'd buy a phone card and hunch over the speakerphone as the professor brought the poems to life."

Was this act of reading and studying poems so important because the readers were tired, isolated in a new country, lost in jobs they never thought they's have to take? How was the ex-patriate Afghan community different 20 years ago compared to now? Who goes to the "contemporary" readings now? How much money do they make? How old are they? How long have they been in this country? Who goes to the traditional group's events? What occasions now do Afghans in this country have to chip in a quarter to a common goal?

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I could not have said, 10 years ago, that one day I would be reading the Wall Street Journal. We get it free, you know, from airline mileage points, and sometimes it piles up in the recycling bin for days at a time. But I've come to appreciate much of its coverage. And really, how can I complain about poetry on the front page of ANY paper?