Read an Excerpt
The Pearl of Dari
Poetry and Personhood among Young Afghans in Iran
By Zuzanna Olszewska Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Zuzanna Olszewska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01763-5
CHAPTER 1
Border Crossings and Fractured Selves
A History of the Afghan Presence in Iran
GOLSHAHR
It doesn't matter
on which side the sun came up,
on which side the moon went down.
In your alleys, sorrow.
In your alleys, beauty.
In your alleys, the sound of the handcart men
who cry out the freshness of their wares;
the footsteps that startle
the always-mute walls out of sleep;
the eyes that turn my dark midnights
into delirious muttering.
In your alleys
is a fluttering of wings that comes from distant mountains.
I begin from your farthest walls,
a place where even my friends don't come anymore,
with my old briefcase in my hand,
like a shepherd whose sheep have all been torn apart by wolves,
like a commander to whom no letter is posted.
Longing for the wild winds of the Pamirs,
the song of a dobeiti in the mountains;
longing for the fresh fish of Helmand,
and soldiers invalided by war,
I pass through your streets.
Old men on the edge of the dark shadows
relive the memories of their horses' manes
and the water channels that ran to the white poplars and apple trees.
The dusty children smile
at the marbles they play with in the dust,
not caring about all this exile,
not caring about the melody from afar,
not the green orchards of Baghchar,
nor the wheat fields of Sangtakht
whose mornings are drunkenness and wine and drink.
You are an empty water jar on my shoulder
that I must carry
to the bright waters of Bamyan and the speed and intoxication of the Jeyhun
and the forgotten wine taverns of Ghazni
as if you were a bullet
shot toward my unforgotten wounds.
I bring your longings home with me.
I share them with Ali,
I share them with Masih,
like an apple that I got from the handcart men
or herbs from the women in the fields.
You are an avalanche that suddenly overcomes me.
Hossein Heidarbeigi
This poem vividly describes the streets and lanes of Golshahr, an Afghan-dominated neighborhood on the outskirts of Mashhad, with their noisy handcart vendors, old men watching the world go by from the shadows, children playing marbles, and the nearby agricultural fields in which farmers cultivate herbs (see fig. 1.1). But it also describes something that Golshahr's older inhabitants still carry in their memories: nostalgia for rural, mountainous regions of Afghanistan with fields and orchards, horses and clear water, and inescapable reminders of war. The expansive geographical scope of that homeland, from the Jeyhun (Amu Darya or Oxus) River in the north to Helmand in the south, clearly evokes Afghanistan as a whole, but there is a special emphasis on Baghchar and Sangtakht, small villages in the central Hazarajat region from which the poet himself hails. In Golshahr, the figures in the poem are all exiles, whether former shepherds or commanders of the anti-Soviet jihad. Memories of another place preoccupy both the old men sitting in the shade and the poet himself, and are apt to arrive suddenly like an avalanche, an alighting bird, a melody from afar, or footsteps that awaken one at night. In this way, the landscape of Golshahr is intertwined with another place, a place without which its own existence is incomplete (Olszewska 2013b). The poem was written in 2007 by Hossein Heidarbeigi, a Hazara student of the Mashhad Howzeh, at the request of his friend and fellow poet Seyyed Zia' Qasemi, to accompany a film Qasemi was making about Golshahr for his filmmaking degree in Tehran. It is a testament to the transnational lives of many of Golshahr's residents.
This chapter situates those lives in a broader historical and geographical context: one that recognizes the necessity of a regional approach to the study of the politics, economy, culture, and certainly the literature, of this population. Recent Afghan migration is situated within a longer history of frequent population movements in the region, and the political division of Iran and Afghanistan into separate states is a relatively new development. More recently, continued Iranian cultural and political influence in Afghanistan has had dramatic consequences, particularly during the Hazara civil war of the 1980s, in which refugee communities supported competing armed groups that were fighting amongst themselves rather than against the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Given this intertwined history, the degree of social and legal discrimination Afghans face in Iran is particularly ironic. I examine representations of Afghans in Iranian discourse and the extent to which Afghan refugees internalize or reject such visions.
Running through these themes is a paradox emblematic of the transformations underway in this region. On the one hand, it continues to be the reality that Afghans are transnationally mobile, adaptable, and flexible enough to exploit an existence within their own weak state or on the margins of other states (Monsutti 2010). On the other, their very mobility causes them to confront and be persuaded by a discourse that negates the idea of transnational mobility: a "national order of things" that fixes people as rooted in certain places and excludes them from citizenship in others, casting refugees as "matter out of place" (Malkki 1995b). The power of Iranian nationalism has resulted in just such a situation: feeling excluded in Iran, Afghans long to participate as full citizens in their own homeland. While their forefathers may have identified primarily with their home cities or villages, or indeed simply with their patrilineal descent groups, Heidarbeigi's poem shows that for many of those in Iran, at least, the extent of their imagined community now stretches from the Amu Darya to Helmand. The conflicting emotions and frustrated senses of belonging that result from this situation are frequently played out in refugee poetry, and form the backdrop to most of the poetic output explored in this book.
Afghan Mobility in Historical Perspective
The majority of the Afghan intellectuals with whom I worked were Shi'a and Persian-speaking (ethnic Hazaras, Hazara Seyyeds, and Tajiks from the city of Herat). All of these groups had a long-standing historical connection with the territory that is now Iran. Indeed, until the mid-eighteenth century, much of today's Afghanistan formed part of the Greater Khorasan region of the Iranian empires, and the city of Herat was known as the Pearl of Khorasan, but Iranian influence and the intermingling of peoples continued long after the territories broke away. Iran had irredentist claims on Herat and other parts of Afghanistan up to the mid-nineteenth century, when it unsuccessfully fought several battles with the British, who were seeking to expand into the west of the country (Kashani-Sabet 1999: 30–33). As recently as the 1970s, Herat was seen by other citizens of Afghanistan as a place apart, almost an extension of Iran (Doubleday 1988: 15). Iran's influence — cultural, political, religious, economic, and infrastructural — continues in Afghanistan to this day, particularly in the west and among Afghan Shi'as.
But even when the Afghan state's borders began to be demarcated in the late nineteenth century, its people continued to embrace mobility throughout the region as a cultural, political, and economic strategy. Such migrations were induced by economic or political necessity — though the distinction between these causes is often blurred — and were often given a religious resonance. Forced resettlement was frequently employed as a tool of political subjugation by rulers, but flight across borders was just as frequently used as a gesture of political defiance and autonomy, often cast in terms of the preservation of the true religion, Islam.
Both pastoral nomadism and migration for trade or employment have supplemented agriculture, whose resources, such as land or water, are often fiercely contested, and whose fruits are unpredictable in Afghanistan's mountainous and drought-prone terrain. Both types of movement took on a seasonal pattern, and transhumant nomads and labor migrants were not deterred by international borders (Pedersen 1990). Labor migration was and continues to be connected to seasonal agricultural cycles: thus, for example, farmers from the southern Hazarajat region would find work in the coal mines of Pakistani Baluchistan after the almond harvest in September, returning home to work in their fields in the spring. During the Soviet invasion, meanwhile, Hazara mojahedin (resistance fighters) would work in the coal mines in winter but spend the summer fighting with one of the resistance groups. Thus, spring and autumn have typically been times of transition and intensified mobility (Monsutti 2005b: 101, 149).
The case of the Hazaras illustrates both the difficulty in distinguishing between economic and political motives for migration, and the way it has become embedded in cultural values and practices. The situation in the Hazarajat, one of the poorest regions of Afghanistan, has been compounded by the destruction of war in recent times and by active discrimination in infrastructure provision and development by successive Kabul governments: "War and poverty have been mutually reinforcing factors propelling hundreds of thousands of Hazaras abroad" (Monsutti 2005b: 123). Since the 1960s, Hazaras have been regularly migrating to Iran and to the Gulf states to engage in a variety of low-wage occupations. Indeed, migration may be seen as a rite of passage to full adulthood for young Hazara men, a means of securing independence and acquiring the assets necessary to marry and support a family (Monsutti 2005a). Established transnational migration channels exist between Afghanistan and Iran and cross-border movements are multidirectional and recurrent (Stigter 2005a, 2005b). A complex system of migration, trade, and remittances between Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan is sustained through trust based on kinship ties among Hazara men (Monsutti 2004).
Expressly political motives have also been responsible for migrations both into and out of Afghanistan in recent centuries. The Durrani Amirs used forced relocations to quell opposition to their state-building campaigns, particularly Abdur Rahman at the end of the nineteenth century, while whole populations chose to evade the Amirs' control by crossing the borders to British India or Qajar Iran. The Kabul government's conquest of the mountainous Hazarajat in 1891–1893 was particularly brutal, and after this campaign successive waves of Hazara migrants departed for Quetta in Baluchistan (which had been incorporated into the British Raj in 1887) or Khorasan province in Iran. In the south and east, meanwhile, the Pashtun tribes have found themselves straddling the Durand Line, demarcating the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and have used this situation to their political and economic advantage while retaining cultural and political autonomy from both states (Edwards 1986a: 316).
In all these regions, then, borders were porous and were exploited by the local populations for their own interests. This constant and often strategic movement, which has remained bidirectional even in times of conflict, leads Monsutti to argue that migration and raft o amad (coming and going) is for many citizens of Afghanistan a way of life. Thus, he argues, "we are a long way from the figure of the refugee compelled to leave his or her homeland in the face of a towering threat, with the vague hope of one day being able to return" (2005b: 146). When one adopts a transnational, actor-centered analytical perspective, the image presented by NGOs and the media of the helpless, vulnerable refugee, stripped bare of politics and history, is certainly misleading (Monsutti 2010, Malkki 1996).
Within this complex history of regional migration, inhabitants of Afghanistan were visiting Iran as migrant workers, pilgrims, or merchants long before the period of conflict that began in 1978. Afghan Shi?as have been making pilgrimages for hundreds of years to the pilgrimage sites of Iran or via Iran to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq (Mousavi 1998: 148). The Hazaras who had settled and integrated into Iranian society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries eventually became Iranian citizens and came to be classified as an ethnic group known as Khavari or Barbari. Large numbers of Afghan citizens had sought employment in Iran from the 1960s onward, particularly during the terrible famine that struck the northwest of the country in 1971–1972, so several hundred thousand were already living in Iran as migrant workers by 1978 (Centlivres and Centlivres-Demont 2000: 151).
Afghan Refugees in Iran: From Oppressed Co-Believers to Deportable Aliens
Following the coup of 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, the number of Afghans in Iran climbed steadily throughout the 1980s until it peaked in 1991 at 3 million people, according to Iranian government estimates (UNHCR 2001). At the time of my research, the number of registered refugees in Iran was just over 900,000 people, with a further 1 million estimated to be in the country illegally and without documentation (IRIN 2008). In the 1980s, Ayatollah Khomeini had welcomed Afghans to Iran for ideological reasons: the Islamic Republic embraced its co-believers who were suffering at the hands of the atheist Soviets, and it also wished to export its own revolution to Afghanistan. In all probability, Afghans were also needed for their labor in a country whose young men were being sent to the front to fight Iraqi forces and dying in large numbers, and the Iranian economy benefited from their labor during the 1980s and the period of postwar reconstruction that followed. But this warm welcome soon wore thin, and in the 1990s the focus shifted to repatriation and prevention of new arrivals, now classed as illegal.
In the 1980s, Afghans were accepted as refugees prima facie and issued residence permits in Iran, granting them a number of rights that were very generous given the large numbers the country was hosting — one of the largest refugee populations in the world. Holders of these permits were granted indefinite permission to stay in Iran and were entitled to subsidized health care, food, and fuel, and to free primary and secondary education and adult literacy training. The vast majority — over 90 percent — were able to settle freely on the outskirts of cities rather than in refugee camps, and although they were not legally allowed to own property, in cities such as Mashhad many enjoyed de facto ownership of their homes through customary contracts of sale or lease (rahn) (Abbasi-Shavazi et al. 2005: 19). The small percentage of Afghans living in camps is significant, for it has meant that the vast majority have established social ties with their Iranian neighbors and come into contact with local Iranian institutions.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Pearl of Dari by Zuzanna Olszewska. Copyright © 2015 Zuzanna Olszewska. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
