what is Afghan literature?
From today's perspective, it is easy to believe that Afghanistan is but a country of incessant warfare, the graveyard of empires, full of land mines, spare arms and legs tossed around, invisible women and one-eyed mujahids. It is rarely associated with literacy, and books, and culture. But it should. It is in fact a culturally rich area, and a cool, peaceful, civilised country that the hippies loved to visit in the 1960s.
The Afghan literature, thus, is basically written in either Dari or Pashto written in Arabic characters. The country is linguistically more complex than this, but these are the main strands. It had surprising range of long-distance contacts early in history; this is why even pre-Islamic scripts of Arabia are attested. Also Bactrian Greek is well attested. There are also several strange writing systems coming from India, such as Kharosthi.
The literary flourishing came to Afghanistan under the Ghaznavids and the Ghurid dynasty, between the 1oth and the 12th century. It developed under the auspices of the great Persian figures, such as Rumi and Rudaki. The great figure of the time was Khwaja Abdullah Ansari, the 11th-c. "Sage from Herat" who composed poetry in the margin of his greater intellectual endeavours, such as Qur'an commentary.
There is thus much to be said about Afghan literature before we reach its contemporary blossoming, conditioned by the well-known sequence of events: the fall of the monarchy, the Soviet invasion, the rise of the Taliban, the war, the end of the war, the return of the Taliban, running parallel to the history of Afghan multiple diasporas. The writers that are the best known in world literature are often those exiled ones. Khaled Hosseini, an Afghani-American author, is the first example that comes to one's mind. The Kate Runner, his 2003 novel (adapted to cinema by Marc Forster) tells a story of male freindship from the old, prosperous Kabul. The protagonist, Amir, is a young boy from the rich district Wazir Akbar Khan. Nonetheless, against the background of the Soviet invasion and the exodus of the refugees, the times of innocence will soon be over. The most traumatic event is the sexual assault on Amir's friend Hassan. The text develops as a novel about guilt and longing for redemption. Another book by the same author, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), features female protaginists and depicts the marital relations under the patriarchal regime. On the other hand, Atiq Rahimi, yet another of those Afghani authors that strive to open up to the world, offers a sophisticated kind of literature, famously indebted to Dostoievski. In fact, Rahimi, naturalized French, is a multilingual and multimodal creator, switching from Persian to French and from literature to cinema.
The Afghan literature, thus, is basically written in either Dari or Pashto written in Arabic characters. The country is linguistically more complex than this, but these are the main strands. It had surprising range of long-distance contacts early in history; this is why even pre-Islamic scripts of Arabia are attested. Also Bactrian Greek is well attested. There are also several strange writing systems coming from India, such as Kharosthi.
The literary flourishing came to Afghanistan under the Ghaznavids and the Ghurid dynasty, between the 1oth and the 12th century. It developed under the auspices of the great Persian figures, such as Rumi and Rudaki. The great figure of the time was Khwaja Abdullah Ansari, the 11th-c. "Sage from Herat" who composed poetry in the margin of his greater intellectual endeavours, such as Qur'an commentary.
There is thus much to be said about Afghan literature before we reach its contemporary blossoming, conditioned by the well-known sequence of events: the fall of the monarchy, the Soviet invasion, the rise of the Taliban, the war, the end of the war, the return of the Taliban, running parallel to the history of Afghan multiple diasporas. The writers that are the best known in world literature are often those exiled ones. Khaled Hosseini, an Afghani-American author, is the first example that comes to one's mind. The Kate Runner, his 2003 novel (adapted to cinema by Marc Forster) tells a story of male freindship from the old, prosperous Kabul. The protagonist, Amir, is a young boy from the rich district Wazir Akbar Khan. Nonetheless, against the background of the Soviet invasion and the exodus of the refugees, the times of innocence will soon be over. The most traumatic event is the sexual assault on Amir's friend Hassan. The text develops as a novel about guilt and longing for redemption. Another book by the same author, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), features female protaginists and depicts the marital relations under the patriarchal regime. On the other hand, Atiq Rahimi, yet another of those Afghani authors that strive to open up to the world, offers a sophisticated kind of literature, famously indebted to Dostoievski. In fact, Rahimi, naturalized French, is a multilingual and multimodal creator, switching from Persian to French and from literature to cinema.
I have readAtiq Rahimi, Khâkestar-o-khâk (Terre et cendres, 2000)
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I have written... nothing ...
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