LANDAYS: POETRY OF AFGHAN WOMEN

Interesting article about landays and women in Afghanistan

The teenage poet who uttered this folk poem called herself Rahila Muska. She lived in Helmand, a Taliban stronghold and one of the most restive of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces since the U.S. invasion began on October 7, 2001. Muska, like many young and rural Afghan women, wasn’t allowed to leave her home. Fearing that she’d be kidnapped or raped by warlords, her father pulled her out of school after the fifth grade. Poetry, which she learned from other women and on the radio, became her only form of education.

Poems and Pictures of Contemporary Afghanistan

by Eliza Griswold

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media/landays.html