Woman poet ’slain for her verse’

by Christina Lamb

SHE risked torture, imprisonment, perhaps even death to study literature and write poetry in secret under the Taliban. Last week, when she should have been
celebrating the success of her first book, Nadia Anjuman, was beaten to death in Herat, apparently murdered by her husband.

The 25-year-old Afghan had garnered wide praise in literary circles for the book Gule Dudi - Dark Flower - and was at work on a second volume.

Friends say her family was furious, believing that the publication of poetry by a woman about love and beauty had brought shame on it.

"She was a great poet and intellectual but, like so many Afghan women, she had to follow orders from her husband," said Nahid Baqi, her best friend at Herat
University.

Farid Ahmad Majid Mia, 29, Anjuman’s husband, is in police custody after confessing to having slapped her during a row. But he denies murder and claims that his wife committed suicide. The couple had a six-month-old son.

The death of the young writer has shocked a city which
prides itself on its artistic heritage. It has also
raised uncomfortable questions about how much the
position of women in Afghanistan has improved since
the fall of the Taliban to American-led forces four
years ago.

"This is a tragic loss for Afghanistan," said Adrian
Edwards, a spokesman for the United Nations. "Domestic
violence is a concern. This case illustrates how bad
this problem is here and how it manifests itself.
Women face exceptional challenges."

Herat, in particular, has seen a number of women burn
themselves to death rather than succumb to forced
marriages.

Anjuman’s movements were being limited by her husband,
her friends believe. She had been invited to a
ceremony celebrating the return to Herat of Amir Jan
Sabouri, an Afghan singer, but failed to attend.

Her poetry alluded to an acute sense of confinement.
"I am caged in this corner, full of melancholy and
sorrow," she wrote in one "ghazal", or lyrical poem,
adding: "My wings are closed and I cannot fly." It
concludes: "I am an Afghan woman and must wail."

Afghan human rights groups condemned Anjuman’s death
as evidence that the government of President Hamid
Karzai has failed to address the issue of domestic
violence. It is especially tragic because she was one
of a group of courageous women, known as the Sewing
Circles of Herat, who risked their lives to keep the
city’s literary scene active under the Taliban regime.

Women were banned from working or studying by the
Taliban, whose repressive edicts forbade women to
laugh out loud or wear shoes that clicked. Female
writers belonging to Herat’s Literary Circle realised
that one of the few things that women were still
allowed to do was to sew. So three times a week groups
of women in burqas would arrive at a doorway marked
Golden Needle Sewing School.

Had the authorities investigated, they would have
discovered that the sewing students never made any
clothes. Once inside the school, a brave professor of
literature from Herat University would talk to them
about Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and other banned
writers.

Under a regime where even teaching a daughter to read
was a crime, they might have been hanged if they had
been caught.

I was taken to meet some of these women by Ahmed Said
Haghighi, president of the Literary Circle, in
December 2001, only days after the Taliban had fled.
One of them, Leila, said that she stayed up till the
early hours doing calculus because she so feared that
her brain would atrophy. "Life for women under the
Taliban was no more than being cows in sheds," she
said.

Anjuman was part of this remarkable group. After the
Taliban fell, she went to Herat University to study
literature. "She was becoming a great Persian poet,"
Haghighi said. Anjuman’s husband was also a literature
graduate. Speaking from prison he insisted: "I have
not killed Nadia. How could I kill someone I loved? We
had a small argument and I only slapped her on the
face once.

"She went to another room and when she returned she
told me she had swallowed poison. She said she had
forgiven me for slapping her and pleaded, ’Don’t tell
anyone I have swallowed poison. Tell them I died from
a heart attack’."

The authorities are sceptical of this account. "One of
the reasons we suspect the husband is he did not take
her to the hospital until four hours after beating her
up," said Maria Bashir, the city’s prosecutor.

Although Afghanistan’s new constitution guarantees
equal rights for men and women before the law, its
conservative mindset has not changed. This is partly
because of the continuing power of the American-backed
warlords whose repressive views are similar to those
of the Taliban.

Many women were allowed to stand in parliamentary
elections in September, the results of which were
being finalised yesterday. One of the most surprising
results announced earlier in the count was in Herat,
where Fauzia Gailani, a female aerobics instructor,
topped the polls.

The 32-year-old mother of six said she was outraged by
Anjuman’s death and was compiling a list of such
cases. "In Islam no one has the right to hit their
wife," she said. "We hope the government will take
action and stop crimes like this."

Additional reporting: Tim Albone, Kabul Christina Lamb
is the author of The Sewing Circles of Herat
(Flamingo)

The Sunday Times