{"product_id":"i-am-the-beggar-of-the-world-landays-from-contemporary-afghanistan-eliza-griswold","title":"I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan;  Eliza Griswold","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAfghans revere poetry, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet—a \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003elanday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation, homeland, love—these are the subjects of \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003elandays\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, which are brutal and spare, can be remixed like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary. From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003elandays\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e     After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and set herself on fire in protest, the poet Eliza Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to learn about these women and to collect their \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003elandays\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e. The poems gathered in \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eI Am the Beggar of the World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms, all of which belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eApril 1, 2014\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eEliza Griswold is an American journalist and poet. She was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"FREEAIR Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49913949913410,"sku":"","price":7.57,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0730\/8735\/3154\/files\/beggar.jpg?v=1729541632","url":"https:\/\/shop.freeairbooks.com\/products\/i-am-the-beggar-of-the-world-landays-from-contemporary-afghanistan-eliza-griswold","provider":"FREEAIR Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}