A landay has very few rules. It must have 22 syllables, with nine in the first line and 13 in the second. It must end in the sound ‘ma’ or ‘na’. It must take on one of five subjects: meena, love; jang, war; watan, homeland; biltoon, separation; and, finally, gham, which means despair or grief. But gham doesn't mean grief in general, it speaks to the particular form of grief that belongs to a Pashtun woman.

It was this grief, this gham, that brought us to this project.

It was the story of a girl who killed herself because her family wouldn’t allow her to write poems that first provided us a window into the complex world of women and poetry in contemporary Afghanistan.

Forbidden love

Rahila Muska, which means ‘love smile’ in Pashto and which was her pseudonym, wrote poetry as a teenager in secret in her rural town of Gereshk in the war-riven province of Helmand.

For women and girls in Afghanistan, poetry is often associated with singing and dancing, and sometimes with prostitution. One of the landays I collected in my 2015 book I am the Beggar of the World refers to the idea in Pashtun society of the riverbank, or godar – where women gather water – as a place of romance. Forbidden from going to the godar, men nevertheless sneak glances at the women they love as they walk to and from the riverbank.

Daughter, in America the river isn’t wet.

Young girls learn to fill their jugs on the internet.

Because of its associations, families often forbid their daughters from writing poetry. Muska was one of these girls. She also belonged to the vast majority of Afghan women and girls, eight out of ten of whom don’t live in cities, but in the country’s 34 rural provinces.