Storytellers

There is a difference between a Qisakhaan (storyteller) and Nawisenda (writer) among Afghans.  The qisakhani (storytelling) is an old time honored tradition; a skill every Afghan is trained in whether these are fairy tales, religious lessons, family legends or neighborhood gossip.  The nawisenda, the fiction writer, is a new kind of literary profession, that gained respectability after Modernist fiction was translated into Farsi for Afghans in the 1930s by the intellectual visionary Mahmud Tarzi.  Translations of James Joyce inspired a new genre of Afghan literature, the novel, which hoped to cut ties to the qisa, (stories), and build a narrative style that was based more on the psychology of the characters rather than the fantastical adventures in fairy tales.

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 created a break in this budding style of story writing.  In 1990s, when the children of Afghan refugees began writing in English, the rift between storyteller and writer was ignored.  The careful path that Tarzi had started for a new literary form was lost on a generation raised (and many born) abroad, who could not read these novels.  The new genre, the Afghan American literary genre returned to the qisa and braided these rich myths into their own life histories.  Suddenly fairy tales of journeys began ways to tell their own stories of migration and survival.  The mute princess became the young woman who had lost her ability to speak in her native tongue.

Why this post on Afghanistan’s literary tradition?  Well, it is all to celebrate the completion of the first anthology of Afghan American literature.  My friend and co-editor, Sahar Muradi and I just completed editing the manuscript.  The title is still awaiting approval.  The project began 8 years ago, months before 9/11 and was meant to be a self-published anthology that would entertain ourselves.   However, the September 11th Attacks transformed this small project and gave it international attention.  With this attention came submissions that took 8 years to complete!   Yes, it took this long to create a robust and varied collection of perspectives and literary styles.  More than thirty writers have been part of this groundbreaking collection.  And the qisa tradition makes up the heart of many of these pieces whether the it is memoir, poetry or fiction.

Perhaps it is not surprising, in order to mark our migration from there to here, we lean back, back, back to the poetry and myths of our grandparents, who whether they were from villages or from cities, had set to memory entire libraries of Afghan literature.  It is in the space between storytellers and story-listeners that Afghan American literature was born.

Stay tuned for an update on other details of the anthology…