Mick Hartley

Two years ago Nadia Anjuman, a young Afghan poet, was beaten to death by her husband. From the Times’ report:

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. […]

“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.”

Her family, it seems, refused to allow a post mortem to determine the cause of death. Her husband admitted to hitting her, but claimed she subsequently killed herself. So that’s the official cause of death: suicide.

From AFP:

Two years ago police discovered the battered body of Nadia Anjuman, a young Afghan poet already known in literary circles for her poignant poems about the misery of being a woman in Afghanistan.

Police arrested her husband on charges of beating her to death in their home in the western city of Herat; he confessed to the assault, but not to murder. Today, the case is classified by the courts as “suicide.”

The death of the 25-year-old thrust her work into the spotlight and, today, her poems – written in the Dari language, which is close to Persian – have been translated into several languages.

They speak of the pain of Afghan women, trapped in a conservative culture torn apart by nearly three decades of war, which were followed by the 1996 to 2001 rule of the extremist Taliban – known for their harsh treatment of women…

Anjuman’s work evokes “a great sorrow directly linked to her status as a woman and an Afghan,” says Leili Anvar, a literature expert who has translated some of her poems into French.

Under the Taliban, girls could not go to school, and women were barred from working and confined largely to their homes.

The removal of the fundamentalist regime has seen few improvements to the lives of most Afghan women, who suffer abuse and discrimination.

Women still choose to end their lives through self-immolation, including in Herat, an ancient city of 2 million people and known for its art, culture, and literature.

Anjuman “was becoming a great Persian poet,” the head of the respected Herat Literary Circle, Ahmad Said Haqiqi, said at the time of her death November 4, 2005.

Anvar, who has dedicated several pages of an upcoming anthology of Afghan poetry to Anjuman, agrees. “When one considers her age, the extreme maturity of her work is astonishing,” she says.

Then we hear, astonishingly, from the husband:

Anjuman’s husband, Farid Ahmad Majeednia, who is the head of the Herat University library, says she has written only about the Taliban period and before she was married.

“All of her poems are a narration of sorrow and sadness, which is a result of being imprisoned behind home walls,” says Majeednia, who is raising the couple’s young daughter.

“Now almost two years later, my hands and legs still tremble when I think of her death and her absence,” he says.

“After Nadia’s death, lots of things have ended for me.”

So not only does the wretched man almost certainly kill her, he now gets to decide what her poems were about (“only about the Taliban period and before she was married”), and is even allowed a little wallow in self-pity. He owned her in life, and now he owns her in death. Or at least he attempts to, with the help of the respectful treatment he gets, for whatever reason, here. Fortunately the poems survive to tell their own story. Here are a few English translations.