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July 1, 2013
Documentary on Landay Poems Featured on Poetry Foundation's Website
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Afghanistan: On Love and Suicide
Anonymous and spoken, landai, two-line Pashtun poems, have served for centuries as a means of self...
![Media file: AfghanPoetry_Pulitzer_SeamusMurphy026.JPG](/sites/default/files/AfghanPoetry_Pulitzer_SeamusMurphy026_0.JPG "Zarmina Shehadi's mother Simin Gula and father Khel Mohammad. They denied that Zarmina wrote poetry or that her death was suicide. “It was an accident. She was trying to get warm after a bath, but the firewood was wet, so she poured petrol on it and caught herself on fire.” And no, her daughter absolutely did not like writing or reading or poetry, her mother argued. “She was a good girl, an uneducated girl. She was a good tailor. Our girls don’t want to go to school." Image by Seamus Murphy. Afghanistan, 2012.")
"Snake," featured by the Poetry Foundation online.
"Snake," a 15-minute documentary by Pulitzer Center grantees Seamus Murphy and Eliza Griswold, showcases the photography and video behind their Afghanistan landay project. Landays are two-line poems that reveal much about the usually hidden inner lives of Afghan women. The landays are a traditional art form, but they have been updated to reflect a country at war; they refer to drone attacks, the Internet and texting.
