Nadia Anjuman: The Dark Flower of Hope

From this hands, these feet and words, it looks strange
That my name is written on the slate of this age, my song.

Half a world away and a few years ago, Nadia Anjuman Herawi, an Afghani poet was beaten to death by her husband in the privacy of their home. At 25, Nadia had managed to survive the years of control by the Taliban, a fundamentalist Sunni Islam Sect that promoted a narrow interpretation of Islam. When they banned women from learning at the University, she enrolled at the Golden Needle Sewing School, a "school" deemed to teach appropriate skills for women. Yet behind the doors of the Golden Needle nothing was sewn. Women came to be taught literature in secret by a University Professor, even though they all knew that to be caught at such a task would mean death by hanging.

Nadia survived this. She wrote and thrived, publishing her first collection "Gul-e-Dodi" (the dark red flower) to critical and popular acclaim in Afghanistan and Iran. Her husband and his family were furious over the book, believing that the publication of poetry by a woman, about love and beauty, had brought shame to them. In November of 2005, Nadia did not survive a culture in which women lived under their husband's rule and beatings were not only permitted but condoned, she fell unconscious, never to wake, and passed from this life.

It is easy, in honoring her, to dismiss Nadia's struggles as a woman under oppression in some distant country and, while we are moved by her accomplishments, relegate her to having chosen to exist in a higher sphere then that which is available to us. We honor her, yet at the same time, reject her life and do not allow her heroism to inspire our own because we make of her a tragic but removed symbol. Nadia's life and works, in their extremes, highlight the need and potential in all of us to speak and never be silenced; to live in pursuit of the fulfillment of our own lives and to serve as an inspiration to those who continue to struggle in all types of conditions.

Life is more than about living, it is about being, and "being" encompasses the expression and fulfillment of all the needs of our soul. In the artist, these needs may surface in a tangible expression outside of our bodies. In others, it may be in the pursuit of a passionate calling. Both involve the fulfillment of the part of our lives that make our existence unique and necessary. What makes us unique is our individual capacity for genius and happiness. This capacity is what makes our lives necessary, for the world around us benefits from our contributions. Yet making the choice to seek your fulfillment can be fraught with risk.

The risks involved may cause effects that span a spectrum of consequences. Some choices may result in the loss of occupation, comfort and acceptance that society would lead us to believe is so readily available to anyone willing to follow the "rules". So ingrained is the mythology of these rules, that making the choice to follow a different path, one with no known rewards but rooted in the faith of the individual, will bring with it a desperate internal battle to justify the pursuit. A person choosing to pursue fulfillment, as in Nadia's case, may run against such extreme rules that they threaten their very life and the arguments against this kind of choice are very persuasive.

So why choose at all? Why not try to achieve fulfillment within the predefined boundaries that a society or culture has set? Why didn't Nadia, with full knowledge of the risk, choose to be a dilettante in her own life, merely touching the choice and reserving the right to back off before it became to dangerous and the words, once spoken , unable to be taken back?

Nadia's tradition, within the Muslim faith and culture, includes a history not only of women poets but of a poetic tradition devoted to the "religion of love" prescribed by Muslim Mystics. In the "ghazal", the voice of faith is hidden beneath the symbolism of a women's voice crying out in the pain caused by separation from her beloved. Much like the Christian "Song of Songs", this poetic form is a means of expressing longing for the Divine and a life filled with its presence that is easily understood. Faith is an intimate relationship with the Divine, full of all the love and longing, disagreements and misunderstandings and eventual reunion of the lovers.

The idea of doing only "so much" when you know there is more that can realistically be done would have seemed not only like an immense betrayal of self but a betrayal of everything in which you believe. People trapped beneath a societal pressure to conform, such as Nadia, are in danger of falling prey to a kind of apathy that prevents them from pursuing all the avenues of expression open to them. The consequences presented threaten to overwhelm the reward of the choices. Through her words, her ghazals, Nadia and others like her, found expression for the desires of their soul that allowed their hope to survive.

In her longing, in her words of love and beauty, Nadia struggled to keep alive the knowledge that her life was worth every effort. She joined others and together they inspired each other to continue being in a time when it seemed best to hope for merely staying alive. One of Nadia's fellow students at 'the Golden Needle' commented of the Taliban era, that life under them, for women, amounted to no more than being cows in a shed. Women were seen as property, chattel and of no importance except for their worth in bearing children and serving their husbands.

For Nadia and others, to quiet their voices in deference to the rules of someone else was unthinkable. For her to speak and write and attempt to keep her life in freedom was as strong a worship as any prayer she could have offered or any ghazal she could have written for it expressed her hope and longing for reunion with the Divine. To cast it in non-religious imagery, Nadia sought a reunion between the way she lived her life and all that her being required to be fulfilled. Phrased in those words, her struggle is similar to one we face no matter what type of society or conditions we live under.

The choices demand that we define the worth of our life. Our choice of definition will be expressed most eloquently in our actions. Do we act as if our internal lives are 'second place' to the demands of our society and culture? Or do we live as if the fulfillment of our lives has a place of importance, not just because it has value to ourselves but because we truly believe it will contribute to the world around us? Either we have faith in our ability to make choices, or we live as if we are so unreliable as to need guidance and governance not only in what we consider to be our personal worth, but to define our hope for the future.

Your choices in life reflect your hope. The students of the Golden Needle choose to continue their studies and explorations despite an oppressive culture because their hope for the future demanded it. Hope is the only weapon we have against the kind of apathy that lets our lives be consumed by the judgments of others. In hope we can begin to picture ourselves as possible and make choices that open opportunities for what we imagine to be realized. With hope we can begin to take small steps to stop merely living and begin the process of being.

Imagine what the world would be like if instead of trying to live within the confines of rules set to preserve the status quo, we lived in service of our hope for the future. Imagine if every person alive believed their life had value and that what they thought was important to the world around them. Imagine that no other person would lose their life over the simple act of writing words of love and longing, because the love and longing were there for all and coming to an individual understanding of them was a rite of passage, rather than a condemned act.

Nadia's life is not important because she was lost. Her life is important because her hope, her faith, her effort to be heard and her talent speak across nations, across cultures, across time. Her life carries the message that what is within you is worth saying, worth fighting for, worth risking all safety for the chance at a better future. Her words never deny the reality of her pain and fear and loss, but in them is the unspoken acknowledgment that our individual lives, simply because we exist, are worth every effort. The hope we have inside of us, can carry us through any difficult time  -  if, as Nadia did, we have the strength to withstand the judgments that assail its value and choose to live and act as if our hope is a precious life to be protected and nurtured.

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