An enjoyable worth reading book review by Jalees Rehman. It is not only a review on the book, but also compares and explores the beauty of German and English writing. Some excerpts from the review;

“Shorter sentences and simple words!” was the battle cry of all my English teachers. Their comments and corrections of our English-language essays and homework assignments were very predictable. Apparently, they had all sworn allegiance to the same secret Fraternal Order of Syntax Police. I am sure that students of the English language all over the world have heard similar advice from their teachers, but English teachers at German schools excel in their diligent use of linguistic guillotines to chop up sentences and words. The problem is that they have to teach English to students who think, write and breathe in German, the lego of languages.

Lego blocks invite the observer to grab them and build marvelously creative and complex structures. The German language similarly invites its users to construct composite words and composite sentences. A virtually unlimited number of composite nouns can be created in German, begetting new words which consist of two, three or more components with meanings that extend far beyond the sum of their parts. The famous composite German word “Schadenfreude” is now used worldwide to describe the shameful emotion of joy when observing harm befall others. It combines “Schaden” (harm or damage) and “Freude” (joy), and its allure lies in the honest labeling of a guilty pleasure and the inherent tension of combining two seemingly discordant words.

The lego-like qualities of German can also be easily applied to how sentences are structured. Commas are a German writer’s best friends. A German sentence can contain numerous clauses and sub-clauses, weaving a quilt of truths, tangents and tangential truths, all combined into the serpentine splendor of a single sentence. Readers may not enjoy navigating their way through such verschachtelt sentences, but writers take great pleasure in envisioning a reader who unwraps a sentence as if opening a matryoshka doll only to find that the last word of a mammoth sentence negates its fore-shadowed meaning.

Even though our teachers indulged such playfulness when we wrote in German, they were all the more harsh when it came to our English assignments. They knew that we had a hankering for creating long sentences, so they returned them to us covered in red ink markings, indicative of their syntactic fervor. This obsession with short sentences and words took the joy out of writing in English. German was the language of beauty and poetry, whereas English became the language best suited for efficient communication. By the time I reached my teenage years, I began to lose interest in writing anything in English beyond our mandatory school assignments. I still enjoyed reading books in English, such as the books of Enid Blyton, but I could not fathom how a language of simple sentences and simple words could be used to create works of literary beauty. This false notion fell apart when I first read “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe.

I was not prepared for the impact the book would have on me. Great books shake us up, change us in a profound and unpredictable manner, leaving footprints that are etched into the rinds of our soul. “Things Fall Apart” was the first great English language book that I read. I was mesmerized by its language. This book was living proof that one could write a profound and beautiful book in English, using short, simple sentences.

As the Ibo say: “When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.”

And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion– to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.

Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.

A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk.

It wasn’t just the beautiful language, aphorisms, Igbo proverbs and haunting images that made this book so unique. “Things Fall Apart” contained no heroes. The books that I had read before “Things Fall Apart” usually made it obvious who the hero was. But “Things Fall Apart” was different. Okonkwo was no hero, not even a tragic hero. But he also was no villain. As with so many of the characters in the book, I could see myself in them and yet I was also disgusted by some of the abhorrent acts they committed. I wanted to like Okonkwo, but I could not like a man who participated in the killing of his adopted son or nearly killed his wife in a fit of anger.

Most of us would end up being neither true
heroes nor true villains but composites of heroism and villainy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jalees-rehman/composites-german-languag_b_3353564.html

Posted By F. Sheikh

A worth reading book review, I Am Beggar Of The World, by Malik Kenan on collection of Afghan folk poetry, mostly composed by women expressing their repressed raw feelings.

You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

Afghanistan is a nation with a fine poetical tradition reaching back centuries, a tradition in which high literary forms, especially those that derive from Persian or Arabic, are revered. I Am a Beggar of the World is, however, a collection of landays, folk rather than high poetry, an oral tradition created by and for mostly illiterate people, especially women. Traditionally, landays are sung aloud, often to the beat of a hand drum, which, along with other kinds of music, was banned by the Taliban.

A landay has only a few formal properties. Each has twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line, thirteen in the second. Sometimes they rhyme, but more often not. The landays in I Am a Beggar of the Worldwere collected by American poet and writer Eliza Griswold. In a 2012 essay in the New York Times, Griswold described the meaning and significance of the form:

Pashtun poetry has long been a form of rebellion for Afghan women, belying the notion that they are submissive or defeated. Landay means ‘short, poisonous snake’ in Pashto, a language spoken on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The word also refers to two-line folk poems that can be just as lethal. Funny, sexy, raging, tragic, landay are safe because they are collective. No single person writes a landay; a woman repeats one, shares one. It is hers and not hers. Although men do recite them, almost all are cast in the voices of women. ‘Landay belong to women’, Safia Siddiqi, a renowned Pashtun poet and former Afghan parliamentarian, said. ‘In Afghanistan, poetry is the women’s movement from the inside.’

Traditionally, landay have dealt with love and grief. They often railed against the bondage of forced marriage with wry, anatomical humor… But they have also taken on war, exile and Afghan independence with ferocity… More recently, landay have taken on the Russian occupation, the hypocrisy of the Taliban and the American military presence.

Like most folk literature, Griswold observes, ‘landay can be sorrowful or bawdy. Imagine the Wife of Bath riding through the Himalayan foothills and uttering landay so ribald that they curled the toes of her fellow travelers’.

The drones have come to the Afghan sky.
The mouths of our rockets will sound in reply.

Come to Guantánamo.
Follow the clang of my chains.

May God destroy the Taliban and end their wars.
They’ve made Afghan women widows and whores.

Wormwood grows on the one-eyed Mullah’s grave.
The Talib boys fight blindly on, believing he’s alive.

Hamid Karzai came to Kabul
to teach our girls to dress in Dollars.

I dream I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.

Griswold started collecting landays after learning the story of Rahila Muska, a young woman who, like many in rural Afghanistan, was forbidden from leaving her home. ‘Fearing that she’d be kidnapped or raped by warlords’, Griswold writes in an essay introducing the new collection, ‘her father pulled her out of school after the fifth grade. Poetry, which she learned from other women and on the radio, became her only form of education’:

These days, for women, poetry programs on the radio are one of the few permissible forms of access to the outside world. Such was the case for Rahila Muska, who learned about a women’s literary group called Mirman Baheer via the radio. The group meets in the capital of Kabul every Saturday afternoon; it also runs a phone hotline for girls from the provinces, like Muska, to call in with their own work or to talk to fellow poets. Muska, which means smile in Pashto, phoned in so frequently and showed such promise that she became the darling of the literary circle. She alluded to family problems that she refused to discuss.

One day in the spring of 2010, Muska phoned her fellow poets from a hospital bed in the southeastern city of Kandahar to say that she’d set herself on fire. She’d burned herself in protest. Her brothers had beaten her badly after discovering her writing poems. Poetry — especially love poetry — is forbidden to many of Afghanistan’s women: it implies dishonor and free will. Both are unsavory for women in traditional Afghan culture. Soon after, Muska died.

Griswold travelled to Afghanistan with the photographer Seamus Murphy on an assignment for theNew York Times Magazine ‘to piece together what I could of [Muska’s] brief life story’:

Finding Muska’s family seemed an impossible task — one dead teenage poet writing under the safety of a pseudonym in a war zone — but eventually, with the aid of a highly-effective Pashtun organization called Wadan, the Welfare Association for the Development of Afghanistan, we were able to locate her village and find her parents. Her real name, it turned out, was Zarmina, and her story was about more than poetry.

This was a love story gone awry. Engaged at an early age to her cousin, she’d been forbidden from marrying him, because after the recent death of his father, he couldn’t afford the volver, the bride price. Her love was doomed and her future uncertain; death became the one control she could assert over her life.

You sold me to an old man, father.

May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

Although she didn’t write this poem, Rahila Muska often recited landays over the phone to the women of Mirman Baheer. This is common: of the tens of thousands of landays in circulation, the handful a woman remembers relate to her life. Landays survive because they belong to no one. Unlike her notebooks, the little poem couldn’t be ripped up and destroyed by Muska’s father.

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/i-am-the-beggar-of-the-world/