Kamran Mir Hazar(Afghanistan)

Kamran Mir Hazar

Kamran Mir Hazar

(Afghanistan, 1976)   

Kamran Mir Hazar is a prominent Hazara journalist, human rights activist and writer who now lives with his wife and one-year-old daughter in Hønefoss, Norway, where he also works. He has set up two much-read websites: the news site www.kabulpress.org and the more literary-focused www.rahapen.org.

Mir Hazar is a politically committed poet. of educational books and publications on politics and censorship  His poetry is influenced not only by his own Persian-language cultural tradition but also by Latin American writers such as the Mexican Juan Rulfo and the Colombian Garcia Marquez. He has had two poetry collections published: lahn-e tond-e asbi dar ezlâ'-e parvân-e sjodan (The Cry of a Mare about to become a Butterfly) in Stockholm in 2009, and before that, Ketâb-e mehr (The Book of Mehr). Mir Hazar’s criticism of the general treatment of Afghan refugees meant that his first poetry collection was prevented from being published in 1995 by the Iranian censorship board.

 In 1999, he wrote an open letter to the UN, UNESCO and UNICEF in which he described the fate of numerous Afghan men, women and children, and which was signed by 330 Afghan and Iranian intellectuals. It was not warmly received by the regime. Mir Hazar’s most recent book, Censorship in Afghanistan, has recently been published by Norway’s IP Plans e-Books. It is the first book to explore the systematic suppression of free speech in Afghanistan, which has been a feature of its ruling authorities for hundreds of years.

In 2004, Mir Hazar returned to Afghanistan, where he set up a critical literary magazine. A few weeks later the publication was banned. He then became news editor and reporter of two Kabul radio stations, Kelid (Key) and Salâm Watandâr (Greetings Fellow Countryman!) His continued fight against Hamid Karzai’s increasingly repressive regime has been supported by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), Reporters sans Frontières and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). His clashes with the authorities have deeply affected Mir Hazar; he has compared the appalling conditions in the local prisons with Guantanamo and later described them in a series of five poems entitled Viroes-e nevesjtan (Writing Virus). After his release, Mir Hazar feared for his own safety and his journalistic projects and decided to leave his country for good. After travelling to India, and with the UNHCR’s intervention, he ended up in Norway.
Some of his poems:-

A BRONZED FACE AND TINY PURPLE VEINS

A bronzed face and tiny purple veins,
A smooth face of Mayan mould,
The colors of saffron and pasture,
Hunched in a bright overcoat
And woolen hat,
The long coat’s tassels wary of the slashing winds of mountain land,
On the invisible flag: whiteness and the antlers of a stag
With a heart dispersed and diffused;
Ferried by a gramophone’s sound waves,
Sensation is channelled in the air,
The command, the book and the empire of catapults, and way before
A sensation is in the air, expanding
In the arm, and the disintegrating arm,
In the solitude of darkness
And when someone’s death is announced in the hour of divination,
Hiding from life,
And escaping between the clear and the blurred faces,
A desire for the pulse to drop,
In the cleft of a ruby; the fruit of Badakhshan ; and a crying face;
In the birth of eyelashes and the soft fabric of shivering dew,
To appear and to nestle between tresses,
The burning of intense fever, lubricious more than ever, magnetic more than ever;
Swinging in the direction of inopportunity, the wheel of fortune, turning
And standing;

In a curling clock destined to melt,
Slippery on the cheeks, the annihilator of the restless cloak, endlessly turning;
You stand,
You watch,
You drink tea;
Like a rainbow, you slip on the chair;
You pick up a cigarette,
And light it;

The flickering lantern awakens,
Swirls around the cloak,
Rising from the margins, coloured blue,
And stands on your heart,
Evaporates through your eyes;
Creeping to a corner is an emerald ring stone,
The slippery past of a faraway destiny,
And you reach the curved line,
Entering a geography of latitudes and longitudes,
The composition quickens;
In the middle of the open field, again and again,
A church turns into ruins,
Recomposing in the breaking of light and the unique path of your voice,
And passes through latitudes and longitudes;
The heat lifts the cloak,
Settling on the crucifix of your ribcage,
On the chair, shivering,
With the fluttering fabric of dew
You drink tea,
You light up the rainbow lamp,
You drown,
And the pen turns round and round,
And you write your own death;
It moves up your fingers,
Pursuing the path to your mouth,
You collapse within your pulse,
You write this,
And you disintegrate between the seconds;
You go to the post office,
You ask for a letter of the perished,
Searching for an omen;
You take the by-way,
You look for an epiphany,
In a rainbow shawl,
And shake crimson-coloured medals,
You say hello, peace be upon you,
And then goodbye;
You are dispersed between the sound waves of a gramophone,
Your heart diffused and ferried by the sound waves of a gramophone,
You stay at home
And seek prophecy,
Searching for an omen in the hours;
The bronzed face heats up,
You wrap yourself around my body;
Looking for where the breaths join up,
You’re released in my throat;
You move up,
Become tears
And flow down my cheeks;
You go to the post office,
Seeking a letter from the dead;

A longing to let go,
A date with the unsung heroes of time,
And empires beyond the age when writing was invented;
The ones that were never put in ink,
Embarking on the saddle, taming the lines,
Abandoning time, leaving the five senses behind;
That bronzed face, a prototype found when iron was discovered
A one that never, ever found reflection in ink.

VIRUS WRITING

1.
Writing viruses
And electronic labyrinths
With a blackout and no computer
In a rented house, at seven thousand a month;
Kabul, the Afghan capital!
What silly poem is this?

You ask yourself, is poetry the same lonely words that wander in electronic corridors,
Cut off from their existence,
Thrown away, with no choice but to become a poem?
You watch imagination wandering through paths, over the paths,
You throw the leash at yet another word,
Trying to subdue this wild one,
And if you fail,
You stop functioning,
Like a computer crashed.
2.
There was someone, someone who wrote viruses
Behind a diesel-powered laptop
Looking for URLs and
An anonymous mail would be sent
Connecting you to a site, infected;
“I am from Florida, the USA, and 23 years of age,
Looking for someone to follow the link, and make happy”;
To open the mail and to make someone happy?
First, stop the programs;
Passing through security, typing 97, 98, 99,
Approaching the death of romance between zero and one.

A virus-writer drank half a beer bottle at once;
Then, computer deaths;
First to the east of Paris, a house,
Australia, three minutes more,
A man is waiting out the last minutes of an office shift
Needs to get home;
A party is starting in half an hour;
The Philippines, minutes later,
A 19-year-old girl
In a chat room,
Showing off a used body;
In Egypt, more or less the same time,
And the next morning, Kabul.
3.
You, and you, also you,
Yes, you and also you,
You are all arrested!
4.
They tell me, stop writing!
You write and we’ll show you Guantanamo at home,
You write, we’ll kill you.
Kabul, summer of ’07
Hands in handcuffs, feet tied up;
This is Afghanistan, and this here where it is going,
Dead bodies over dead bodies.
The poem has no choice but to stop writing itself.
This is prison.
5.
They asked a Kabul sparrow
Just what is mankind up to?
The sparrow considered this and died!

 

Music

 With respect

with love

with the shining sound of Ghamar Al-Molook Vaziri (1)

with wild red-winged horses

 with the circle of a wave that runs through a the wave

with Ney Anban 

with the paradisiacal tones of a saxophone

with travel

with the inventor of the first plane

A lost sense

drinking wine in lost taverns

the duty of the first cupbearer

the duty of the first lovely melody

the first one who submitted to travel

became a passenger

packed the suitcase

the one who never spoke in his native language

the one whose words got disturbed through French words

with the humbleness with love

with happy music

the pure descendent of Kooshaniyan 

with the child of the sorrowful Mir Hazar–the king of kings- 

from the poet of rains

With respect

with the royalty of the month October

and the time that knelt down on his veins

and rain that would be rich towards all countries and divisions

maybe by the Brazilian god

the god who worked in all cane sugar farmlands

by the unformed and air-like naked space 

connected to one foot of the devil

with the red-skinned of the south of the California

with red rose’s ceremony in the disturbed Afghanistan 

and the being strange of our martyr

In each land which rain falls on

the sorrowful poet is in each land

by the sky,

by water,

by the soil, fire and wind which are current in the time’s figure

and has got rolled in death by magic

that it’s the very measure

the quality which comes from lost windows

and that’s not a volley of any gun

death is living inside the world’s soul

the identity out of all fantasies

without feeling any pain

you will become a garden

that is watered by a virgin

Death is the formed sense of the human-beings

that it is the measure

and the time is equal with what human-beings can do

time will stay equal till the passenger returns his home

out of the current of all betting and tickets of lottery

time is rolled in death by magic

and this sunken ship will return to tattooing over and over again

and its passenger will arise

for participation in a ceremony

to see the fight in the field of bullfight

in the beginning of a painting which rain falls on

Rain will be towards all lands

towards all the countries and divisions

towards the fully-lined face of an afghan soldier

towards the unformed and air-like naked space

directed to the space of thunder and song

this dusty cradle and old stage-coach

connected to one foot of the Devil

while beginning of the ceremony and singing inspirations

to form a ballet in the grief of whom you like

Getting pushed towards an afghan melody

while getting blended with the shining sound of Ghamar Al-Molook Vaziri

joining the first tones

by the initial tones

by music.