I could have tasted death for a taste of your tongue,

watching you eat ice cream when we were young.

Sanga, a sixteen-year-old girl whod gotten engaged to her cousin about a
month before I met her in the eastern city of Jalalabad, told me this landay. Her
cousin approached her on the walk to school and recited a landay to declare his
love: My mother loves me and God loves my mother / so God will reward you with
being my mothers daughter (my wife). Then he sent her the landay on the facing
page by text message, to which she responded via landay, saying that hed better
hurry up and send his family to ask for her hand in marriage since others were
already coming to her home. The young couple corresponds by landays.
Sanga and her older sister Salma asked me to wear a burqa when I came for
tea so that neighbors wouldnt gossip, which could lead to scandal for their family
or, worse, reprisal at the hands of the Taliban for hosting a foreign spy. Salma is a
radio host and teaches literature at the local university. She was worried about the
fate of professional women after the U.S. left. What will happen to us? she asked.

Mullah, give me back my billy goat.

Ive had no kiss despite that spell you wrote.
For a fee, such as a goat, Muslim holy men used to write spells, love charms,
and hexes. With the rise of stricter forms of Islam over the past several decades,
this practice, like facial tattoos, has fallen out of favor.
The call and response nature of landays has morphed into teasing and
sparring love poems between men and women; a kind of stichomythia that rivals
that of ancient Greece. Although its possible that a woman might sing one part and
a man another, theyre not really antiphonal. Its more likely that one singer will
recite the entire series to the beat of a drum. Then, in friendly competition around a
fire in the evening or on a couch in a sitting room in Kabul over after-dinner tea
a spirited rivalry will spring up between singers who try to outdo one another with
poems.
Girl:
When you kissed me, you bit me,
What will my mother say?
Griswold, Eliza, and Seamus Murphy. "LANDAYS." Poetry Foundation. Poetry
Foundation. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.
<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media/landays.html>.

Boy:
Give your mother this answer:
I went to fetch water and fell by the river.
Girl:
Your jug isnt broken, my mother will say,
so why is your bottom lip bleeding that way?
Boy:
Tell your mother this one:
My jug fell on clay, I fell on stone.
Girl:
You have all my mothers answers, sweet.
Now take my raw mouth bon apptit!

Send my salams to my lover.

If hes a farter, I fart louder.

Make a hole in Facebook and plant me one.

Tell your mother, Ive been bitten by a scorpion.
Among Afghans, farting is far more embarrassing and shameful than it is in
the West. Theres a folktale about a man who farts by mistake in front of his family
and out of shame leaves home for twenty years. When he returns, he stands outside
the door and hears his wife exhorting his children never to be farters like their
father. He leaves home for another twenty years. Beneath the raunch and humor,
the idea here is that a woman can be as vulgar a teaser as a man.
The second landay was posted by Eimal Dorani on his Pashto Landay
Facebook page, which now has more than twenty thousand likes. Dorani, like
many young Pashtuns, lives outside of Afghanistan. The members meet online to
share poems as a means to speak Pashto and to trade jokes and landays about
missing home Kabul-jan, dear Kabul and being separated from it. One of the
most often repeated words in landays is musafir traveler which essentially
describes anyone far from home, including Afghans who leave the country for
education, to make a living, or to escape war. On Facebook the landays are
frequently wistful both for the country itself and for a time before war when men
and women were free to interact openly. Along with the landays that readers send,
Dorani posts pictures. He has devised a method to swap landays with Pashtun
strangers, most of whom are fellow exiles living outside of the country. One posts a
Griswold, Eliza, and Seamus Murphy. "LANDAYS." Poetry Foundation. Poetry
Foundation. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.
<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media/landays.html>.

landay and then, in the comments, others respond with their own. Within a matter
of hours, landays morph and are remixed by different readers: a process that used
to take decades, even centuries. This has become a virtual competition and trading
site. These are landays of love, separation, and homeland. Heres the link:
facebook.com/pashtolanday.

Griswold, Eliza, and Seamus Murphy. "LANDAYS." Poetry Foundation. Poetry

Foundation. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.
<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media/landays.html>.