¹ The quote in the title comes from a poem by Elyas ‘Alavi, Avaz-e Gharib. The adjective gharib means strange, lonely, foreign, and is intended here to evoke a cry of desolation and dispossession. All translations of Persian poems and sources are by the author, with assistance and clarifications from the poets.

² This vignette is a fictionalized account of a typical Friday at the Dorr-e Dari [Pearl of the Dari Language] Afghan Cultural Centre in Mashhad, Iran based on regular participant observation by the author over a period of six months in 2005–06.

³ My thanks to Darryl Li for encouraging me to develop this point. This is in some ways analogous to the creative space in contemporary Iranian cinema in which, for example, veterans of the Iran-Iraq war have attempted to come to terms with the huge costs of the war, within certain limits: “What cinema does is reappropriate possibly critical images and memories and place them in a space of controlled mourning, where the correct effect and proper ghostly nuances are at hand.” Varzi, Roxanne, Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran (Durham & London, 2006), 192Google Scholar.

⁴ For a useful summary of discussions of exile, diaspora, liminality, and their application to the Iranian diaspora in North America, see Malek, A. “Memoir as Iranian Exile Cultural Production: A Case Study of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis Series,” Iranian Studies 39, no. 3 (Sept. 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Naficy, Hamid, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis, 1993)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the liminality between tradition and modernity among pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian intellectuals, see Fischer, Michael M. J., Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (Durham & London, 2004)Google Scholar, ch. 3 & 4.

⁵ Azoy, W. and Khalili, M., “Introduction,” in An Assembly of Moths (New Delhi, 2004), 11Google Scholar; this is a new volume of poetry by former poet laureate of Afghanistan, Khalilullah Khalili, in English translation.

⁶ Ghani, A., “The Persian Literature of Afghanistan, 1911–78, in the Context of its Political and Intellectual History,” Persian Literature (Albany, NY, 1988): 428Google Scholar.

⁷ Cf. Boesen, I. W., “Conflicts of Solidarity in Pakhtun Women's Lives,” Women and Islamic Societies: Social Attitudes and Historical Perspectives (London, 1983)Google Scholar; Edwards, David B., Pretexts of Rebellion: The Cultural Origins of Pakhtun Resistance to the Afghan State, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan (1986)Google Scholar; and Mills, Margaret A., Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional Storytelling (Philadelphia, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ E.g. Gholam Mohammad Tarzi, who was exiled to Karachi and then Istanbul in 1881 with his whole family; his son Mahmoud Tarzi who was exiled to Iran in 1929; and Seyyed Baha‘ ud-Din Majrouh, who was assassinated in Peshawar in 1988.

⁹ See, in particular, Abu-Lughod, Lila, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, 1986)Google Scholar; and Caton, Steven C., ‘Peaks of Yemen I Summon’: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Naficy, H., “The Poetics and Practice of Iranian Nostalgia in Exile,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies i (1991): 286CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ See Hanifi, M. J., “Anthropology and the Representation of Recent Migrations from Afghanistan,” in Rethinking Refuge and Displacement: Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants viii (Arlington, 2000)Google Scholar; Monsutti, Alessandro, Guerres et migrations: Réseaux sociaux et stratégies économiques des Hazaras d'Afghanistan (Neuchâtel, 2004)Google Scholar and “Cooperation, Remittances and Kinship among the Hazaras,” Iranian Studies 37, no. 2 (June 2004); and P. Centlivres and M. Centlivres-Demont, “Exil et diaspora afghane en Suisse et en Europe,” Cahiers d'Etudes sur la Méditerranée Orientale et le Monde Turco-Iranien xxx (June-December, 2000).

¹² See for example, Castles, S. and Loughna, S., “Trends in asylum migration to industrialized countries, 1990–2001,” in Poverty, International Migration and Asylum (London, 2005)Google Scholar.

¹³ Neither is it possible, in the Iranian context, to dismiss anti-Soviet resistance ideology as merely propaganda dispensed by Western journalists or the Central Intelligence Agency, as Hanifi claims; see Hanifi, “Anthropology and the Representation…,” 297).

¹⁴ See Hassan Kakar, M., Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979–82 (Berkeley, 1995), 94–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar for an overview of the Shi‘a mojahedin organizations and their histories.

¹⁵ In fact, the word ‘mohajerin’ is difficult to translate accurately because of its subtle shades of meaning which have changed over time. Shahrani has argued that the word carries specifically Islamic connotations, recalling the prototypical Hijra of Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Medina, which meant that fleeing Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation was intrinsically a political act of resistance against the atheist invaders. Cf. Nazif Shahrani, M., “Afghanistan's Muhajirin (Muslim ‘Refugee-Warriors’): Politics of Mistrust and Distrust of Politics,” Mistrusting Refugees (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar. However, to complicate matters, in Iran today, mohajerat seems to have lost its religious overtones and is used synonymously with “migration”—e.g., mohajerat-e eqtesadi is economic or labor migration, while the word panahandegi is used for seeking political asylum in another country and is used by Afghans in Iran applying for resettlement to a third country through the United Nations. Nonetheless, many Afghans I spoke to indeed referred to the religious injunction to flee in the face of religious persecution when describing their departure from Afghanistan.

¹⁶ Poetry of the ‘jihad’ in the Pashtun language also developed in the refugee communities in Pakistan. Both oral and written literature was flourishing in the refugee camps and the bazaar of Peshawar, disseminated orally, published as chapbooks, or sung to musical accompaniment and tape recorded (Edwards, Pretexts of Rebellion). As in Iran, “Love and eroticism are praised less, while religious outpourings, the call to holy war, nostalgia for the ancestral land, the sense of honor, and the glorification of heroism dominate. (…) …the war's dark wing and the despair of exodus haunt the melodies.” Majrouh, Sayd Bahodine, Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women's Poetry (New York, 2003), 42Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Edwards, Pretexts of Rebellion, 472.

¹⁸ Known as ‘Rumi’ in the West (after his home in Roman Anatolia); the epithet ‘Balkhi’ is proudly used by Afghans in honor of his birthplace in today's Afghanistan. However, both Iranians and Afghans more commonly refer to him in abbreviated form simply by his title, ‘Maulana.’

¹⁹ Cf. A. Ghani, “The Persian Literature of Afghanistan”; Karimi-Hakkak, A., “Introduction,” in An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry (Boulder, 1978)Google Scholar; H. Katouzian, “The Emergence and Development of Modern Persian Literature,” lecture delivered to the Oxford University Persian Society (Oxford, 3 March 2005).

²⁰ H. Hojjati, “Adabiyat-e moqavemat dar afghanestan [Resistance Literature in Afghanistan],” Daneshnameh-ye adab-e farsi 3: 64b.

²¹ Mozaffari, S. A. T., “Pishgoftar [Foreword]” in Gisuan-e gij: Daftari az she‘rha-ye nasl-e javan-e mohajer (Mashhad, 1384/2005), 12Google Scholar.

²² Hojjati, “Adabiyat-e moqavemat,” 67a. Other Iranian influences at this time included Abdoljabbar Kaka'i and Alireza Qazveh.

²³ ‘Ali Mo‘allem's Islamic and Third-Worldist sympathy for the Afghan “Islamic Revolution” against the Soviet invaders, as well as his friendship with Afghan poets, is evident from his remarks in the Introduction to one anthology of resistance poetry (Kazemi, M. K. and Rahmani, M. A., ed., She‘r-e moqavemat-e afghanestan (Tehran, 1370/1991)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Several of these men have now emigrated further afield, to Europe or Australia.

²⁵ Republished in Kazemi, Mohammad Kazem, Qesse-ye sang va khesht: Gozine-ye she‘r [A Tale of Stone and Brick: Selected Poems] (Tehran, 1384/2005), 40Google Scholar.

²⁶ Mahmoud Ekrami (“Khazan”), “Inak hamnamak hastim” [Now We Eat the Same Salt], Qods Daily (17 ordibehesht 1380/7 May 2001).

²⁷ Hojjati, “Adabiyat-e moqavemat,” 68b.

²⁸ Dorr-e Dari and Khatt-e Sevvom promotional booklet (Mashhad, n.d.): inside front cover.

²⁹ Identity is a slippery and strategic thing: those who have, by some means, managed to acquire Iranian shenasnamehs (identity cards) no longer identify as Afghan but Iranian; I know of one such young man from the refugee quarter of Mashhad who joined the air force and became the most patriotic of Iranians. This suggests that if they were given the option, perhaps the majority of long-staying Afghans would choose to assimilate and ‘become’ Iranian, like their Barbari or Khavari cousins before them. Cf. Adelkhah and Olszewska, this volume.

³⁰ In this, they are perhaps not so different from their Iranian peers, many of whom also suffer from disaffection and alienation, for reasons that are related, although their feelings of exclusion bear a very different complexion. The post-revolution Islamic Republic has failed to deliver the social welfare and justice that it promised even to its citizens, and the baby boomers of the war years in particular have suffered from this as they reached adulthood. On Iranian youth, cf. Varzi, Warring Souls.

³¹ Cf. Abbasi-Shavazi, Mohammad Jalal, Glazebrook, Diana, Jamshidiha, Gholamreza, Mahmoudian, Hossein and Sadeghi, Rasoul, Return to Afghanistan? A Study of Afghans Living in Mashhad, Islamic Republic of Iran (Kabul, 2005), 21Google Scholar. Literacy rates in late-1970s Afghanistan were estimated at between 5 and 10 percent of males and about 1 percent of females (Mills, Rhetorics and Politics, 3).

³² Cf. P. Piran “Effects of Social Interaction between Afghan Refugees and Iranians on Reproductive Health Attitudes,” Disasters xxviii (2004); E. R. Povey, “Women in Afghanistan: Passive Victims of the Borga or Active Social Participants?” Development in Practice xiii (May 2003); and H. Hoodfar, “Families on the Move: The Changing Role of Afghan Refugee Women in Iran,” Hawwa ii (2004).

³³ Abbasi-Shavazi et al., Return to Afghanistan?, 47.

³⁴ Cf. Z. Olszewska, “Stealing the Show: Women Writers at an Afghan Literary Festival in Tehran,” Bad Jens: Iranian Feminist Newsletter (2005), http://www.badjens.com/afghan.lit.html.

³⁵ This is captured well by Fischer in an ethnography of “Persian poesis”: “One does dard-e del [confiding the pain of one's heart] with a sympathetic listener, which is usually not a person, but a mountain, a light, a shrine, a well, the Qur'an. Such sadness is not a weakness but a source of strength.” (Fischer, Mute Dreams, 216).

³⁶ This same filmmaker was recently making a film on the “identity crisis” of Afghan youth as seen through the eyes of a certain foreign anthropologist and the poets she interviews.

³⁷ Compare, e.g., the developments in Urdu poetry with the decline of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century: “The crumbling of empire, and of its edifice of unquestioned authority, also encouraged the growth of free enquiry rather than dogma, of individual mysticism rather than collective belief, and of fearless satire: all contributing to the complexity and subtlety of the poetry.” Futehally, Shama, Slivers of a Mirror: Glimpses of the Ghazal (Ahmedabad, 2005), 12Google Scholar.

³⁸ For a critical overview of the stylistic, thematic, and formal characteristics of the young generation's poetry, see the contributions in “Vizhenameh-ye she‘r-e javan-e mohajerat [Special section on refugee youth poetry],” Khatt-e Sevvom vii (spring 1384/2006): 89–134.

³⁹ Mozaffari, “Pishgoftar,” 15. The original uses the Quranic images of the “apple and wheat” eaten by Adam and Eve, and “the fall to Sarandib” rather than expulsion from the garden.

⁴⁰ With the exception of the legendary poetry evenings at the Afghan consulate in Mashhad after 2001, which were discontinued allegedly due to their lack of restraint in gender mixing and openness to poetic content that offended more conservative tastes.

⁴¹ The latter is also demonstrated by the frequent and sympathetic mention of the Buddha in post-Taliban era poetry, in reference to the statues which were destroyed in Bamyan province.

⁴² There are hints that this is already happening in Iranian cinema, which has recently been preoccupied with Afghans and Afghanistan, without giving Afghans much power to speak for themselves. As award-winning director Samira Makhmalbaf said about the film she shot in Afghanistan, Panj-e Asr [At Five O'clock in the Afternoon], “This film is not only about Afghanistan but it could very well have happened in Iran. (…) The Taliban is our backwardness;” (Cited in Fischer, Mute Dreams, 347).