Change: a poem from The Poetry of the Taliban
[ by Charles Cameron — poetry in time of war, symbolism / semiotics of blood and martyrdom, analogies with Jefferson and St Augustine, sacramental nature of reality ]
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Felix Kuehn and Alex Strick van Linschoten’s book The Poetry of the Taliban (Hurst, Columbia UP) contains a remarkable poem composed in the 1990s by one Bismillah Sahar:
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Change
The spring of change needs blood to rain down,
It requires the irrigation of the gardens with blood.
Valuing the blood of the people of the past
Requires the price of human blood.
Each drop of it has become a Nile of the dawn’s blood;
The Pharaohs want to fill the Nile with blood
Sitting here in California seven thousand miles and many cultures distant and more than a decade later, the phrase “spring of change” has an interesting ring to it – but it was likely not the not-yet-deposed Mubarak that Sahar was thinking of when he penned his lyric about the Pharaoh, but “the Oppressor” — whomever that might be. The imagery of the Pharaoh is a common enough trope, in fact, used for instance by the Taliban to describe President GW Bush in their magazine Al-Sumud [ link is to preview, relevant chapter of Master Narratives of islamist Extremism.
And while it is true that, as Asim Qureshi notes, “poetry links the ancient past with the modern day”, neither the trope itself nor the reference to the plight of the Jews in Egypt is exclusive to Afghanistan in specific or Islam in general. Indeed, Martin Luther King explicitly views himself as what theology would term a “type” of Moses when he says:
We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
These sacramental bleedings of the past into the present as in a palimpsest are native to the imagination and powerful in their poetic impact, as MLK’s life, final speech and death eloquently testify.
But there is a second layer of sacramental reality at work in the poem, and it lies in the repeated mention of blood. – the transition between past an present itself being presented in terms of blood spilled in the lines:
Valuing the blood of the people of the past
Requires the price of human blood.
The past requires a price from the present, then, and that price is paid in blood.
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The poem is six lines long, and there is not a line of it that does not contain the word blood. Again:
The spring of change needs blood to rain down,
It requires the irrigation of the gardens with blood.
Valuing the blood of the people of the past
Requires the price of human blood.
Each drop of it has become a Nile of the dawn’s blood;
The Pharaohs want to fill the Nile with blood.
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Zeus “poured bloody drops earthwards, honoring his own son, whom Patroklos was soon to destroy in fertile Troy far from his homeland”, Homer writes in the Iliad, 16.459, and the associations of rain with tears, and of spilled blood with spilled life, are ancient and pervasive.
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