She Defied the Taliban

She Defied the Taliban, Now Secret Poet Killed by Husband

SHE risked torture, imprisonment, perhaps even death to study literature and write poetry in secret under the Taliban. Last week, when she should have been celebrating the success of her first book, Nadia Anjuman was beaten to death in Herat, apparently murdered by her husband.

The 25-year-old Afghan had garnered wide praise in literary circles for the book Gule Dudi, or Dark Flower, and was at work on a second volume.

Friends say her family was furious, believing that the publication of poetry by a woman about love and beauty had brought shame on it.

"She was a great poet and intellectual but, like so many Afghan women, she had to follow orders from her husband," Nahid Baqi, her best friend at Herat University, said.

Farid Ahmad Majid Mia, 29, Anjuman's husband, is in police custody after confessing to having slapped her during a row. But he denies murder and claims that his wife committed suicide. The couple had a six-month-old son.

The death of the young writer has shocked a city that prides itself on its artistic heritage. It has also raised uncomfortable questions about how much the position of women in Afghanistan has improved since the fall of the Taliban four years ago.

"This is a tragic loss for Afghanistan," Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the UN, said. "Domestic violence is a concern. This case illustrates how bad this problem is here and how it manifests itself. Women face exceptional challenges."

Anjuman's movements were being limited by her husband, her friends believe.

Her poetry alluded to an acute sense of confinement. "I am caged in this corner, full of melancholy and sorrow," she wrote in one poem, adding: "My wings are closed and I cannot fly." It concludes: "I am an Afghan woman and must wail."

Afghan human rights groups condemned Anjuman's death as evidence that the Government of President Hamid Karzai has failed to address the issue of domestic violence. It is especially tragic because she was one of a group of courageous women, known as the Sewing Circles of Herat, who risked their lives to keep the city's literary scene active under the Taliban regime.

Women were banned from working or studying by the Taliban, whose repressive edicts forbade women to laugh out loud or wear shoes that clicked. Female writers belonging to Herat's Literary Circle realised that one of the few things that women were still allowed to do was to sew. So three times a week, groups of women in burkas would arrive at a doorway marked Golden Needle Sewing School.

Had the authorities investigated, they would have discovered that the sewing students never made any clothes. Once inside the school, a brave professor of literature from Herat University would talk to them about Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and other banned writers.

Under a regime where even teaching a daughter to read was a crime, they might have been hanged if they had been caught.

I was taken to meet some of these women by Ahmed Said Haghighi, president of the Literary Circle, in December 2001, only days after the Taliban had fled. One of them, Leila, said that she stayed up till the early hours doing calculus because she so feared that her brain would atrophy.

Anjuman was part of this remarkable group. After the Taliban fell, she went to Herat University to study literature. "She was becoming a great Persian poet," Haghighi said.