Pir Muhammad Karwan: Pashto poet of Khost and the Peshawar exile

At a glance

• Pir Muhammad Karwan (پیر محمد کاروان) is a Pashto poet and short-story writer from Narizi, a village in Tani district of Khost province. Maryam Siddiqi, writing for Khaama Press in 2024, gives his birth as 1338 of the solar Hijri calendar, which began in March 1959. [6, 7]

• He is the son of Nur Muhammad. Karwan, "caravan", is a pen-name that, in one profile, he took as a boy. [6, 7]

• He trained as a machinist, worked in factories, farmed, left Afghanistan for Iran in 1362 SH and for Peshawar at the end of 1369 SH, and wrote for exile magazines and a radio drama there. [6]

• His first book of poems, La mashama tar mashama ("From Evening to Evening"), came out in the early 1990s. Five collections of verse and two of stories are named in profiles of him. [2, 5–7]

• He is alive, and profiles of the mid-2020s place him in Khost. [6]

A boyhood under a plane tree

Muhammad Allah Hamim, who wrote a long profile of Karwan for the Pashto site Samsoor, begins in Narizi, a mountain village in Khost. Karwan's father, Nur Muhammad, bought him a copy of the Quran in the Baghdadi primer, took him by his small finger to the shade of a plane tree in the village that the villagers reckoned several hundred years old, and sat him before the mulla, Abdul Quddus. By the age of ten, Hamim writes, he had finished reading the Quran. [6]

Hamim tells how he became Karwan. A friend at the lesson asked what the word karwan meant; another answered "caravan". The boy liked the sound, wrote it on his slate, and that evening cut it with a small knife into the trunk of the plane tree beside his name. "Pir Muhammad Nur became Karwan", Hamim writes. [6] The profile does not say when this was, and the story is Hamim's telling of it.

The plane tree stays in his verse for the rest of his life. When King Zahir Shah visited the village, Hamim writes, the villagers set out their pots beneath it, and a village school was later built in its shade. Karwan studied up to sixth class in the village and then at the Gharghasht lycee in Khost up to the tenth. He learned tappa couplets by heart, heard folk stories at night from his father, mother and grandmother (of fairies and giants, of Laila and Majnun, of Momin Khan and Shirin) and read Saadi's Gulistan with a teacher named Momin Khan. [6] Hamim gives the first poem Karwan wrote as a two-line verse set down on a sheet of white paper one evening. [6]

Siddiqi's shorter piece, written for Khaama Press, agrees on the essentials: he was born in 1338 SH in Narizi in Tani district, the son of Nur Muhammad, did his first and middle schooling in the village, and finished the rest at the mechanical lycee in Khost in 1356 SH. [7] Meywand Bakhtiyar, a lecturer in Pashto at Herat University, cites a work by Rafiqi dated 1395 SH for the same birth year and place. [2] The Words Without Borders biography also names the village, Narizi in Tani district of Khost province, and gives no year. [5]

Machine work, farm work and the Soviet years

After the mechanical school, Hamim writes, Karwan went to Kabul to learn work in a factory, stayed some months, and then spent two years in a clothing factory in Kandahar. He went home to the village and farmed. [6] The Soviet army, Hamim writes, "came" and the quiet of his youth was gone: houses were knocked down, mountains burned, and the plane tree of his childhood was left with burned leaves and broken branches after a bombing. [6] On the wider war, see the Soviet war and the refugees, 1978 to 1992.

In 1362 SH, Hamim writes, he left for Iran to look for work and spent two years in Kerman as a labourer. He came back to a village in ruins. He then took camels and carried the villagers' loads over the border, and when the chance came he went to the trenches with a Bori rifle. Hamim sets this down in one paragraph without dates and without naming a commander or a party, and no other source read says more about it. [6] In the same passage he quotes Karwan's lament for the plane tree, which is also the title poem of a later collection:

دي تاندې چینې وچې چرته تللي چنارونه

Di tande chine wache chrta tlli chinaronah

Where have they gone, the plane trees of those fresh springs, now dry?

His other poems of this period turn on the same loss. Hamim describes Karwan's friends noticing him pacing alone for several days, talking to himself, and thinking that he was ill; he was composing the poem "Chinar khabare kawi", "The plane tree speaks". When he finished writing it, they said, he was well again. [6]

Peshawar, 1990 to the early 2000s

Hamim says Karwan went to Peshawar at the end of 1369 SH, a date that falls in early 1991; the Poetry Translation Centre says he moved there in 1990 and lived there for more than ten years. [3, 6] Hamim names him a member of the Association of Free Afghanistan Writers (Da azad Afghanistan da likwalo tolana), says he began work on the magazine Khpalwaki ("Independence"), and then published a newspaper called Wafa. Computers then had no Pashto type, so he typed in another language and added the Pashto letters by hand when the text was printed. [6]

In 1373 SH, Hamim writes, he passed a test and joined the drama Nawi kor, nawi zhwand ("New Home, New Life"), first correcting the Persian and Pashto text and then writing for it; he stayed with the drama and its office for twenty or twenty-two years. [6] The Poetry Translation Centre, which gives no dates for this, says he returned to Kabul after the end of the Taliban regime and "works with the BBC's Afghan Education Project". [3] The two sources do not name the drama and the project in the same breath, and the articles read here do not say that they are one.

Words Without Borders says Karwan made his debut as a writer in 1993 with From Evening to Evening, followed by The Plane Tree Speaks (1998) and The Angel's Palm (2000). [5] Hamim calls La mashama tar mashama the first of his books of verse. [6] The Poetry Translation Centre names a collection, Da shaperai warghawi, published at Peshawar in 2000, as the source of its poem. [3, 4] The sources read do not say whether that book is the one Words Without Borders calls The Angel's Palm.

Poems

The Pashto critics read him as a poet of the ghazal who has worked outward into the free poem. Hamim writes that Karwan composes ghazals, formal poems (nazm) and free verse, and that his lines come to him with their frame already made. [6] He also reports that Karwan has said: "After God, I fear my own poetry most", and that if he spoke ill or behaved badly his poetry would be spoilt. [6] Both sentences are translated from Hamim's Pashto and are given as he reports them.

Bakhtiyar, in a paper on the compound phrases in the ghazals, says that Karwan ranks among the contemporary Pashto poets who have made and used the most compounds, and that making compounds is part of his style. [2] Bakhtiyar worked from the 1398 SH (2019) collected edition of Karwan's poems, Naghma zebde zamane, which gathers La mashama tar mashama, Chinar khabare kawi, Da shaperai warghawai, Zar zari wazare and Pa khuday insan khwag dai. [2] Siddiqi's list differs slightly and includes Yo zarghun da naghmo sind, "A Green River of Songs". [7] Hamim adds that the collected edition holds all his printed poems, and he lists the same collections. [6]

Two pieces of verse show the range. The poet in one couplet, which Hamim says was written on a visit to India, goes looking for a mosque at the hour of the afternoon prayer and finds temples in his way:

ګرځم په جومات پسې مندر په مخه را شي

لمونځ د قضا شوي مازیګر په مخه را شي

Gharzham pa jomat pase mandar pa makha ra shi

Lamonts da qaza shwi mazigar pa makha ra shi

I go looking for a mosque and a temple meets me; the afternoon prayer that I have missed meets me. [6]

In another, which Hamim quotes on growing old, he tells himself not to mourn age, since love will make him young again within two days. [6]

Karwan himself has described what poetry is to him in terms that Hamim puts in quotation marks: love is a great motive, he says, and any craft or calling done with a lover's feeling reaches its best. [6] Hamim adds that the poet's message is always to put the love of God in the heart and, in that light, to love family, friends, kin, countrymen and the whole country. [6]

Short stories

Karwan also writes prose. Words Without Borders names two collections, From Daffodils to Daffodils (1995) and The Man Who Went into the Hills (2004 or 2005, 1383 SH). [5] Hamim and Siddiqi give the same two titles, as La nargisa tar nargisa and Ghra ta rawan saray. [6, 7]

Anders Widmark translated the title story from Pashto for Words Without Borders in 2011, and the journal dates the story to 28 August 2000. [1] A man runs through an alley where radios and newspapers announce the dead and wounded of the country. Newspapers carry a map of the country that is "like a big fish" cut in two, and a newsman tells him it is the map. He accuses the papers of being "bought with money", smashes his television and radio, wraps his books in a cloth and goes off to the hills, leaving the city, he says, in his friends' custody. [1] The story never names a war or a party; the editor of the journal introduces it as about "a crazed paranoiac". [1]

Return, study and Khost

Hamim writes that after Karwan returned to Kabul he presented a Radio Spogmai programme called Spogmai krang, and wrote a drama, Yo kali zar ghagona ("A Village of a Thousand Voices"), which Azadi Radio broadcast. At Dawat University he studied the sharia faculty and graduated in 1392 SH. [6] After that he went to Khost, and has lived for "many years" at Tora Wrai in Tani, according to Hamim; he puts Karwan's age at about sixty-six. [6] He has been to India for a seminar and to Saudi Arabia for the hajj, and Hamim quotes a couplet written there. [6]

Siddiqi's piece for Khaama Press dated 30 July 2024, is headed "Today is Karwan's day"; she lists six printed works, four of verse and two of stories, and says his poems carry the symbols of the plane tree, the ghazal, the song, the fairy, Kabul, Bagram and the mountains. [7]

His writers and readers

What has been written about Karwan is admiring, and no published criticism of his work or his politics has appeared in it. Hamim's profile is a warm one, and it is the only long account. Siddiqi and Bakhtiyar are also admiring; Bakhtiyar's article is a technical study, and says that no one has yet written a specific study of Karwan's compounds apart from a few short notes by other critics. [2, 6, 7] The Poetry Translation Centre calls him "a well known Pashto poet". [3]