Woman Empowered??

Read this before you carry on...
In Memory of Nadia Anjuman
1980--2005

(An extract from her book Gul-e-Dodi)

Dark red flower--it grows in the night.
Grows in the sorrow at the edge of loss.
Grows in the mirror of human faces
Watching one another weep.

The flowers is covered to protect
It from the sun, from the men whose
Hands sweat to think of picking it.

She came to poetry the way a storm
Comes to a clear sky over a desert morning.
The clarity of first light giving way
To upthrust of heat reflecting from sand.

The invisible forms into a fist, clenches
The sky into wind, into a threat
That blows the sand into the machinery
Of violence transporting death
Between intimate groves of skin.

In the family there is the hand that pours
The tea. There is the hand the feeds
The animals. There is the hand that holds
The child. But above all there is the hand
That delivers the blow in the name of God.

This is not sunrise. It is is sunset.
The beginning of the time when
All things disappear, even from themselves,
In pieces relinquished by the failing light..
.
Open the book left among dunes, open
To the pages that thunder with voices
Permitting the hand's unrestrained fury.

Nadia. Dark red flower. First book.
First glimpse of a new world behind
A veil of blowing sand and settler's prayers

She will tell us what it means to be a woman
Filled with trapped light. She will tell
Our children and theirs what it means
To be a woman in a place where women
Are worshipped and hunted for their skeleton.

We are alone when the poem appears.
Everything is alone when it understands this.
From that moment we are joined.
What happens to one happens to all.
Out in the sand, in a place strange
To our head, familiar to our heart,
A poet is killed and some single
Momentous cell inside us dies.

Bright ghost gesturing to the sky.
Vultures circling. The ghost sing to them,
Her voice rising above the storm
Scattering her unwritten pages into
Our lives, the pages we
Must now enscribe with our blood.

-----------------------------------------------------

Nadia Anjuman was a young ambitious woman who was interested in poetry. She turned 25 this year. She was a student at the Herat University, and studied English poetry stealthily from a brave professor, for had anyone known that she was pursuing studies instead of learning to sew, which she told the world she went there for, she and the prof both would have been killed. While there, she release a collection of her poems, Gul-e-Dodi, an extract from which I have posted. You must have been pretty happy that a woman in Afghanistan has done all this right. Feeling that woman world over are being empowered and all right! Think again, for Nadia Anjuman met a gory end to her life on November 3, 2005. Reportedly, her husband and in-laws battered her to death. The Reason: This is the end any Afghan woman who wants to study meets.

May her soul rest in peace!

Don't you think it is time world changed?! or we tried changing it?

Read more here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1869842,00.html