I just want my name back so my life can go back to chaotic and weird instead of chaotic and desperate.
In most of the world, poetry has such a different reputation than it does in Western culture.
We know Jesus taught that if someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to the left. We know that Mohammed was sacked from his village and stoned at Ta'if, but he quietly left for Medina. If both of these men, beaten, and bloodied-the incarnations of their respective faiths-asked God to forgive their aggressors, then who were today's religious leaders to advocate holy war?
I was surprised by the level of sophistication of the Special Operation forces. Among them were anthropologists and PhD candidates. I felt because I understand the patterns of nineteenth-century jihad in West Africa that I was definitely going to be more advanced than they were in comprehending what the militant rallying cry was.
One of the things about landays is that they thrive in a modern context. Early on I went to this incredible Pashtun novelist, Mustafa Salik, who is a bestselling novelist in Afghanistan and works for the BBC in Pashto. With the question of the sanctity of the poems in mind, I asked him, "Aren't you worried? They've been posted on Facebook and such. " And he said, "Just the opposite. This is a folk form; they survive and thrive as people share them. "
The power of the voice in rap is about the expression of truth, rather than the expression of some kind of artifice. Landays, they're about love and pleasure and oppression and levels of oppression within a family. And because of that, I think rap music is probably closely related.
If we think about folk forms, they belong to disenfranchised people, people who have not been allowed access to the poetry of literature or the leisure time that comes with the pursuit of poetry. Instead, this is ceremony. This is a highly charged way to create a sacred space that isn't necessarily about God, but is about human experience at its most profound levels - whether that's love or grief, separation, or homeland. All are altered states.
I haven't lost my head yet.
That was the true terror of love, that you could love with your whole heart, your whole soul, and lose both
I never thought to ever ask for money. I was so stupid.
There's much you can't change, but there's something important you can change: you.