In secret, I burn, in secret I weep,
I am the Pashtun woman who can’t unveil her love.
Sayd Bahodine Majrouh
I died but still live among the living, because I live on in my lover’s dreams. Footnote 1
Introduction
This paper analyzes a selected corpus of Pashto tapey as they circulate across printed collections and digital platforms, particularly those associated with rural and Pak-Afghan borderland contexts. The Pashto folk genre of tapa (pl. tapey) offers an expressive space through which in these mediated contexts, the rural Pashtun women are represented as articulating voice, affect, sexuality, and resistance—countering their misrepresentation as docile and compliant subjects within patriarchal social structures. Its anonymity and oral circulation make tapa a particularly enabling form allowing women to evade fixed authorship and voice subversive ideas without fear of accountability. This article examines how, within this curated corpus, tapey articulate experiences of labor and everyday life among Pashtun women situated in marginal rural settings. It explores how these verses register perceptions of work, constraint, and social relation, and how they produce alternative voices from within and against dominant configurations of gendered labor under contemporary household and capitalist economies on the margins. Focusing on tapey centered on women’s labor, the study draws on feminist-Marxist insights, particularly Silvia Federici’s theorization of domestic labor as a site of social reproduction. Women’s unwaged work sustains households and broader capitalist labor power but remains largely invisible, often excluded from conventional definitions of “work” versus “nonwork.”Footnote 2 In rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, this hidden labor acquires affective, expressive, and resistant dimensions: through tapa, women document toil, assert agency, and contest social and cultural norms, transforming invisibility into acts of resistance.
Extending Federici’s insights to rural contexts, this article explores how tapey render visible the multiple sites and embodied dimensions of women’s labor at the gudar (stream), in the fields, and at home. These intimate poems reveal hidden structures of exploitation and gendered divisions of labor often absent from statistical or sociological accounts, particularly in relation to unwaged domestic and socially reproductive work that sustains both economic production and everyday life. In documenting these conditions, tapey transform invisible labor into acts of agency, asserting women’s presence and resistance within oppressive social structures.Footnote 3
Rather than treating domestic labor solely as an economic function, this study approaches it as a site where labor, affect, and constrained autonomy converge. In this sense, it extends Federici’s account of social reproduction by attending to the expressive and affective dimensions through which unwaged work is not only performed but also interpreted, contested, and resignified by women themselves. Tapey thus become a medium through which labor is simultaneously material practice, emotional register, and a field of negotiation over agency.
Extending this focus on labor as both material condition and expressive idiom, the article also turns to the domain of marriage and honor as interlocking structures through which women are rendered exchangeable within kinship systems. Drawing on Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” it examines how practices such as warwal, swara, and badal (explained and discussed in the following sections) can be understood within a broader political economy that produces and sustains gender asymmetry by positioning women as both value and medium of alliance, status, and male authority.Footnote 4 The tapey engage this system by mobilizing the language of labor— bartering, tending, raising, selling— to expose the unequal relations that organize marriage, honor, and kinship obligations, and to foreground their moral and affective costs. In doing so, they shift attention from the abstract logic of circulation to its lived experience, where kinship intimacy is projected through transaction, and obligation shades into coercion. This section further examines how the same system that organizes women’s circulation through marriage also regulates their bodies through the code of honor, culminating in the threat or enactment of (dis)honorable death. By tracing these figurations, the article argues that tapey not only illuminate the structural conditions that Rubin theorizes as systems of “sex/gender” but also momentarily interrupt their coherence, generating an alternative ethical register in which the terms of exchange, value, and honor are made visible, contested, and reimagined.
Before turning to the analysis, it is important to situate this study within existing scholarship on Pashto tapey, which has evolved from folkloric documentation to critical analyses of its political and gendered dimensions. Scholarly engagements with Pashto tapey have increasingly foregrounded the genre’s entanglement with histories of conflict, displacement, and women’s expressive agency. Benedicte Grima offered one of the earliest ethnographic readings of Pashtun women’s oral traditions where she argues that these women’s experiences and expressions of grief or sadness (gham) are a principal way in which they “do paxto [Pashto]” and make claims to honor.Footnote 5 Building on such insights, James Caron (2018) situates Pashto literature within the epistemologies of the Frontier, reading oral and written forms as “geopolitical knowledge” that reconfigures state and imperial narratives.Footnote 6 Syed Irfan Ashraf and Muhammad Farooq extend this trajectory into the contemporary moment, interpreting drone tapey as necropolitical expressions of grief and defiance amid militarized violence.Footnote 7 Similarly, Anoosh W. Khan explores how women’s recitations of tapey in contexts of conflict-induced migration transform loss and exile into poetic testimony and collective voice.Footnote 8 While much of this scholarship foregrounds tapey as responses to war, displacement, and state violence, this article turns to the intimacies of the everyday—to the subtle ways in which women’s poetic expressions transform the routines of labor into gestures of affect and resistance.
By centering rural Pashtun women in predominantly kinship-based contexts, this study treats tapa as a discursive field in which labor, affect, and constrained autonomy are articulated, negotiated, and resignified, recovering voices often absent from mainstream scholarship on Pashtunwali.Footnote 9 While Grima’s influential reading locates women’s expressive practices within the ethical framework of paxto (Pashto) and the performance of gham, such an approach risks treating Pashtunwali as a relatively coherent and rigid cultural logic through which women’s experiences become intelligible. More recent scholarship has questioned the assumption of a singular or uniformly practiced Pashtunwali, demonstrating instead its historical variability and situational deployment.Footnote 10 The tapey examined here therefore are not approached as straightforward enactments of an honor code. Rather, they reveal how women negotiate, contest, and reconfigure the very social relations that Pashtunwali is often invoked to authorize. If Grima emphasizes the cultural performance of grief, the tapey analyzed here foreground a wider affective repertoire that includes anger, resentment, mockery, erotic desire, and even open defiance. These utterances do not merely reproduce the moral order; they expose its fractures from within.Footnote 11
The article is structured in three sections: an introduction to the genre of tapa; an analysis of women’s labor across the gudar, fields, and household; and an examination of women’s contestations of (dis)honorable death in tapey. In doing so, the study demonstrates how these poems document hidden labor, expose oppressive structures, and theorize resistance from the margins.
Tapey and the sites of women’s labor
Tapa also known as landay or misray,Footnote 12 a two-line poem with nine syllables in the first and thirteen in the second, ending with the sound “mah” or “nah”— may have slight variations in the structure and sound patterns, but the two-lines restriction remaining consistent— conveys a complete thought and often contains a sharp jab on a “common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love.”Footnote 13 Mostly, tapey are produced spontaneously and unrehearsed by the poet in response to their immediate circumstances either as isolated couplets or as a chain of couplets produced by multiple people in an activity of call and response. Even in a chain, each tapa has a separate and complete meaning that may or may not correspond with the others in the chain. The selection of tapey in this article has been taken from a wide range of sources including Twitter/X; digitally published works in Pashto; and translated collections by Benedicte Grima, Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, and Eliza Griswold. All the translations of the tapey presented in this article are my own, except the ones taken from the translated sources. Where the original tapey was unavailable in the source, I have reproduced the translation as provided without the original text.
The moral economy of honor in many Pashtun social contexts regulates women’s expression of intimacy, rendering overt articulation of desire, romance, or emotional excess socially legible as transgression. Within this discursive regime, women’s speech is frequently subject to scrutiny and potential sanction, and poetic expression—particularly love poetry attributed to female voices—may be read as a breach of propriety even in urban settings. Therefore women, fearing accusations of immorality, refrain from opening up about their intimate feelings.Footnote 14 So, the folk genre of tapey, produced anonymously and transferred orally, is an apt medium for women to express emotions that otherwise stand the risk of condemnation and even punishment in society. Though Pashtun men also frequently engage in producing and singing tapey, it is predominantly a folk literary genre associated with women. Moreover, there are multitudes of tapey with a female speaker produced by men, but many are so poignantly representative of the most intimate aspects of a woman’s life that they defy assumptions of production by men.Footnote 15
Women, mostly illiterate, produce/sing tapey at the spur of moment while doing their daily chores in secret or in the form of a chain of tapey by engaging in a call and response in the company of close friends. The element of privacy and secrecy is crucial because singing is considered licentious among Pashtuns, and for a woman, even singing tapey in the presence of other Pashtun women can be dangerous, triggering gossip about her purity and creating suspicion of immorality, sometimes leading to her murder in the name of honor.Footnote 16 Griswold’s account of her difficulties and challenges in extracting tapey from Pashtun women after repeated assurances of anonymity illustrates the fear and precarity of their lives.Footnote 17
The literary space of tapey not only records the voices of Pashtun women but also reveals the material realities of their everyday lives, particularly their labor, thereby becoming a repository of their lived conditions. Such realities remain largely absent from “our received models of crisis [which] focus exclusively on the economic aspects” while ignoring “the violent story of dispossession and expropriation” behind capital itself.Footnote 18 By foregrounding the exclusionary conditions of the “hidden abodes” of rural and predominantly tribal Pashtun life through tapey, this article examines the deeply gendered division of labor among Pashtuns and the ways women’s work shapes their lives. More specifically, the analysis of tapey seeks to uncover the overlooked, unwaged, and largely invisible labor of the domestic sphere that sustains the broader public order structured by the tenets of Pashtunwali.
Given these constraints of anonymity and circulation, contextualizing tapey presents a methodological challenge because, as anonymous oral poetic forms, they are difficult to locate within a single time, place, or moment of composition. Their circulation across communities, generations, and, more recently, digital platforms means that individual verses often become detached from their original contexts and take on new meanings through repeated performance and reuse. Yet the persistence of certain images across the tradition suggests that they remain recognizable poetic motifs. As Jen Enevoldsen notes, the village stream frequently appears as a recurring setting in a large corpus of tapey, functioning as a familiar and recognized social space tied to water collection, courtship, and everyday communal interaction.Footnote 19 Thus, a tapa that invokes a stream may be recited in regions where streams are absent or circulated on social media by users far removed from the rural settings it appears to evoke. Rather than treating tapey as fixed records of specific historical situations, they are better understood as mobile expressive forms whose meanings shift through continual recontextualization. The task of contextualization, then, is not to reconstruct an unrecoverable origin for each verse, but to identify the broader social worlds and affective settings within which they circulate.
The geographic context of tapey is equally diffuse. The genre circulates across Pashto-speaking regions of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, a distribution that both predates and exceeds the modern nation-state border between the two countries. Because tapey move through oral transmission, migration, kinship networks, labor mobility, print collections, and digital media, individual verses often travel across localities and cannot be tied to a single point of origin.Footnote 20 The corpus examined here therefore draws on a tradition that spans the Pak-Afghan border rather than belonging to one national context. This does not suggest a uniform Pashtun experience. Regional, linguistic, class, and tribal differences remain important; however, many tapey gain their intelligibility from shared social worlds and recurring experiences that circulate across political boundaries. The labor practices, gender expectations, affective attachments, and forms of constraint expressed in these verses are better understood as recurring social worlds within the tradition rather than as a full account of Pashtun life.
A further complication in historicizing tapey comes from competing claims about the genre’s antiquity. Some scholars and translators suggest that landay / tapey may preserve very old poetic traditions, with speculative accounts tracing them back to Indo-Aryan migrations and early South Asian oral verse forms.Footnote 21 These claims are difficult to verify, as oral transmission leaves few stable markers for dating individual verses. At the same time, several Pashto-language scholars point out that the language of tapey is largely continuous with contemporary spoken Pashto and shows few features that would mark it as especially archaic.Footnote 22 This continuity suggests that tapey are not best understood as remnants of an ancient poetic system, but as living forms of vernacular expression embedded in ongoing linguistic practice. They are continually adapted, reperformed, and recirculated in present-day speech communities. Contextualization, therefore, is better directed toward the social and affective conditions that sustain the genre than toward reconstructing distant or uncertain origins.
The diffuse spatial and temporal character of tapey follows from the oral foundations of the genre, as Walter Ong argues, oral traditions survive through repetition, memory, and reperformance rather than as fixed textual objects tied to a single moment of composition.Footnote 23 Unlike written texts, which are usually interpreted through identifiable authors, dates, and places of inscription, oral utterances move across contexts and accumulate meaning through repeated use. This mobility makes it difficult to place individual tapa within a precise historical geography, and it also complicates any attempt to assign them to a single regional origin.
Although the tapey analyzed here are encountered in written and digital form, these archives preserve traces of a genre whose circulation long predates and extends beyond its textual recording. This study does not claim that the selected verses represent all Pashtun women or the full range of regional variation within Pashtun culture. Rather than geographical or ethnographic sampling, the corpus was assembled through thematic sampling from published collections and contemporary digital circulation, with attention to recurring representations of labor, affect, and resistance. Following Richard Bauman’s conception of oral performance as the relationship between text, narrated event, and narrative event, I treat these verses not as fixed textual objects anchored in moments of composition, but as traces of communicative situations refracted through circulation and textual transmission.Footnote 24 Rather than asking who composed a particular tapa and under what circumstances, the analysis focuses on the social situations that make these verses meaningful and recognizable, the experiences they evoke, and the social positions they imply.
In the labor-oriented tapey examined here, narrated events repeatedly invoke agricultural work, water collection, weaving, domestic labor, migration, waiting for absent men, bodily exhaustion, and economic dependence. Although the individual authors remain unknown, these themes point toward recognizable social conditions and gendered experiences of work. The implied narrative voice often suggests a female speaker addressing peers, sometimes in lament, sometimes in humor or quiet critique, and often in a complaint that would be difficult to voice in more formal or public settings. The significance of these tapey therefore lies less in recoverable origins than in the social worlds they evoke and make intelligible. It is within these recurring worlds of labor and constraint that the genre’s affective and expressive force becomes visible.
The exploration of women’s work in Pashtun rural and kinship-based contexts complicates assumptions underlying studies of domestic labor in urban and industrial contexts. Women’s movement to streams, fields, and other outdoor worksites in these settings contrasts sharply with the rigid public-private binary associated with bourgeois communities in colonial India and postindependence Pakistan.Footnote 25 In most rural Pashtun societies, women work from dawn to dusk—fetching water, laboring in fields, baking bread, and tending animals—tasks that frequently take them beyond the confines of the home. As the following sections argue, this fluidity in the boundary between public and private grants women’s labor a distinctive potential for rebellion and deviation from social norms.
Although women work alongside men in the fields and help tend cattle, domestic labor remains primarily their responsibility in Pashtun communities, where men’s participation in housework conflicts with dominant ideals of masculinity. Through selected tapey, the following sections examine women’s labor at sites such as streams, fields, and homes to highlight both their scale and diversity, as well as their entanglement with women’s affect, agency, creativity, and resistance. These sections also underscore the significance of tapa as a predominantly feminine form of expression through which women on the margins create linguistic spaces for resistant and revisionist narratives that challenge phallocentric understandings of reality.
Gudar (The Stream): A Place Where Labor Meets Excursion
As the main point of departure from the standard binary of the domestic versus the public spaces, the stream, called gudar in Pashto, is a crucial site in the lives of rural Pashtun women, from where they fetch water at least twice a day: at cockcrow in the morning and before sunset in the evening. Of the many responsibilities of women, going to the stream is most coveted because the stream is an almost exclusively feminine space outside the house where women gather, chat, socialize, and even meet their lovers. In rural settings, therefore, the stream—being a source of drinking water—implies nurture and survival, but also suggests experiences of freedom, love, and exposure to a world outside the home. Unsurprisingly, the stream recurrently appears in tapey predominantly produced by women, and the visits to the stream appear as the highlight of the day, becoming a site of excursion and enjoyment for women, as is suggested in the following tapa:
Da gudar har mazigar kha wi
Chi jiney tuli mazigar sel la razinah Footnote 26
Every evening at the stream is pleasant
When all the girls gather for their excursion
This tapa paints the scenes of a typical evening at the stream before the sunset in all its pleasantness with the girls gathered to enjoy each other’s company. The speaker of this tapa may either be a girl from among the group of women at the stream regaling in the joy of her experience, or it may be a male speaker enjoying the sight of girls frolicking on evenings at the stream from a distance.
The following tapa also expresses similar sentiments about the stream:
Har mazigar de luwi akhtar de
Gudara zaka di sifat har zay kwomah Footnote 27
Every evening of yours is festive
O stream! that is why I admire you all around
With its capacity for bringing immense joy to the girls, the stream, personified in the above lines, acquires an agency and is not only addressed but also praised like an individual. The delight of village girls with their experience at the stream is mainly due to its location outside the house, which allows the girls to leave their homes without fear of condemnation, and transforms work into a joyful excursion.
Due to its multiple dimensions of socialization, expedition, and even possibilities of romantic engagements, fetching water from the stream becomes a chore that girls look forward to doing:
Mangi ki mori wubah nishta
Zah da wubu laparah kuz gudar la zama Footnote 28
Mother, the pitcher is empty
I am going to the stream downhill, to get some water
The speaker’s readiness to visit the stream in the lines above sounds discordant with the idea of work as a duty, almost suggesting a deliberate emptying of the pitcher to find an excuse for visiting the stream. This gesture resonates with what James C. Scott terms a “hidden transcript”—a veiled act of resistance embedded within routine performances of compliance.Footnote 29 The seemingly dutiful act of fetching water thus becomes a subtle reappropriation of domestic labor, transforming a socially prescribed task into an opportunity for self-expression, movement, and affective freedom.
The next tapa shows the ceremonial preparation of girls for the daily visit to the stream:
Shu mazigar zan ye sanbal kru
Khpalu hamzulu sarah kuz gudar la zinah Footnote 30
As the evening approaches, she adorns herself
and joins her cohort to visit the stream
In these lines the practice of preparation and beautification shows women’s eagerness to visit the stream. Furthermore, the tradition of visiting the stream as a group, hints at the communal and sisterly bond this experience cultivates.
These communal and affective associations with the stream shape the political views of women in interesting ways as the significance of a potter rises in comparison with a king:
Bacha kah mar shi sa ba wushi
Kulal di nah mri jinakai bah khwari shi nah Footnote 31
If the king dies, nothing will be lost,
But the potter’s death will ruin the girls
The potter’s work of sculpting the earthen pitchers—making the girls’ visits to the stream possible—seems to make a more significant impact on the immediate circumstances of these women’s life than the king’s politics. Compared with the potter whose work facilitates their excursions to the stream, the king here is a remote figure whose presence or absence does not impact them directly.
These tapey provide a unique perspective on a form of labor that does not alienate or reify the worker through a mechanical repetition of minute tasks but instead allows possibilities of freedom, expression, and growth.Footnote 32 As is evident from the tapey above, for the Pashtun women of rural areas—who are otherwise confined by the norms of a conservative patriarchal society— the labor of fetching water is a welcomed prospect because it allows rare moments of “self-activity” (Selbstbetätigung) rather than imposing “loss of self” (Verlust seiner selbst).Footnote 33 Furthermore, the gudar—an exclusively female space—becomes the site for fostering sisterly bonds and creating women’s culture within the dominant male culture.Footnote 34 This subculture is complicated in the sense that while it exists within the dominant culture, it attempts to deconstruct, subvert, and revise the main culture not only through personal sisterly bonds but also through articulation of the bond in poetic expressions.
The possibilities of freedom and self-expression at the gudar produces avenues for entangling labor with affect, thereby creating metaphoric associations of the stream with love, romance, and sexuality, making it a wild zone that is spatially “a no man’s-land, a place forbidden to men,” which according to Elaine Showalter “must be the address of a genuinely women-centered criticism, theory, and art.”Footnote 35 Being a woman-friendly outdoor site, where girls can go without fear of retribution, the stream becomes a suitable site for women’s self-expression and agency and often becomes a relatively convenient place for lovers to meet or at least see each other. However, in these instances of blissful encounter the girl’s consent and cooperation remains central.Footnote 36 The following tapa reflects such agency and autonomy of the female lover as she invites her partner to the stream,
tah mazigar gudar tah rashah
pa gudar kizhi pah asana didanunah Footnote 37
Come to the stream in the evening
Sighting a loved one is easier on the stream
Similarly, filling water pots, which is merely a chore that allows girls to leave their homes, may also be maneuvered to extend the time with the lover. The chore thus not only becomes an excuse for transgressing traditional expectations of abstinence and morality but also transforms it into a means to facilitate it.
kah didan kri gudar ta rashah
zah bah mangi pah lapu waru waru dakomah Footnote 38
Come to the stream if you desire didan (viewing)Footnote 39
I will fill the pot with smaller smatterings of water
The female speaker’s invitation to her lover here is accompanied by a promise of a prolonged sighting facilitated by slower and smaller smatterings of water into the pot. By taking longer to fill the pots, the girl allows her lover a lengthier didan.
The possibility of seeing the lover makes the stream a treasured place, as indicated in the next tapa:
Gudar di umar lah wadan wi
Pah di bhana da janan wakram didanunah
(Paktiawal, 16)May the stream be evergreen
It gives me pretexts for sighting my beloved
Note once again how in the above lines, the stream is prayed for like a living being, assuming its agency of providing lovers the chance to meet. The spatial aspects of the stream in these lines transform into a figurative existence of a benevolent being for lovers, offering them the opportunity for union, joy, and protection.
The poetic articulation of experience at the stream, as captured in tapey, emerges as a deliberate assertion of women’s voice and agency within a space where normative patriarchal structures are temporarily suspended. In line with Federici’s insights on unwaged domestic labor as a central component of social reproduction, these moments at the stream reveal how women’s work—though typically invisible and undervalued—can simultaneously sustain social structures and create openings for autonomy and self-expression. The act of fetching water, while formally a laborious duty, is transformed in practice into a site of pleasure, sociability, and even romantic engagement, demonstrating that labor in these peripheral contexts is not solely oppressive but can also produce affective and relational possibilities.
The articulation of such experiences of affect, freedom, and joy through the genre of tapa resonates with Shoshana Felman’s conceptualization of literature as a site through which the subject may negotiate and resist restrictive social norms set by the “phallacy of masculine meaning,” and with Virginia Woolf’s insistence on literature as a conduit for the full expression of mind and body, particularly in contexts where conventional avenues of speech are constrained.Footnote 40 These instances of female expression demonstrate that tapa is a unique feminine poetic form developed largely by Pashtun women for themselves to differentiate themselves from men, to decode the connection between textuality and sexuality, genre and gender; to express and redress grievances against patriarchal structures; and to express and understand their womanhood.Footnote 41
In this sense tapey exemplify the intertwining of labor, affect, and autonomy: women’s routine work at the stream is not merely functional but becomes inseparable from moments of pleasure, relationality, and minor transgressions, thus complicating the conventional binaries of private versus public and labor versus leisure.
This intertwining of labor, affect, and autonomy is further encoded in women’s choice of streams—uphill or downhill—not simply for fetching water, but as a subtle navigation of desire and relational possibility. Observe the following tapa, for instance:
Wubah da bar gudar khwazhi di
Jananhs ta laparah kuz gudar tah zamah Footnote 42
The water at the uphill stream is sweeter
It is for you, my love, that I go to the stream downhill
The freedom, bliss, and possibilities for lovers make the stream a perfect picnic spot to which people entice each other by bringing and sharing food.
tah da gudar ghari lah rashah
ma pa mangi ki parati rawari dinah Footnote 43
Come over to the river-bank
I have brought pancakes in my pitcher
While the gudar remains a site of regulated domestic labor, these poetic expressions of autonomy, agency, and mutuality through which women reimagine their relationship to work, nature, and one another, reveal it as a liminal space that is neither wholly private nor public and where the dominant and subcultural forms within Pashtun everyday life are entangled. This entanglement between compliance and subversion continues to inform the poetics of resistance examined later in this study, particularly in the section “Contestations against (Dis)honorable Death.”
Seen through this lens, the tapey about the stream capture this ambivalence with striking clarity: the stream emerges as both a site of freedom and a reminder of its limits. The same waters that witness union also witness parting, as the prayers once uttered for the stream’s endurance gradually turn into invocations for its ruin:
Da mazigar gudarah wran shay
Pah khanda darsham pah zhara darnah razamah Footnote 44
Cursed is the evening at the stream
Happily, I come there for you but leave weeping
Ultimately, the prohibition from the lover often translates into prohibition from the stream, with the mother acting as the principal enforcer of this restriction. In the following tapa, the water pot—ordinarily a mundane instrument of labor—becomes a potent symbol of prohibition, encapsulating both familial control and the limits imposed on female autonomy,
Bya bah mangi tah guti nah kram
Mor da gudar da tlu na ma manah kawinah Footnote 45
Never will I touch the pitcher again
Mother has forbidden me from going to the stream
The mother’s intervention in policing her daughter’s mobility and regulating her access to spaces associated with pleasure, sociability, and romantic engagement is not merely practical but deeply ideological. The affective weight of maternal control is further illustrated in the following tapa, where the girl’s lowered gaze signals an imposed constraint and anticipatory compliance,
Banrah de mrah di khkatah guri
Lakah chi mor di nurah kor ke bandawi nah Footnote 46
Your eyelashes are cast down
It seems your mother will keep you home now
Thus, the first instance of punishment and ban on girls manifests in their being barred from the stream, revealing its significance as a site of budding romance, rebellion, and deviation from the norms. This indicates that despite the female-centeredness, wildness, and the idyllic nature of gudar where women form a subculture; this space is not completely outside the dominant culture that ultimately delineates the limits of freedom it offers to women.
In Pashto tapa, the mother’s role as enforcer of prohibition draws particular attention. Despite being the bearers of patriarchal control themselves, the mothers by regulating daughters’ access to the stream, effectively reproduce the same order, mediating the tension between female-centered subcultures and the dominant social order. The tapa crystallizes this paradox: the mother’s prohibition, articulated as care, becomes the conduit through which control is reproduced. Marianne Hirsch’s reading of Nancy Chodorow clarifies how this dynamic emerges from the pre-oedipal relation between mother and daughter. Because mothers in patriarchal societies identify closely with their daughters and see them as extensions of themselves, they project their own fears, limitations, and ambivalence about femininity onto them.Footnote 47 The mother’s command in the tapa—“Do not go to the stream”—thus registers as an act of both protection and projection. It safeguards the daughter within the boundaries that have confined the mother herself, ensuring what Chodorow calls the “reproduction of mothering,” a psychic and social inheritance of constraint. Furthermore, for Federici, the subjugation of women’s bodies and reproductive labor was central to the historical consolidation of capitalist power; domesticity and maternal authority became instruments through which women’s agency was privatized and regulated. The tapa’s maternal voice, then, can be read as the echo of this historical domestication—a speech act that reproduces obedience within a gendered economy of care.
This dynamic is not confined to Pashto contexts alone. Similar patterns recur across South Asian literatures and oral traditions. In Vidaai Geet (wedding farewell songs), for example, women articulate the ambivalent emotions of attachment, separation, and familial constraint, often mediated through maternal figures who regulate the transition between home and public or marital spaces. Likewise, Angan by Khadija Mastoor, Hasil Ghaat by Bano Qudsia, Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hosain, and The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur are literary examples among many others, where women negotiate autonomy, desire, and social boundaries within domestic or intimate spaces, frequently under the watchful or guiding presence of mothers or elder women. These multilingual examples underscore how expressive forms repeatedly mediate the tension between female-centered autonomy and societal regulation, with maternal figures serving as intermediaries who both constrain and protect. Across South Asian literatures, the interplay of compliance, subversion, and intergenerational negotiation emerges as a recurring motif, highlighting the centrality of mothers in shaping, policing, and transmitting the boundaries of women’s freedom.
This section foregrounded several tapey to highlight the uniqueness of gudar (the stream) as a site of unalienated labor where women find prospects of freedom, self-expression, and self-determination, thereby enabling an association of labor with affect. These tapey show how labor can become a means of expressing and experiencing love when external forces of oppression and reification are absent. However, not all labor in peripheries allows for such enhancement of the self as will be discussed in the following sections about labor in the fields and in the house.
Women in the Field and Housework: Roles, Affect, and Feminine Aesthetics
Besides fetching water, women also tend cattle and work in the fields. Unlike the stream, however, these spaces do not evoke the same joy and excitement expressed in stream-related tapey, perhaps because fields and cattle sheds are not predominantly feminine outdoor spaces. Typically dominated by men, they do not offer the same sense of freedom and pleasure associated with the stream. Nevertheless, women remain equal partners in agricultural labor:
Da badshahay takht me pakar nah de
Janan di lwo kri za bah waghi tulawumah Footnote 48
I don’t desire a king’s throne
My love will reap, and I will collect the corn
The lines above indicate equality in the division of labor and the joint struggle for bringing bread to the house. The speaker equally divides the responsibilities at the field by collecting the corn after the janan (the male partner/lover) has done the reaping. The two lovers are ready to go through this toil and be content with limited means to remain together since aspiring for more wealth may require separation. Yet women’s participation in agrarian labor does not automatically translate into productive labor or emancipation. The sexual division of labor under patriarchal capitalism extends the logic of domesticity into the fields, rendering productive work invisible by recoding it as an act of love or care, as Federici’s feminist manifesto insists, “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.”Footnote 49 The field, like the home, thus becomes a site where affect and labor merge, sustaining economies that thrive on women’s unpaid and unrecognized contributions. Expanding this critique, Maria Mies argues, “By defining women universally as housewives, it is possible not only to cheapen their labor, but also to gain political and ideological control over them. Housewives are atomized and isolated… their horizon remains limited by the family.”Footnote 50 Read through this lens, the apparent equality between the lovers in the tapa conceals a deeper asymmetry: while the woman toils alongside her partner, her labor remains absorbed into a system that naturalizes her contribution as part of care, not production.
This fusion of productive and reproductive labor becomes even more evident in the following tapa, where affection and obligation merge seamlessly within the gendered dynamics of agrarian life. Here, the man’s request for a yogurt drink—uttered during shared labor—reveals how women’s work expands to encompass not only agricultural toil but also the sustenance of men within that laboring world,
Mala da kurah shumli rawrah
Che ta razi ma bah ghanam rbali winah Footnote 51
Bring me a yogurt drink from home
By the time you return, I will have reaped the wheat
The following tapey reveal that the merging of productive and reproductive roles of women in the fields is never simply material—it is also affective,
Tah mi da halah khabar na ye
Lakah ghanam da zrah pah sar chawdali yumah Footnote 52
You are oblivious to my pain
Like a wheat kernel, my heart has cracked
The imagery of a wheat kernel for a broken heart delivers the speaker’s pain in an unrequited love, but its agrarian denotations also hint at the rural background of the speaker. The imagery reveals the speaker’s experiences and observations of natural phenomenon in the field, which gives her the language for expressing pain.
Similarly, the speaker in the following tapa parts ways from the lover by clearly designating the division of labor in the fields,
Zama aw sta lari juda di
Jananah khpal ghanam rebah, khpal bah rebamah Footnote 53
Your and my paths have parted
Love, reap your own wheat; I will reap mine
In these lines, the speaker marks the end of a relationship through an agrarian metaphor that signals both the division of previously shared labor and the separation of its rewards. The refusal to work together in the fields itself signifies emotional estrangement and a fractured bond. Such figurative expressions, rooted in agrarian life, acquire meaning only when contextualized within the experiences and landscapes of rural settings.
These tapey encode the doubleness of labor and emotion, fatigue and attachment. If, as Federici and Mies argue, women’s labor sustains both household and field, it is unsurprising that cultivation becomes a language of feeling. The recurring metaphors of wheat, harvest, and soil do more than depict labor; they translate emotional experience into agrarian imagery, collapsing the boundary between bodily exertion and emotional endurance.
The house is another recurring site in Pashto tapey where women appear as unwaged and unacknowledged workers. Many house-centered tapey foreground the tension between labor and aesthetics, adornment, and affect. Unlike earlier poetic depictions of the gudar as a space of leisure, where girls adorn themselves before going to the stream, women occupied with domestic and agricultural labor in rural settings cannot afford such ornamentation while sustaining the social order of which they are an essential part. Fetching water, being comparatively less strenuous and largely undertaken by unmarried girls, stands apart from the demanding labor of the fields and household. In the following tapa, the female speaker laments her inability to clean the hearth after fulfilling her lover’s request to adorn her hands with henna:
Pah ma de spin lāsūnah srah krah
Da anghari hiri bas ok jaru kawinah Footnote 54
You wanted my fair hands adorned with henna
Who will clear the ashes off the hearth now?
With henna on her hands, the woman in these lines cannot clean the hearth, yet no one else can perform the task because it is considered women’s work. Since henna must remain on the palms for some time, it further delays her pending chores, turning a simple act of adornment into an unaffordable luxury amid necessary labor. The tapa thus captures women’s impossible position as both laborers and objects of the male gaze. The following tapa reflects the same tension between work and beauty:
Mor de da kor karunah ghwari
Ta rana ghwari pah nakrizu srah lasunah Footnote 55
Your mother demands all the errands done
While you want my hands colored in henna
Caught between the conflicting demands of the mother-in-law and her own husband, these lines show how beautification and love become a form of affective labor that the husband demands at a point where it clashes with domestic labor.Footnote 56 As Sara Ahmed reminds us, affect and emotion are not merely personal but circulate within social and material relations; in this sense, this tapa by delineating the sociality of emotion between two objects (the husband and the mother-in-law) transforms affect itself into a form of labor and critique.Footnote 57
Since most houses in rural settings occupy joint families, the women, regardless of their exhaustion and helplessness, are expected to tend to the entire clan—constituting the husband’s family, including his parents, siblings, and in many cases, aunts and uncles—as is represented by the following tapa:
Da nacharay mermanah wakhlam
Sare bas tari wi da bal zrah ba satinah Footnote 58
Cursed is the state of helplessness
Even if worn out, you have to tend to others
Women also perform the heavy work of grinding wheat in a stone grinding mill. The speaker, exhausted from grinding wheat in her husband’s mill, curses it in the following tapa,
Wruka mechan di shah laliyah
Da zrah pah zur ye gadawom stari ye kramah Footnote 59
May your grinding mill go to ruins, love
I run it with my heart’s strength; I am worn-out
Many women in the villages also must bear separation from their husbands, who forced by poverty, leave home for better wages in remote places. Back home, these women care for the immediate and extended family (on the husband’s side), losing the prime years of their youth in drudgery. The speaker of the following tapa expresses her dejection in such a situation,
Ta pah pardes zwani tabah krah
Za da tanur pah lambu shnah lukharah shumah Footnote 60
You ruined your youth on a foreign land
And I turned to smoke in the flares of the kiln
The intensity of pain and difficulties in the absence of the lover is idiomatically expressed here; however, the idiom of being turned to smoke is also complemented by representation of literal labor at the kiln.
The woman in the next tapa pleads with her husband to return home by offering her own labor in needlework to make both ends meet:
Come back to your home, my love
I will do needlework and run the house
The speaker here offers to do needlework for money to support her husband in keeping the hearth warm. This is in line with a large number of women who work from home and contribute to the currency-based economy; however, their work, because of its domestic framing, is not seen the same way as work in a factory setting is considered.
The tapey discussed so far reflect women’s entanglement with strenuous labor, which brings out their exploitation in the reproduction of a semifeudal social structure; however, as the following tapey indicate, women’s relations with their labor in the periphery is multifaceted, and sometimes women employ the same oppressive weapon to strike back as a manifestation of their agency. In the following tapa, the speaker frames her labor within the affective parameters,
Jananah sta da zrah da parah
Zah da de khelkhatay khidmat kawuma Footnote 62
Love, for you
I look after your entire clan
By emphasizing this labor for the husband’s extended family, the speaker in the above tapa expresses her love to him; labor thus becomes a form of expressing affection. On the other hand, the following tapa shows that love may also require an abandonment of domestic responsibilities:
Da kur karunah de wur wakhli
Chi janan wular wi za bah ghwar lushi prezhdamah Footnote 63
Let the errands go to hell
As long as my love stands here, I will let the dirty dishes lie
Seeing or meeting the lover is prioritized here over the responsibility of washing the dishes. Abandoning household chores for the lover becomes equivalent to the abandonment of duty for love and is audaciously declared as an expression of love. Similarly, in the following tapa, the girl, lost in thoughts of her lover, ends up burning the bread and getting chastised by her mother,
Pah tanarah ratah yadigi
Doday me swazi mor me shna pa lakhtah krinah Footnote 64
By the side of the kiln, I am lost in your reveries
When the bread burns, my mother beats me black and blue
The smoke of the furnace in the following tapa hides the speaker’s tears, which she sheds for her lover, while the next one shows how the speaker uses the sound of the broom to pretend indifference to the ongoing conversation about her lover,
Che mazigar tanur tah kinam
Lugi banah kram jarah ta pasi kawumah Footnote 65
When I sit by the kiln in the evening,
I weep for you and blame the smoke for it
---------------------------
Pah kor ki sta qisi shuru di
Zan me Kunr kari de kutah jaru kawumah Footnote 66
They are talking about you in the house
I pretend indifference while sweeping the floor
Similarly, like fetching water, baking the bread may also be interpreted as a form of communication in the next tapa:
Liwanay bya tanur lambah kru
Da doday tap ye swarlasam kali ta zinah Footnote 67
The wild girl has fired up the kiln once more
The sound of her slapping the dough echoes to a far-off village
The furnace for baking bread is typically outside the boundaries of the kitchen in the open air; therefore, neighbors can hear any activity near the furnace. In the tapa above, the sound of slapping dough while making bread may be interpreted as sign language for communicating with a lover outside the house’s walls. The slapping of the dough is unusually loud in this context, which is why the woman portrayed is referred to as liwanạy (silly/crazy, mad). The unusualness of her method hints at expression of an underlying emotion that she is perhaps not able to express with words. It is evident from these tapey that domestic labor for women in rural settings is not simply manual work but intricately connects with the various aspects of their lives.
Sweeping and cleaning the house are also associated with the welcomed visit of a loved one, as the speaker in the next tapa expresses her exhilaration through an idiomatic reference to the act of sweeping:
Nun me da yar da ratlu wraz dah
Da kali lar ba pah banru jaru kawuman Footnote 68
Today is the day of my love’s arrival
I will sweep the streets with my lashes
In this section, I have shown the representation of Pashtun women’s daily work in folk literary productions. This exploration aims to highlight the specifics, responsibilities, and difficulties that Pashtun women face in their everyday lives. The ambiguous demarcation of home versus outside creates openings for resilience and resistance in the most toilsome routine of these women’s lives and transforms their work into apparatuses for exercising their agency in a strictly patriarchal society. Furthermore, the tapey indicate how the daily labor is not simply perceived as such by the Pashtun women but becomes a meaningful tool of self-expression and communication. Thus by transforming the textures of everyday work into poetry, the tapey defy the erasure of women’s unwaged labor as “nonwork,” a phenomenon that Silvia Federici identifies as central to the maintenance of capitalist production and patriarchy.Footnote 69 In doing so, they render visible what Nancy Fraser calls the “hidden abodes” of capitalism—the feminized, unpaid labor that sustains both household and economic systems.Footnote 70
However, my emphasis on the uniqueness of women’s labor in the peripheries of Pakistan and Afghanistan is not intended to glorify the exploitative and tedious nature of their work. I must emphasize that the lives of Pashtun women are steeped in toilsome labor that is interlaced with their commodification in the name of custom and honor. Women are commodified and bargained in marriages in return for money, offered as ransom in resolution of conflicts, to be treated as workers without wages and to be symbolized as emblems of honor and identity.
Figurations of resistance and contestations against (dis)honorable death
The previous section, explored how tapa reworks the language of women’s domestic and agrarian labor, turning everyday tasks into a medium through which constraint and control can be voiced, negotiated, and subtly unsettled. This section continues that focus on tapa, shifting from the household labor to the domain of marriage and the cultural code of honor as modes of transaction and the positionality of women therein. Within the dominant framework of Pashtunwali, women move through social life as carriers of honor, instruments of compensation, tools for forming alliances, and means of reconciliation—through them, male prestige is secured and male disputes are settled. Such a system rests on the normalization of women’s labor and obedience, where their work is taken for granted, their compliance assumed, and their sacrifice elevated into virtue. At the same time, these practices are not uniformly observed across all Pashtun communities along the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands; they vary by region, class, tribe, and historical moment.Footnote 71 Thus the tapey examined here, do not present a singular, static culture but reflect tensions within diverse and changing social arrangements.
I examine how tapa renders the institution of marriage a charged site of meaning, where ideas of value, honor, and sacrifice are exposed, questioned, and reimagined. The selected tapey address practices such as warwal (where a girl’s father or brothers negotiate a bride price); swara (where a girl may be given in marriage to settle a dispute); badal (in which daughters are exchanged between families to preserve property and alliance), and child marriage, not simply by reflecting the honor code that governs Pashtun society; rather, they generate an alternative ethical register that destabilizes that code from within.Footnote 72 Through the persistent use of labor metaphors—bartering, selling, tending, raising, sweeping—these tapey act as a subversive discursive field through which the authority of the honor code is unsettled. If marriage transactions render women exchangeable within systems of male alliance, tapey interrupt that logic by registering women’s awareness of the unequal power relations through which marriage, honor, and alliance are organized.
In doing so, the tapey raise questions that resonate with Gayle Rubin’s critique of kinship and gender. Rubin’s importance for this section lies in her critical engagement with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s account of kinship and Sigmund Freud’s account of psychosexual development. Appropriating insights from both thinkers while challenging their assumptions, Rubin argues that they offer powerful descriptions of how gendered hierarchies are reproduced through social and symbolic structures of kinship yet fail to adequately interrogate the inequalities embedded within them.Footnote 73 Her intervention shifts attention from the mere circulation of women within kinship systems to the broader sex/gender system that produces and sustains such arrangements.Footnote 74 Her discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s formulation of the “exchange of women” is therefore not a claim that all cultures literally exchange women in the same way, nor a universal explanation of kinship. Rather, it is an analytic formulation that illuminates how rights, obligations, and authority are often distributed unevenly along gendered lines, positioning men as the primary agents in systems of exchange while women are often treated as the objects through which social relations are organized. Read alongside Rubin’s critique, the tapey can be understood as poetic reflections on—and often protests against—the gendered forms of authority that claim the right to determine women’s value, mobility, and exchange. As a result, relations of exchange, authority, and sexual difference emerge not as foundational features of human social life but as historically produced arrangements of power.
Among many Pashtun communities, particularly in more rural and kinship-structured contexts, a girl’s father and brothers are regarded as her legitimate guardians, exercising moral, legal, and social authority over her life. This control extends beyond explicit restrictions through codes of honor and obligation that shape women’s choices and bodily autonomy long before marriage. In tapey, however, such authority is rarely accepted silently. These poems appropriate the language of guardianship, labor, and exchange to expose the mechanisms and ethical assumptions underlying such control. In the following tapa, the female speaker expresses her helplessness to her naïve lover, who resents her for turning away from him:
Lah ma nah wali gilaman ye
Kamaqlah yarah da pradu ikhtyar ke yumah Footnote 75
Why are you dismayed with me
Oh, my silly beloved, I am in others’ dominion
Or consider,
My body belongs to me;
to others its masteryFootnote 76
In the first tapa, the speaker’s address to her lover both asserts her subjectivity and illuminates the moral and social violence embedded in guardianship. The line “I am in others’ dominion” positions her simultaneously as object and agent: she names her subordination, but in doing so she makes the power structures themselves visible. The phrase “to others its mastery” shows how the body, typically framed as a site of honor and obedience, becomes a lens through which the transactional logic of marriage, discussed in more detail below, is made legible. This articulation of the asymmetry of power in affective terms resonates with Sara Ahmed’s theorization of emotion where she argues that once feelings are expressed, they do not remain private but circulate socially, shaping relations and responses.Footnote 77 In the tapa, the speaker’s articulation of her subordination works in the same way: by voicing the moral and social violence of guardianship, she projects it outward, making the structures of control visible and open to critique. Beyond expressing emotional pain, the tapa exposes how claims of guardianship can slide into claims of ownership, making marriage appear less as care or protection than as a negotiated exchange.
Subverting the usual practices of warwal, in which a young woman’s consent may be secondary to familial negotiations, the speaker in the following tapa turns urgently to her lover:
Jananah rasha da de wakht di
Plar me da sar soda da bal sarah kawinah
Come, my love! This is the time!
My father is bartering me off to someone else
By describing the arrangement as “bartering,” the speaker rejects the language of duty, alliance, and familial obligation through which such marriages are often legitimized. The term exposes the economic and transactional dimensions of a decision that is ordinarily presented as a social or moral necessity. The urgency of the appeal—“Come, my love! This is the time!”— opens up the possibility of a break in the apparent closure of the arrangement. The speaker does not articulate an exit from the system of kinship; instead, she introduces a competing address within it, redirecting the terms through which her position is being determined. Whether the lover is imagined as alternative exchange partner or as refusal of exchange altogether is not clear, and this indeterminacy is significant because it marks the fact that what counts as a “relation” is still in formation at the level of speech. The tapa therefore does not illustrate exchange; it stages the moment in which exchange becomes an object of contestation.
The darker dimension of this exchange emerges in the following tapa making the resentment of the speaker more palpable:
You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.Footnote 78
Here the vocabulary of sale is stripped of euphemism. The father is not misled or mistaken; he occupies the position that structural accounts of kinship describe as that of an exchange agent.Footnote 79 The past tense in “I was your daughter” marks a rupture in her relationality to her father. As Rubin, adapting Karl Marx, notes, a woman “only becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel … in certain relations.”Footnote 80 The speaker recalls a prior relation—daughterhood—recast through a vocabulary of exchange that renders kinship legible as transaction rather than relation. The marriage to an old man signals not emotional compatibility but purchasing capacity. Age here indexes capital, and the daughter’s youth is positioned as exchange value. Furthermore, the curse is one of the few forms of agency available to the speaker, and it is directed not merely at the father as an individual but at the father’s home/household/lineage, the social world that authorizes his actions. In many kinship systems, including Pashtun ones, the “home” is not simply a physical dwelling. It is the social unit through which honor, lineage, continuity, and authority are reproduced. The father derives his authority precisely from his position within that household structure. This once again resonates with Rubin’s theorization of sex/gender, which does not concern individual men but the social relations that organize gendered power. The daughter’s curse can be read as recognizing that the problem is larger than just her father.
The next tapa widens the frame:
Zwananu nang rabandi wukray
Plar me zalim de ma khamar larah liginah Footnote 81
Oh, young men of the village, stand up for me
My father is a tyrant who sends me to a giant serpent
The appeal to “young men” is revealing. The speaker recognizes that power does not reside solely in her father but in the male collective among whom she circulates. Rubin observes that “if women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners.”Footnote 82 By addressing the broader network, the speaker names that structure. Furthermore, the metaphor of the “giant serpent” invokes a figure of threat that, in psychoanalytic terms, can be read as indexing the asymmetry of masculine authority, indicated symbolically as the phallus, within kinship relations. Rubin reads psychoanalytic accounts as mapping how this symbolic authority is distributed along gendered lines in which women do not possess phallus (read authority) but may be given one by someone who possesses it.Footnote 83
The consequences of such exchanges surface starkly in the tapey on mismatched marriages:
Pah spinah girah rapasi shwi
Rab khu di mar krah da limas pa zay di yumah Footnote 84
You stalk me despite your white beard
May you perish, I am like your granddaughter
The “white beard” functions as a sign of seniority and prestige, but within this logic of exchange articulated by structural accounts, it also indexes accumulated status—what enables acquisition. Here, what Rubin terms the “political economy of sex” becomes analytically relevant: gender and sexuality are not merely cultural identities but are produced through kinship and marriage arrangements that distribute rights, obligations, and forms of value in deeply unequal ways. Within such arrangements, women’s exchange is not an isolated practice but part of a broader sex/gender system through which male authority and inter-male relations are reproduced.
Reading through Rubin’s engagement with Freud, the repeated reference to the figure of the father as exchange agent can also be understood as the point at which kinship enforces a redirection of desire itself. In Rubin’s account, the girl’s movement away from the mother and toward the father, during the oedipal stage, is not a spontaneous erotic reorientation but a compelled passage through what she calls the sex/gender system, in which access to the “phallus” structures access to legitimate objects of desire.Footnote 85 The turn to the father is therefore not simply a turn within kinship, but a forced reorganization of attachment under conditions in which heterosexuality is already installed as the only viable route into symbolic exchange. Yet Rubin is attentive to what this transition leaves behind: a residue of resentment produced by the displacement of an original object-choice (the mother) and by the asymmetry of what each sex is permitted to retain or exchange.Footnote 86 It is precisely this resentment as a remainder—desire redirected but not fully reconciled—that surfaces in the tonal force of the tapey, where anger and refusal persist alongside incorporation into the system they contest.
Mockery in the following tapey further sharpens this resentment:
You wrapped your bald head in a thick turban to hide your age
Why, you’re nearly dead!Footnote 87
If the marriage contract positions the husband as the legitimate recipient of a transferred bride, these poems revalue him as a grotesque consumer. The imagery of disguise and decay produces a symbolic inversion in which the authority attached to age and marital purchase is transformed into ridicule. What appears as power within the idiom of exchange is refigured in the poetic frame as excess, lack, and bodily decline. In this reversal, the tapa recalls Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s observation that the body becomes “a battlefield on which issues of sexuality and narration are debated.”Footnote 88 Yet rather than staging the female body as the primary site of contestation, the woman’s discourse redirects the struggle onto the male body itself. Thus, through the female seizure of discourse, tapey displace the contest from the exchanged female body onto the body of the male recipient.Footnote 89 The white beard, bald head, and signs of senescence become objects of scrutiny and mockery through which the husband’s authority is symbolically dismantled. The power secured through exchange is thus challenged not by an escape from the system but by a poetic revaluation that transforms the male body into the terrain on which its legitimacy is contested.
The mismatched marriages may also be arranged between an older girl who has reached puberty and a younger male child. This reversal of age hierarchy complicates, but does not undo, the logic of exchange already at work. Such bonds, as in swara or badal, are used to settle disputes or preserve property and alliance—forms of matrimony in which marriage restores balance between male lineages. The following tapa registers the cost of that arrangement:
Fate brought me a husband, a child I must raise
But, God, when he is tall and strong, I shall be old and weak
Here, the speaker is bound to a boy whose masculinity is yet to be formed, occupying the position of both wife and surrogate mother while the asymmetry of power remains intact. The husband will grow into authority, while she anticipates bodily decline before any possibility of reciprocal partnership. The poem thus exposes a temporal structure of exchange: her present life is consumed in anticipation of a future masculine authority that is already secured within the system. What appears as an anomalous mismatch is therefore consistent with a kinship order organized around the reproduction of male status and the differential pacing of gendered life trajectories.
What unites these tapey is the presence of anger, resentment, and ridicule as discursive markers of contestation, pointing toward an impulse not only to critique but also to symbolically rework the structures of marital exchange in which women are rendered as “gifts” between kin groups. Rather than affirming this logic of gifting, the poems expose its instability by recasting such transfers in terms of coercion, sale, and bodily dispossession, thereby unsettling the moral and symbolic coherence of exchange itself.
While Rubin provides a powerful account of the sex/gender system as a historically produced structure that organizes kinship, sexuality, and political economy, her analysis remains oriented toward the logic of systems rather than their experiential articulation. The tapey examined here can therefore be read not as illustrations of Rubin’s framework, but as an extension of its critical impulse into another register: they render visible how the relations she theorizes are lived, resisted, and inverted in poetic form, where exchange is not only a structural principle but is also rendered as an affective and embodied experience.
Within this set of relations, honor is not separate from exchange; it is one of the mechanisms that keeps it intact. Even as men cast themselves as protectors of the household against outside threats, the responsibility for safeguarding honor is placed squarely on women—their movements, their speech, their desires. The daughter who is transferred between families does not simply secure an alliance; she is expected to uphold its moral legitimacy. Her body thus carries a double burden: it mediates ties between men while also serving as the visible measure of family reputation. The following tapa makes this burden explicit:
Saba me sta pah tuhmat wazhni
Khudai rasti de chi munkar nah shi mayanah Footnote 90
Tomorrow, they will kill me for your love
I implore you never to deny it!
Here, the threat of death is not abstract. It is the logical extension of a system in which women anchor male prestige. What is striking, however, is the speaker’s emphasis. She fears denial more than execution. The plea is not for rescue but for acknowledgment. In a structure where her body guarantees honor, her declaration of love converts that same body into evidence of dishonor. Yet by insisting that her lover may not deny connection with her, she asserts authorship over her desire. The anticipated killing becomes secondary to the preservation of her truth. If marriage organizes women as exchangeable value, honor polices the affective boundaries of that exchange. The speaker’s voice crosses that boundary deliberately.
The defiance intensifies further in the following tapa:
Give me your hand, my love, and let us go into the fields
So, we can love each other or fall together beneath the blows of knivesFootnote 91
The field—like the earlier references to gudar—emerges as a liminal space where desire briefly escapes surveillance. Yet even here, intimacy is shadowed by violence. Love and death are imagined as simultaneous possibilities. The line brings romance and execution into the same frame, exposing how closely erotic choice is tethered to communal punishment. The speaker does not fantasize an escape from the social order; rather, she presents love as a conscious act undertaken in full awareness of its consequences.
The most striking transformation occurs in the following tapa:
Saba me sta pah tuhmat wazhni
Gholi juaru krah chi pah shar me wina zinah Footnote 92
Tomorrow, they will kill me for your love
Sweep the courtyard, so my blood may gush in streams
Here, domestic labor is folded into the choreography of execution. The directive to sweep the courtyard—an ordinary domestic task—prepares the ground for spectacle. The courtyard, a space associated with household order, becomes the site where honor will be restored through blood. By speaking in the language of work, the speaker frames her own execution in terms drawn from daily life. The gesture reveals the ritualized logic beneath so-called honor killings: the clearing of space, the visibility of the act, the conversion of private love into a public lesson. Labor, which elsewhere allowed moments of movement and subtle defiance, here becomes the idiom through which she anticipates her own sacrifice.
The movement from the gudar to the courtyard traces a continuum rather than a rupture. Both are gendered spaces; both are regulated; both carry the imprint of women’s labor. Yet in the tapey of (dis)honorable death, that labor acquires a stark clarity. The extent to which women actually use labor as a means of resistance and resilience may be inconsistent, but the maneuverings of poetic expression around the everyday errands, on the one hand, show the creative potential and agency of women excluded from formal systems of education; on the other hand, they also suggest the significant role of their labor in giving meaning to their emotions, difficulties, dilemmas, and fears. The same body that carried water, sang with companions, and momentarily reclaimed rhythm now stands as the site upon which honor is recalibrated. The political economy that circulated her through marriage also renders her expendable when desire exceeds its bounds.
These tapey complicate any simple reading of honor as static code. They reveal it as an affective economy intertwined with exchange—one that binds women to the preservation of male alliance and punishes deviation as collective loss. Yet they also demonstrate that even at the threshold of death, women claim speech. Through poetic utterance, they refuse to remain silent symbols. In naming their love, their fear, and their impending execution, they briefly reclaim the narrative authority that the system seeks to deny them.
Conclusion
This article has examined a curated collection of tapey from Pashto-speaking contexts to analyze the genre as a critical site through which labor, affect, and constrained autonomy are articulated, negotiated, and resignified. As an oral and largely anonymous tradition, tapa offers a distinctive expressive space that enables Pashtun women to render visible forms of unwaged labor that would otherwise remain obscured within patriarchal social structures and dominant accounts of economic production. In doing so, the tapey do not merely document women’s work; they transform it into a medium of interpretation and resignification through which the textures of everyday life—labor, desire, grief, and constraint—are made legible on women’s own terms.
The analysis of tapey across the gudar, the household, and the fields demonstrates that women’s labor is neither uniform nor passively endured, but differentially structured and affectively experienced. At the gudar, labor is interlocked with experiences of collectivity, mobility, and shared expression, enabling forms of relationality and self-articulation that complicate its material demands. In contrast, work within the home and the fields is more frequently figured through the idioms of coercion, exhaustion, and grievance, revealing the alienation and appropriation that structure women’s unwaged labor under patriarchal authority. In this sense, the tapey extend Federici’s theorization of social reproduction by foregrounding not only the structural centrality of unwaged labor but also its affective intensities and its capacity to generate forms of agency from within conditions of constraint.
At the same time, the article places these forms of labor within a wider system of exchange, showing how ideas about marriage and honor shape the ways women are treated as things of value within kinship networks. Drawing on Rubin’s idea of sex/gender as part of a social life that is the locus of oppression of women, tapey bring to light the everyday realities of practices like warwal, swara, and badal, where close family ties are entangled with transactions and where obligations can slip into coercion.
In this context, the repeated language of labor—bartering, tending, raising, selling—becomes an important way for women to question and challenge the moral authority behind these exchanges. At the same time, the group of tapey that deal with (dis)honorable death shows how this same system not only organizes women’s roles in marriage but also makes them expendable, tying together their bodies, their work, and their emotions within a single system of value, sacrifice, and control.
Taken together, these tapey allow for a rethinking of labor not merely as an economic category but as an affective and expressive condition through which women negotiate forms of constrained autonomy within structures of reproduction and exchange. By articulating labor as both material condition and expressive resource, and by embedding affect within structures of exchange, obligation, and violence, they open a space in which autonomy—however partial or constrained—can be voiced, negotiated, and momentarily enacted. The tapa, in this sense, emerges not only as a form of poetic expression but as a mode of theorizing from the margins, where the intertwined dynamics of labor, affect, and autonomy are made visible, contested, and reimagined.
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