The Pearl of Dari is an ethnography of Afghan refugee poetry. It sheds light on how poetry is used in the formation, expression, and negotiation of personhood and subjectivity of Afghan refugees in Iran. Beyond keeping a record of refugee poetry, Dr. Olszewska's book redirects the focus of her anthropological study from the “mass politics of forced migration to subjectivity and individual creativity” (3). She promotes a fresh perspective on literature that includes at a deeper level marginal and obscure populations, whose practices are indeed “developments in their history” and whose artistic productions can serve as a bridge or continuation of literary forms worth examining.
The book presents a twenty-year history of Afghan literary and cultural organizations in post-revolutionary Iran, including their literary and cultural productions and audiences. The focus on poetry, however, allows the author to examine the shift from political poetry invoking heroic notions, with fixed and deeply rooted symbolic meanings in Persian poetry, to a more “self-consciously” modern and subjective genre imbued with private symbols and individual meanings produced by the second-generation refugees who followed this trend.
The author's methodology consisted of a yearlong participant observation of the activities of the Pearl of Dari Cultural Institute, which is located in Mashhad and hosted poetry and short story readings and discussion sessions. This was supplemented by observations at literary festivals and fifty-two recorded interviews of educated male and female Afghans, including thirty-two poets. There are nearly thirty poems examined in this book.
Dr. Olszewska provides the historical background of Afghan refugees’ plight and attends to their diverse experiences. She follows them through Soviet occupation and the later civil wars as they sought refuge in Iran, hoping to pursue their personal, political, and religious ideals among people with a common history, language, and religion. Their further disillusionment resulted from the gradual denial of the rights afforded them in the early 1980s, strict immigration, discriminatory employment laws, “bio-political” and “bureaucratic management by the state,” the Afghan refugees’ own “cultural and political organizing” (6), and, finally, Iranian nationalism and propaganda leading to discrimination against Afghan refugees—all of which led them to an invisible public life and a marginal status at best.
The book illustrates the historically noble position of the poet as the enlightened intellectual in Iranian society and particularly the transformed modern definition of the poet as a writer of avant-garde, unconventional material critical of oppressive social conventions. Dr. Olszewska further analyzes the role this culturally exalted status plays in the formation of subjectivity and personhood in Iran, extending from the middle class to the poor and the marginalized. She demonstrates how this has provided an opportunity for the poetically inclined Afghan refugees not only to gain cultural capital but also to pursue various personal goals.
Chapter 1 recounts the history of the Afghan presence in Iran, including the cultural and literary life of Afghans in Iran and their exclusion from Persian literary history. Dr. Olszewska examines the post-1979 migrations of Afghans to Iran, as well as their experience as oppressed co-believers in Islam with residency, employment, and social services equal to Iranian citizens. At the end of the chapter, the author explores how the loss of those rights following the Soviet withdrawal, along with various discriminatory governmental policies, modern religious practices, the concept of women's rights, and the corresponding changes in subjectivity and personhood among this group, led to the rise of a new kind of Afghan intellectual and cultural activist in Iran.
After providing a thorough and cogent history of Afghan refugees in Iran, in chapter 2 Dr. Olszewska focuses on the cause and extent of the melancholy present in the poetry of Afghan refugees. She argues that it is mostly rooted in economic disadvantage, instability, dual identities, and the liminal nature of their conflicted status among Iranians and even among fellow Afghans.
Chapter 3 introduces the reader to Afghan literary organizations in post-revolutionary Iran including the Pearl of Dari (Dorr-e Darī) Cultural Institute in Mashhad and its dual function as following both the old pedagogical model, where prominent poets transmit their knowledge to students through lectures, and a dialogic one based on open inspirational discussions, encouraging originality, experimentation, and constructive critiques.
In the fourth chapter, the reader is not only presented with a view into the value of poetry and “poetic hermeneutics as a social practice” in Iran, but also into the social lives and history of the Afghan poets, their backgrounds, training, motivation, and creative processes along with the delivery and reception of their poems.
In the next chapter, Dr. Olszewska delves into the history of the culture of love in the Persianate world and transformations of its literary expression into the present. She examines how the poetry of women, in particular, reveals unrealized passions, as well as the effects of the prearranged and often endogamous marriages Afghan women have traditionally had to tolerate, in contrast to those advocating for companionate marriage.
The final chapter addresses the dualities these Afghan poets endure at various levels, the role of the “Inner and Outer Selves,” and “Ethics of Self Expression” in Persian culture and how this dichotomy is enforced, particularly for women. We further see how revelation and concealment are strategized via conventions of Persian poetry that facilitate multifaceted interpretations. Daily navigation of these contradictions at times requires self-censorship, internalization of imposed boundaries, and imprisoned spontaneity.
The Pearl of Dari examines how the vulnerable legal status of Afghan refugees, their exposure to revolutionary Shi'ism along with the modernity of the Islamic Republic, and their own cultural constraints have shaped this group's subjectivities and self-definition, as expressed in the choice of genre, sociopolitical content, and negotiation of censorship in their poetry. The author argues that the limits to the heterotopic space which poetry provides to the exile allow him or her to feel whole again and shows how “creative subjectivity is also mediated by artistic genres, conventions, institutions and cultural politics” (15). By opening up new horizons in literary and immigration studies, the Pearl of Dari will also provide an invaluable resource for classes on the history, literature, and politics of Iran.
