For A. Z., my Pashto teacher
!مڑھ ما شي (Marh ma shay!; “May you not die!”). In my very first week of learning Pashto a few years ago, I was startled when my Pashto teacher wrote this phrase on the blackboard in Pashto and roman scripts, followed by an English translation. Used as a greeting in Pashto, the expression could be taken as a stand-in for “may you have a long life,” but it is much stronger. The starkness and economy of the words deploys the grammatical imperative mood to convey that one may avoid death. The phrase was curiously absent from the textbook, Pashto: An Elementary Textbook, which had the more sanitized ستڑي ما شي (staray ma shay), meaning may you not be tired, along with the Arabic سلام عليکم (salam aleikum), peace upon you (Inomkhojayev 85).
“It is used on both sides of the border,” explained my Pashto teacher. He was from Southern Waziristan, the area of Pakistan on “his side” of the Durand Line, the international border between Pakistan and Afghanistan referred to in the United States as the “Af-Pak Border.” Later in the semester he told us that on 11 September 2001, he was eleven years old when he heard of the attack on the Twin Towers on the radio. Because of his village's proximity to the Af-Pak Border, to escape death and destruction caused by the United States–led “war on terror” and drone attacks, residents of Waziristan were forced to move away to bigger cities—from the closest, Peshawar, to the farthest, Karachi—to find work and somehow begin new lives. Internally displaced Pakistanis ended up living alongside Afghan refugees cascading from the other side of the border. The communities of Pashto speakers in Pakistan and Afghanistan shared the same script worlds, even with differences that marked their speech worlds.
Apart from food and language, what also remained common was the greeting Marh ma shay: May you not die. Unlike the title of Tayeb Salih's famous postcolonial novel Season of Migration to the North—which in Pashto would be translated as شمال تہ ده مهاجرت وخت (Shumal ta da Muhajarat Vakht)—for forcibly displaced communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 9/11 inaugurated a جنوب ته ده مهاجرت وخت (janub ta da muhajarat vakht), a season of migration to the south so they do not die: !چي دوي مڑھ نه شي (che duy marha na she).
Through this frame story, my intention is neither to romanticize a greeting in a language of the Global South nor to reduce forty million speakers of Pashto to a single phrase that entails death. But I do want to frame the twenty-first century as an age of forced displacements and refuge. In 2021, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimated that there were roughly eighty-three million forcibly displaced people worldwide, of which around twenty-one million were refugees and forty-eight million were internally displaced. Since the United States began its “war on terror” in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), the number of ongoing wars and violent conflicts has escalated, including those in Syria (2011– ), Yemen (2016– ), and Venezuela (2019– ). Within a few weeks after Putin's imperial invasion of Ukraine, over four million Ukrainian refugees had fled to neighboring European countries (Associated Press and Euronews). Roughly one percent of the world's population is forcibly displaced.
Scholars of languages and literatures can no longer afford to look away, for many of us and our students are directly or indirectly affected by forced displacements. In this essay, I want to centralize and elevate refuge and forced migration as units of literary criticism, as methodological possibilities, to present them as major frame stories, rather than minor enframed stories peripheral to societies and nation-states.
However, to avoid presentism, I want to ask, how can we use the current moment to turn our attention to identify and read “languages of refuge” in literature at large? How can moments of forced displacement in literary narratives be identified and illuminated by paying attention to languages of refuge? How do we strategically expand our repertoire of what we compare, in original languages of creation or in translation? How do we, as scholars of languages and literatures, identify our own illiteracies, confront our own literal and conceptual “monolingualisms,” as we compare the world through its literature? How do we consider the role of translation in contexts of forced displacement, in which translation is not a matter of choice, but a necessity for survival—of human beings and their stories?
I approach these questions in three steps. First, I draw attention to Afghanistan, one of the biggest sources for refugees in the world since the Soviet invasion in 1979. Second, I unfold multiple meanings and methodological implications of “languages of refuge” with brief examples from literary works. Finally, working with Sandra Bermann's helpful term, the “and zone” of translation, particularly “translation's and,” I explore how forced migrations and refuge can be more centrally written into the project of world-literary comparisons.
“Great Games” of Frontier Politics
Afghanistan escapes, even defies, any established lines of thought in postcolonial theory or world literary studies, because its political organization as a modern nation-state and its multiple postcolonial formations and reincarnations do not overlap with the Midnight's Children moment—to invoke the famous novel by Salman Rushdie—that we have come to associate with India and Pakistan. In historical discourse as well as media coverage in Europe and North America, Afghanistan is framed through British colonial phrases such as “the graveyard of empires” (Bearden), or in neoconservative political vocabularies of a “failed state” (Rubin), shifting the blame for failure largely onto the people of Afghanistan. With all the scholarship in the world on partitions of nation-states and forced migrations, the Af-Pak Border and the area around the Durand Line—the by-product, if not the end-product, of the “Great Game” among the the Persian, Russian, and British empires in the nineteenth century—have remained an empty space in literary imagination (Mani, “Finding”).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay “1996: Foucault and Najibullah” is a notable exception, in which she discusses the construction of Afghanistan and Afghans through questions of language, power, empire building, and governmentality. Spivak's aim in the essay is to “link US behavior with a political tradition in the area that has been called the Great Game” (135). Identifying 9/11 as the point when “the entire pattern of our postcolonial vision was changing … , [t]he era of one-nation colonies that gave us postcolonialism was getting revised” (134), Spivak traces the construction of Afghanistan as a colonial subject from the late nineteenth century to Najibullah as the last communist president. She ends her essay with a commentary on developmental politics that further reiterates the colonial legacies of aid in Afghanistan in the twenty-first century. The essay tellingly starts by comparing scenes of hanging from the beginning of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and the Afghan president Najibullah and his brothers’ public hanging by the Taliban in 1996 (135). In parallel moves, Spivak delves into an archive of the Great Game and traces it from the production of the colonial subject Abd-ur Rehman to the development discourse of the early 2000s (135–41). Commendably, Spivak reads English-language texts along with those written in Farsi, zooming in on the word haqdar—the righteous ruler—thus opening up the question of governmentality in colonial and postcolonial contexts (151). In her monograph Intervention Narratives (2020), Purnima Bose picks up where Spivak leaves off, now focusing on the United States as an imperial power. Bose analyzes texts from foreign-policy papers to popular films such as Charlie Wilson's War, identifying modes in which creation of the victimized colonial power is justified all along in, as the title promises, “intervention narratives.” But unlike Spivak's, Bose's study includes only occasional references to Afghan cultural production.
Curiously absent from both studies is a longer discussion of colonial era politics of division, especially on the question of the Durand Line—touted by the British as their most successful strategic policy in the late nineteenth century—and a detailed discussion of displacements, internal or international. It may serve us well to be reminded that George Nathaniel Curzon, viceroy of British India (1899–1905), delivered the Romanes Lectures at Oxford University under the title “Frontiers,” in which he categorically stated that “owing to [the] international scramble for the ownerless or undefended territories of Africa and Asia, fresh developments have occurred in the expansion of Frontiers, of which notice here must be taken” (4; emphasis added). Curzon connects this endeavor, this intervention narrative justifying the two Anglo-Afghan Wars, to empire building by the Romans. Unbeknownst to Curzon, who died in 1925, yet another colonially constructed border, the Radcliffe Line, which would divide India and Pakistan along religious lines, would have its impact on the Durand Line. Most of the townships, villages, and neighborhoods in and around Waziristan, such as Bannu, Hindi Kalan, Shah Deo, Man Deo, Mohalla Ram Das, and Mohalla Bhatiya, had the largest population of Hindus who were forced to move across the Radcliff Line in 1947 to the newly formed nation of India. Their emptied-out abodes became homes for Muslim refugees from India. The Durand Line thus encompasses multiple histories of forced migration and refuge across and along political boundaries that scar the geography of South Asia.
I am citing Curzon to illustrate how colonial divisions were justified and institutionalized in the academy, especially through filters of “governmentality” based on the colonial power's self-declared ownership of the “ownerless” territories. The Durand Line was finalized in 1896. In many ways, it sealed British ownership of Pashto-speaking areas in British India (today parts of Pakistan). This settler-colonizer entitlement and self-proclaimed British racial-cultural superiority was long present in the nineteenth century in Orientalist philological registers, especially as Pashto language and culture were repeatedly accused of primitivism in British colonial reportage of Anglo-Afghan Wars:
But little can be ascertained as to the origin of the language, which they call Pushtoo. Most of the words are from unknown roots. The words relating to religion, government, and science are mostly through Arabic, through the Persian. They boast of a few literary men; but in point of mental ability and scholarly attainments they rank very low. They go not beyond a circle of ideas of the narrowest limits. They have neither the genius of creation nor the faculty of imitation. (Burton 159)
In the twenty-first century, reducing Pashto to a language of refugees may not be a direct endorsement of Burton's ideas, but it carries over the colonial legacies of geographic, thematic, and linguistic illiteracies that still inform mainstream literary criticism. Despite a long list of journals and publications dedicated to Afghanistan in English, German, and French, as well as anthologies such as Afghanistan in Ink (Green and Arbabzadah), Pashto and Dari Farsi literatures have not received adequate attention in comparative world literary studies. Spivak's admonishment to look beyond one-nation colonies and Bose's discussion of “interventionist narratives” reveal the continuation of the “Great Game” of empires beyond Afghanistan. The still-colonial “governmentality” can be read well in United States Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's curious comparative sentence following the United States armed forces’ withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021: “Kabul is manifestly not Saigon” (qtd. in Mani, “Empires”). Underlying this comparison in negation are notions about which narratives are permissible, which are not, and in which language: the powerful registers of the global anglophone, or the hitherto willfully neglected, impermissible narratives in languages of everyday lives—Hmong, Vietnamese, Pashto—all of which suddenly become languages of refuge.
Languages of Refuge
I want to offer multiple meanings of the term languages of refuge. First and foremost, the term refers to the language of inaugural iteration, the primary language spoken by someone who has become a refugee, the very same language in which the refugee might ask—through gestures, orally, or in writing—for asylum. The primacy of a language, its incomprehensibility to the stranger, does not make it or its speakers or readers primitive or monolingual. In fact, from actual occurrences in the contemporary reality of our world, to their fictionalized accounts, these very languages appear as languages of apprehension and trepidation, as well as cognition and re-cognition of entire histories, cultures, and traditions of aesthetic expression.
Two examples from world classics illustrate these thoughts. In the Epic of Sundiata, Sundiata—“Sogolon Djata in the rapid Mandingo language becomes Sundiata or Sondjata” (Niane 23)—son of King Maghan Kon Fatta and his second wife, Sogolon, must leave Niani with his mother on the orders of the first queen Sassouma and her son Dankaran Touman. The chapter “Exile” presents a vivid picture: “Their feet ploughed up the dust of the roads. They suffered the insults which those who leave their country know of. Doors were shut against them, and the kings chase them from their courts. But all that was part of the great destiny of Sundiata” (29). Sundiata and Sogolon finally find refuge in Ghana, where Mandingo, now a language of refuge, and its recognition become their saving grace. Sogolon and her children are received by the king's brother, who understands Mandingo, and acts as an interpreter: “‘The King Greets the Stranger.’ ‘The Strangers greet the King.’ ‘Today I have come to ask for Asylum with the Cissés of Wagadou’” (33). “To the great astonishment of Sogolon and her children the King also speaks the very same Mandingo language” (34).
Two-thirds of the way along Abolqasem Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, in the “Legend of Seyavash,” we learn about Seyavash having to flee Iran to find refuge in Turkestan (Ferdowsi 245). There he meets Afrasyab, the king, who welcomes him and becomes his friend. During a friendly game of polo between the two kings and their soldiers, Seyavash's soldiers become aggressive, so he (Seyavash) shouts at them in Pahlavi: “This is a playing field, not a battlefield for you to be raging and struggling like this” (249). Afrasyab, primarily a speaker of Turkish, understands Seyavash's orders to his soldiers in Pahlavi and quickly comprehends why suddenly his own soldiers have an advantage and a lead in the game. Seyvash's small gesture of hospitality, even as it comes as a scolding to his soldiers, is recognized by Afrasyab.
Then comes the secondary language: the language of mediation, citation and re-citation in translation. This language explodes myths about “untranslatability,” and the exclusivity, the insulated borders of a particular linguistic universe that the term untranslatability invokes. The work of translation in this language can be best understood as translation beyond instrumentalism, as Lawrence Venuti reminds us in Contra Instrumentalism. Venuti calls out the instrumentalism of previous models of translation that conceive translation as “the reproduction or transfer of an invariant that is contained in or caused by the source text as invariant form, meaning or effect” (1; added emphasis). Venuti's critique is especially helpful in thinking about languages of refuge, in which an instrumentalist transfer of an invariant source text or form simply does not hold. In the very act of translation, the singularity of the source text and its meaning, effect, or form undergo transformation. Any literary text in citations or re-citations acquires further complex layers of meaning. Two examples from contemporary literature, one written originally in Dari Farsi and the other in German, illustrate this example.
That moments of refuge begin even before refuge is sought is illustrated by several examples from the literatures of or about Afghanistan. The United States–Soviet struggle and the repercussions of the fights between the Russian soldiers and the mujahideen, funded by the United States, regularly appear as frame stories in the French-Afghan author Atiq Rahimi's works. The novella Earth and Ashes (2000), originally composed and published in Dari as Khâkestar-o-Khâk (1999), is set in the years following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The protagonist is an old man, Dastaguir, whose son, Murad, works for a coal mine run by the Afghan state. The Soviet army bombards the village and everyone in the family dies, except for the old man and the five-year-old grandson, Yassin, who goes deaf. Incapable of understanding why he cannot hear anyone anymore, Yassin asks, “Grandfather, have the Russians come and taken away everyone's voice? What do they do with all the voices? Why did you let them take away your voice? If you hadn't would they've killed you?” (32). The constant presence of the Russians and the Russian language in a text written in Dari Farsi and then translated into English shows the multilingual mediation and dissemination, the uncontainment, of both languages and people. In addition, citation and re-citation of Shahnameh, discussed earlier, become crucial to the transformation of the classic as it is presented in the text. There is a parallel storyline in this novella of a tea seller named Mirza Kadir, a reciter of Shahnameh. He is particularly interested in the legend of Rustom and Sohrab, the story that entails the separation of a father and son living lives unaware of each other's existence (42–43). The story of Rustom and Sohrab, into which now is enframed the story of Dastaguir and Murad, mediates a longer narrative tradition as it reconceptualizes it beyond instrumentalism.
The history of Afghanistan, entangled and inseparable from the history of many powerful nations of the Global North—Great Britain, the Soviet Union, as well as imperial, divided, and reunited Germany—acquires an epic treatment in the German-Afghan author Massum Faryar's novel Buskaschi, oder der Teppich meiner Mutter (Buzkashi, or My Mother's Carpet [2015]). The novel begins in 1919, with the end of World War I, when the Western-oriented Afghan king Amanullah resumes power. It ends in the late twentieth century, when the aftermath of the rivalries between superpowers empowers the mujahideen and, later, the Taliban. The narrator, an Afghan refugee in Germany, recounts the lives of his mother and father. In the first part of the novel, the Farsi poet Khwaje Shams-od-Din Mohammad Hafez-e-Shirazi, known to the world under his pen name, Hafez, makes an appearance. The narrator presents Hafez's poetry in German translations from the nineteenth-century Orientalist Friedrich Rückert and the twentieth-century Iranian German poet Cyrus Atabay (Faryar 87–88, 170). Beyond the Orientalist tradition of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, whose German translations of Hafez inspired Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to write the West-Östlicher Diwan, in Faryar's novel the refugee narrator writing in German revisits Hafez but, by using extant translations by an Orientalist and a migrant writer, completely reframes the meaning of Hafez in the German translation for the twenty-first century.
And finally, there is an entire set of tertiary languages, the vast apparatus of legal language determined by the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of the Refugee, which refugees may acquire awareness of if they are fortunate enough to be alive and in a space where they can receive or apply for asylum. These tertiary languages also include the language of hosts in all their forms: as helpful volunteers providing aid, as police, army, or immigration officials either compromising or validating the refugees’ dignity. Or, if the refugee ends up sneaking past all legal authorities and starts a life as a persona non grata to the state, the language of the employer, the landlord, the neighbor, the shopkeeper, with whom the refugee may communicate in the primary and, as time passes, in the secondary or tertiary languages, either in the confined space of a refugee camp, or on the streets of the forcibly chosen home, permanent or temporary. These are languages of legitimation, authorization, accreditation, and socialization, and, simultaneously, languages of rejection, racialization, and minoritization.
A collective of refugee poets in contemporary Germany, writing under the auspices of The Poetry Project, are drawing attention to the contemporary histories of the “Great Game” of Afghanistan in the twenty-first century (Poetry Project Berlin). The project was founded by the journalist Susana Koelbl, who served as the foreign correspondent for the German political magazine Der Spiegel in Afghanistan, in collaboration with the Afghanistan-born German lawyer Aarash Spanta. The poems written by these young poets in Farsi and Arabic, then translated into German and English, bring together the many registers of languages of refuge.
In this current fabric of the world, torn asunder and patched together by refugees and forced migrants, I have mobilized the Pashto phrase to engage with languages and literatures of border zones, cities of refuge, and refugee camps. Pashto is just one example. As my examples illustrate, in moments of cataclysmic world-historical events, when human lives are suddenly swept up by powerful forces beyond their control, as citizens and residents are turned into refugees, languages of everyday exchanges quickly morph into languages of refuge. Languages of refuge are not to be conflated with, or reducible to, languages of refugees—that is, languages that may be refugees’ first languages, their mother tongues. Much as speakers of any language, including English, have the potential of becoming a refugee—a fact that is conveniently ignored or forgotten in affluent societies in Western Europe and North America—any language can one day become a language of refuge. A language of refuge could be a language in which one seeks refuge, or one in which one finds refuge. Languages of refuge attest to the liminality of the border, but they absorb forced displacements in much more powerful ways. Languages of refuge may invoke foreignness, strangeness, unfamiliarity. But their palpable presence within mainstream societies and nation-states—for nation-states are also formed through multiple waves of migration, through slow sedimentations, and therefore encompass histories of forced displacements within and outside their political boundaries—calls into question the very foreignness, strangeness, and unfamiliarity attributed to them. In fact, paying attention to languages of refuge shifts the responsibility of their ascribed foreignness from the speaker to the listener, the writer to the reader, forcing the listener or the reader to confront their own self-sanctioned ignorance.
That is the work of literature, of poetry, dramas, novels, creative nonfiction, graphic novels, and more, in that they do not ask us to acquire literacy merely in “languages of refugees,” the alphabet and grammar of a particular language. Whether composed in the first language of a refugee or translated into another language, or even composed in the second, third, fourth language in which the refugee author or artist finds refuge, literary works urge us to consider acquisition of political, cultural, and historical literacies in such languages of refuge. This multilevel acquisition can help us challenge constructed border regimes of literary studies encapsulated in terms such as national literature and regional literature, categories that depend on the monolingual composition of nation-states. Engaging with languages of refuge, I contend furthermore, reveals that mono- (singular) in monolingual does not necessarily convey homo- (similar). The apparent singularity of a language carries the plurality of differences, a plethora of stories of connection, coexistence, and conviviality along with histories of conquests, conflicts, and colonialisms. So, on the one hand I offer the term languages of refuge as part of a larger repertoire of new critical tools to forge alternative ways of thinking about world literature—in the original, or in translation—in global comparative contexts, especially in the case of literatures written in what in the United States are known as “less commonly taught languages.” On the other hand, the term can well serve to make us aware of our own ascriptions of and subscriptions to border regimes of native and foreign, familiar and strange, local and extra-local that form and inform our reception of refugee narratives.
In other words, languages of refuge may refer to instances of deployment of a language or languages to seek shelter in situations in which wars, violent conflicts, religious persecutions, or, increasingly, climate disasters create conditions for human beings to seek refuge. Beyond its literal meaning, the term can serve as a point of departure to investigate the pre-lives, the prologues of such forced displacements, in which languages—often in hierarchical relationships to others—become sources and resources to scrutinize much longer series of events, which sometimes over decades, other times over centuries, lead to that eruptive moment when mass displacement is unleashed. Under languages of refuge, we can also understand the registers of affective dimensions in the afterlives of moments of seeking refuge—that is, modes in which refugee subjecthoods are expressed beyond departures and arrivals, in narratives that grant aesthetic expression to thoughts, feelings, and ways of being in the geographic place and the cultural space that could be a few hundred, or thousands of, miles away from what was once called home.
The Work of Comparison
In South Asia, where the language of politics is inseparable from the politics of language, Afghanistan also plays its very important part, at times overlapping, other times escaping, the primacy accorded to English as the dominant “colonial” language one has come to associate with India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In this rather complicated linguistic context, one cannot revert to simplistic ideas of global dominance of English or create borders between languages and literatures as we have in the past: major, minor, large, small, dominant, subservient. Bermann's idea of the “and zone” of translation and comparing in translation—or original—serves to illustrate this asymmetry. In her address to the American Comparative Literature Association in 2019, Bermann states:
At times, the worldly dimensions of translation can be all too striking, and in every case, they need to be considered. Vectors of power cross through it. The practice of translation is not only similar to that of comparative literature, in its tendency toward endless encounters, new connections. Like comparative literature, it also does its interpretive work in the basically conjunctive space of and. It works, that is, through connection and relation.
Bermann's term “and zone” helps us think how reading languages of refuge and comprehending them through “worldly dimensions of translation” would require recognition of vectors of power, endless encounters, new connections and relations, and interpretive work. One could extend Bermann's thoughts to test the efficacy of and zones within and beyond colonial borders in order to treat them not merely as disjunctive, but also as conjunctive zones of global connections. Let me conclude by briefly citing two poems, the first in Pashto by Tahir Dawar, a Pakistani police inspector who was killed for bringing to light state-endorsed violence in Waziristan following the US intervention:
Dawar's poem acquires multiple layers of meaning, when read comparatively with a few lines of “The Body Counts,” by Tsitsi Ella Jaji, a United States–based poet and scholar from Zimbabwe:
Both poems feature vectors of power, in that they centralize state-sponsored and state-endorsed violence in multiple global contexts that lead to mass deaths, displacements, and disappearances of human beings that punctuate lives for many marginalized communities in societies around the globe, from which refuge and shelter are sought. Dawar's poem, when read at a distance from his biography and geography, can be read as the words of a person who has lost everything in his life. There is no mention of Afghanistan, the Durand Line, or Waziristan in his poem. The biographical and geographic origins of the language, Pashto, lead the reader to one of the most volatile zones from where the maximum number of refugees originated in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Jaji's poem maps such violence in the entire world. Waziristan, a place whose repeated violence evokes either momentary sympathy or long-term apathy, appears on the same page as affluent Western metropolitan locations such as London, Chicago, and New Orleans, each one with its own history of killings and loss of support networks, each one with stories of ruin buried and forgotten, or simply erased from mainstream memory. The inclusion of Soweto, with a history of Western colonialism and apartheid, the redlining of residential areas in London, Chicago, and New Orleans, each carry memories of internal Durand Lines, whether they are named as such or not.
To call the linguistic-poetic register of these two poems melancholic would be a grave mistake; the poems work as petitions, as signposts to the world, reminding the world of what I discussed earlier through multiple meanings of languages of refuge—how everyday languages turn into languages of refuge and carry emotions of apprehension, trepidation, all the way to racialization and minoritization. The border zones work as those “and zones” of translation beyond the instrumentality of translation. In the words of David Damrosch, reading these two poems in comparison augments the task of comparing literature in a global age, which “involve[s] novel intersections of perspectives that haven't always been in conversation” (338). The two poems open possibilities of investigating phrases such as “Great Games” and “failed state” beyond Afghanistan, holding the white Western world accountable. In languages of refuge, Dawar and Jaji ask for the haq, the rights of those who do not have them, from the haqdars, the powerful who directly or indirectly disenfranchise the marginalized of their rights.
Coda
The terms unilingual, monolingual, and ambilingual enter the English language at the end of the nineteenth century, coinciding with the high point of European colonialism in Asia and Africa. Unilingual is older than monolingual, and yet in its earlier usage it referred to something primitive, provincial, uncosmopolitan. Monolingualism may rhyme with colonialism (Mbembe), but its rhythms have been rather different from what we have been able to hear focusing just on the phonetic world of English. The ethical and aesthetic enterprise of reading refuge and comparing in translation cannot simply rely or focus on the so-called refugee languages. We must turn our attention to languages of refuge and focus more on the and zones that we can imagine of the politically volatile zones. In doing so, as literary scholars and critics we will find that the entire linguistic universe of refuge resounds with forbearance, endurance, and hope for tolerance. Languages of refuge open for us a zone hitherto unnamed, or willfully neglected. From Niane and Ferdowsi, through Rahimi, Faryar, the numerous young poets in Germany, Dawar writing on the Af-Pak border to Jaji writing in North Carolina, we find multiple border zones that are also and zones: zones in which sensibility stretches or tests the limits of permissibility.
It is up to us whether we continue to hear the mono- in the oneness of a language, or pay attention enough to realize that it is stereo quality, and the Durand Line is actually a surround-sound and zone, in which the din of bombs and explosions is still cut by sounds of stories and poetry: دا اوازونه دوي مړه نه شی (Da aawazona duy marh na shee; “May these sounds not die”)!
