In Search of My Silenced Language

As an Afghan growing up speaking Persian/Dari, I read Maulana Rumi. I encountered his poetry at school and heard his verses recited both at home and in gatherings, large and small. His words echoed from the tongue of my illiterate Grandmother Lion, sometimes fragmented, sometimes whole, always alive on her moving lips. Rumi was everywhere – his lines adorned letterheads and featured in every television programme even remotely connected to the sweet language of the Parsi speakers. One of his most famous lines serves as the perfect introduction to his renowned work, Masnavi Ma’navi:

بشنو از نی چون حکایت میکند

از جداییها شکایت میکند

کز نِیِستان تا مرا بُبریدهاند

در نفیرم مرد و زن نالیدهاند

Listen to the reed as it tells its tale,
complaining of separations from within.
As soon as they separate me from my reed-earth
in my chest, men and women have screamed therein.
                    (my own translation)

I could never grasp what this poem meant, why it was expressed the way it was, or how it was said – like this. I must have been about fifteen at the time. I could not even begin to comprehend the sense of the reed and the earth, the voice resonating within it, or the breath that gave it life – let alone come close to the depth of meaning that would prove so much more intellectually captivating at the age of twenty-one. This is when
I encountered the poem in a broken English ...