Hazara

By Binazir Haidari

Hazara

You call me a mutant and unworthy

in hopes that your words will unsettle the land beneath my feet

you proudly call yours;

as though to drown out our folk songs that reached the mountains before they stood.

My almond eyes discomfort you 

because yours are afraid to admit they’re different

to admit they’re beautiful;

instead you raise your nose and call mine 

flat. 

My blood is unduly thick when it comes to coating missiles

and painting the middle portion of our flag

but made thin as water to wash away history. 

I stand here, uncomfortably twisting my tongue to wring out the sweet accent 

in order to tell my story in the sharper syllables of yours--

but of all the deaths, 

I realize the first one was when you convinced me I was lesser than you. 

Kabul University Attack

Today I tap my screen

to the rhythm of my racing heart

because my thumbs are numb

to touch

and mindless to the images 

I can’t reach behind the glass,

behind the sea,

miles away from me

where my land and my people

crumble into the breeze.

Ambition drawn notes

are drenched in youthful blood;

the pages flutter ownerless on the streets

where wandering mothers scan for familiar 

handwriting

because it is easier to search letter by letter

than limb by limb

for their child. 

I resemble that child— 

a student, an Afghan

but the difference is that I breathe 

on this side of the screen— 

and no amount of tapping or scrolling

will tell me why. 

What qualified me to stay alive on this side? 

Bamyan

Bamyan is haunted, they say.

The great Buddha is an empty coffin

etched into the mountain.

They stole him but left

confusion in the form of his silhouette 

to cloud our eyes so we crumble

and forget the nobility that we were;

the civilization that made us. 

They’ve robbed us of our memory, robbed us of our identity. 

Lines of generations missing like lines in a book,

our story became blackout poetry

to bring light to their own words. 

and conceal our unwritten narrative. 

But its written I promise, if you read the 

gravestones composed on the

paper sand ground.

Hold your ear to its page

and you will hear an echo 

of history that repeated its tune

in slaughtering my kind

until there was an entire symphony 

buried into the ground…

But it’s an incomplete song 

and though you play deaf

I hear a waiting echo 

like the nervous drumming  

in my chest.

It has happened before, it will happen again

and we play a guessing game of when

our entire lives. 

Bamyan is haunted, because there was never an apology.

Bamyan is haunted, because although history is digestible,

the fear of the future locks unsettled dust from decades of massacre into the air

for us to inhale until tomorrow and the day after that. 

Every breath, might be a breath away from another genocide.

About: I do not consider myself a writer or poet. And I have only recently begun recognizing myself as a Hazara while reconnecting to my Afghan roots. I am however, a feeler, and I have always been a Hazara from Afghanistan at heart, even when I wasn’t proud of it. My only goal is to fill simple language with all the feelings I carry from that identity, so that others may also be redirected to it. Art and poetry have always been and will always be a resistance to the mass desensitization created by the news, media and opportunists. Poetry has access to the human soul, so I am hoping my words can spark all the parts of people that enable change and healing in face of all the hurt. My words are a source of my own hope for my people.

Keep in touch with Binazir Haidari

Instagram @ll.binazir.ll

Cover Image by Sana Saidi