The Afghan John Lennon

In his latest blog post, Adam Curtis tells the story of the king of Afghan pop music, singer Ahmad Zahir. With the style of Elvis Presley and the political commitment of John Lennon, he remains an idol to his countrypeople. He was the son of Abdul Zahir, Columbia alumnus, court doctor, health minister, and prime minister under Mohammed Zahir Shah.

As Afghanistan's elite grew more westernised in the 1960s, the children of the ruling class looked for new forms of entertainment and expression. Ahmad started making pop music that blended western influences with traditional music and poetry as well as songs from Indian cinema.

This is Aye Darya* from his first album, with the Habibia Amateurs. It starts very strangely but bear with it a minute:



Later he became more involved with prog rock, working with Afghan band The Stars, who loved Emerson Lake and Palmer but also covered western disco songs. Begzar Ta Begeryam Chon Abaro Dar Bah is from Beyayed Beyayed, the album they recorded together:



Here's Khuda Bowad Yaarit, another proggy song, with a striking video:



And one of his last songs, Tu Ba Mani (1978; released 1979), with another dodgy fan video:



Following the marxist takeover in 1978, he protested against the new government and his songs were banned from state radio. He died mysteriously in his car on June 14, 1979. Officially it was a car accident, but many people believe he was shot dead by one of his friends who were travelling with him, on the order of communist general Daud Taroon.

Following the Soviet invasion in December 1979, his sister Zahira fled to the west, settling in Washington DC, where she set up a hair salon in the Watergate building. Her customers included Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George HW Bush and his son George W.

When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, they destroyed Zahir's grave, believing all music to be sinful. But Ahmad Zahir still retains incredible popularity in Afghanistan and elsewhere, not least at his official web site. Recently his music featured in the film The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan.

*Unfortunately the romanisations of his song titles vary a lot (probably from being translated between Persian, Pashtun, and other languages).

The war against modern poetry

The 20s and 30s saw a flourishing of experimental, modernist poetry, often with marxist or left-wing politics. According to Al Filreis's book Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960, this all changed after World War Two when conservative critics launched a counter-attack; they reasserted a more traditional form of poetry based on the lyric and expressing emotion, helping to kill off literary experimentation and ushering in a post-ideological age. Two reviews, by Charles Bernstein and Sarah Ehlers (pdf) explain Filreis's argument, and largely agree with it.

Ehlers explains how

in the middle of the 20th century, conservative critics decried experimental verse forms in an attempt to destroy the modernist avant-garde and to undo its associations with the Left. Yet by treating modern poetic experimentalism as a form of communist subversion, and by privileging a traditional lyricism defined by individual expression and reflection, it appears that these critics effectively convinced American audiences that poetry and politics don't mix.

The anti-communist critics, such as Stanley Coblentz's League for Sanity in Poetry, attempted to remove the politics from earlier poets. They rewrote the history of poetry to their own ends, turning Whitman from a radical socialist (and homsexual) into a nationalist, an epic poet to match Virgil or de Camoes, and used attacks on poetical experimentalism to discredit the political views of the largely left-wing experimental poets of the 1920s and 30s.

The anti-communists focussed on the difficulty and non-accessibility of modernist poetry, using its apparent rejection of the mass audience to discredit it: modernist poetry became an enemy of the public. The conservatives feared modernist poetry's rejection of hierarchy, with Donald Davidson condemning paratactic verse for its "treacherous political irresponsibility in the act of eschewing relations of cause and effect while the related elements [are] left to stand in unordered, unsubordinated lists." (AF) Bernstein points out the contradiction that leftist writers were often seen as democratic, yet in the 1950s left-wing modernist forms were accused of elitism and anti-populism.

Traditional lyric poetry was seen as staying true to individual emotions, while modern verse was about abstractions. The 1950s anticommunists used similar language to that of Hitler's art criticism: "The vocabulary of thirties-bashing was cast in the idiom of incurability; tropes of cancer and mass death abounded. Leftist writing of the 1930s was dismissed 'in a phrase: it was an alien growth' ... 'poison'" (AF). Lucien Burman condemned Gertrude Stein's influence "still to be found in many strategic strongholds, like the lurking germs of a yellow fever, they must be constantly fought and sprayed with violent chemicals lest the microbes develop again and start a new infection."

As the conservatives tried to shape poetry to their will, modernists were accused of imposing critical orthodoxy and perpetrating a "Big Lie": the lie that their work was poetry at all. Coblentz claimed modernist leftists would use the state security apparatus to impose their poetic ideas on the nation. Pinnacle, the magazine of the League for Sanity in Poetry, compared modernism to genocide. Peter Viereck linked the modernist "anything goes" philosophy with totalitarian mass murder.

The effects of this conservative campaign were long-lasting. 1950s magazines like Poetry refused to publish new verse by writers with radical politics even if the poets had been previously published there. Many poets saw their reputations ruined. The critical landscape shifted from the radicalism of the early 20th century to the system we now have. Bernstein sees traces of the anti-modernism persisting, in a belief that mainstream aesthetic principles are common sense, and a continuing pressure towards non-ideological poetry that accepts the dominant norms; the literary establishment claims that the avant-garde has won, as an excuse to say experimentalism's time has past.

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It is common on the left to explain post-ideological traditionalist poetry and literature as an inevitable product of late capitalism, but the account given by Filreis seem to show that contemporary ideas about poetry were creations of people with a specific political program and perhaps not historically necessary. It also shows how decisions about the literary canon often reflect political needs; battles over the interpretation of classic poets are frequent, and it can be seen here that they often have very high stakes.

Filreis's work follows earlier studies such as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders (Reviews Monthly Review; CIA) which described how the CIA and other anti-communist organisations funded journals such as the Partisan Review, promoted writers such as George Orwell, and most famously supported abstract expressionism. The influence of these policies is debatable; while some people claim abstract expressionism was otherwise worthless and its valorisation is all a CIA plot, a more measured response sees the CIA as attempting to shift the world's cultural balance from Europe (with its strong left-wing tendencies) towards the USA. Promoting abstract art also damaged the left-wing representational art that had been popular in public contexts in the 1930s and 40s, funded by New Deal money, with the many followers of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and black artists like Jacob Lawrence. And art is not a matter of isolated geniuses: they require money, often from government or institutional sources (most American poets seem to earn their living through universities), but also a supportive creative and critical community.

There was certainly debate in the 1950s as to whether anti-communists should fund the abstract expressionists or more traditional artists, so it's noteworthy that in poetry the opposite side seemed to win compared to what happened in painting. And now we have an art world dominated by abstraction and conceptualism, and a literary world that seems shy of experiment. Cultural history often seems to conservatives to be a history of great men and women, and to those on the left as a story of historical inevitability under the wheels of capitalism, but Filreis shows that neither view is sufficient, and literary reputations and the success of artistic movements often hinge on political expediency and decisions that have little to do with art.