Beyond silence: Hazaragi music in diaspora

This article in The New York Times by Elian Peltier on Afghanistani music and artists in Pakistan warns that it is in danger of being silenced. Although this claim may be somewhat true, its danger is that it misses the whole picture. Afghanistani music is not only the music performed and recorded by Pashtun and Tajik refugees in Peshawar. Take a trip to Quetta, Balochistan once. There, Hazaragi music is flourishing and offers a fresh promise for the production and proliferation of Afghanistani Hazara music in the diaspora.

One only needs to search for Hazaragi music on YouTube, and you will come across dozens of channels featuring various music groups, with folk and pop genres emerging from Quetta. You would realize that the culture and the music are neither frozen nor silent, but actively produced and innovated in different contexts and catered for a more transnational audience. Yes, Afghanistani music is deterritorialized, but in diaspora it is reterritorialized and claimed through digital spaces like YouTube, Spotify, and social media websites.

Yes, music in Afghanistan has completely fallen silent-- if we entirely disregard private homes of people who surreptitiously still play music and even Taliban members play music on their cellphones--but in the diaspora, it has been revived. Ignoring this issue means narrowing our perspective and seeing the world from a narrow space.

We have to remember to acknowledge the cultural resilience of diasporans in the face of violence, displacement, and ongoing threats of deportation. And we should also remember that culture is dynamic, not static; it can adapt, reinvent, hybridize, influence, and be influenced by other cultures.

Fieldwork revitalized my native language

For the first time in nearly a decade, this summer, I had a chance to speak in my native language Farsi more than I did before. It was during my fieldwork that forced me to speak Farsi, though it have been comfortable and beneficial had I been able to speak English for the most part. That is what I also preferred, but not all participants were fluent in English. At any rate, I'm content with what have happened.

In my four years of college, I almost forgot Farsi. In college, I barely spoke my native language because there was no other Farsi speakers around. There was a benign retired US diplomat who lived nearby and we hang out a lot. He often called me or I went over to his place, we chatted in Farsi while cooking and drinking.

I have to admit that for the last ten years, I have never read a book in Farsi though I read the news regularly. That is a shame! (I tell myself). I did not have access to Farsi resources either, and honestly, I had no interest. I am a little bit biased towards Farsi and for that reason, I don't read scientific books other than in English. Farsi is good enough for poetry, storytelling and perhaps, Sufism, but not a language that you can use for critical thinking, logical reasoning, especially in the field of philosophy, technology, and science. I know this statement has ideological values, but what can you say when you compare two things. Well, one might say, languages are not things, they are culture and history. I agree, but what could you do in a short blog post than doing a gross simplification.

But getting back to the main point, living in DC with a community of Hazara immigrants this summer was gracefully beneficial to me. I noticed yesterday that my speech has become more smooth and I have become more confident to control myself from code-switching.