Kārwān’s Talking Forest: Materiality, Poetic Imagination, and the Metaphysics of War Violence

Caron, James

Abstract

Pir Muhammad Karwan’s 2000 poetry collection Da Xāperey Werghowey traces a history of materiality, emotion, and imagination across human-environmental systems as they are militarized over twenty years in Afghanistan. At the same as it is a unique narration of the wars, this project is a cosmopolitical one. In dialog with other essays in this issue that point to the life of the immaterial in present-day traditions, I show how Kārwān’s bottom-up psycho-history draws on Persianate-classical, Pashto-popular, and embodied knowledges to critique both imperial and Islamist modernity on ontological grounds. It aims to undermine the borders of self and other that geopolitical violence embeds everywhere: barriers between human and other beings, humans and other humans, imagination and material.

Citation

Caron, J. (online). Kārwān’s Talking Forest: Materiality, Poetic Imagination, and the Metaphysics of War Violence. History and Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2024.2435662

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 26, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Dec 3, 2024
• Deposit Date: Nov 29, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 6, 2024
• Journal: History and Anthropology
• Print ISSN: 0275-7206
• Electronic ISSN: 1477-2612
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2024.2435662
• Keywords: War, relational ontologies, ontopoetics, Afghanistan, peace
• Publisher URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02757206.2024.2435662