A landay is a two-line poem passed mouth to mouth, ear to ear, among Pashtun people for at least 1,000 years.

A landay has very few rules. It must have 22 syllables, with nine in the first line and 13 in the second.

It must end in the sound ‘ma’ or ‘na’. It must take on one of five subjects: meena, love; jang, war; watan, homeland; biltoon, separation; and, finally, gham, which means despair or grief.

For women and girls in Afghanistan, poetry is often associated with singing and dancing, and sometimes with prostitution.

Because of its associations, families often forbid their daughters from writing poetry. Muska started calling and regularly reading her love poems aloud.

While she was on the phone, her brothers overheard her and assumed that she was calling a lover rather than a group of women sitting in a room in the distant capital.

They beat her terribly and threatened to kill her if she kept writing. She did it anyway, and was discovered. After another attack, she decided to take her own life.

One day in the spring of 2010, Muska phoned her fellow poets from a hospital bed to say that she had set herself on fire. She had burned herself in protest.

Her brothers had beaten her badly after discovering her writing poems.

Poetry – especially Love poetry – is forbidden to Afghanistan’s women: it implies dishonor and free will. Both are unsavory for women in traditional Afghan culture.

Soon after, Muska died.

Because my lover is a British soldier,
blisters blossom on my heart

became

Because my lover is a Russian soldier,
blisters blossom on my heart

and is today

Because my lover is an American soldier
blisters blossom on my heart.

When sisters sit together, they’re always praising their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they’re selling their sisters to others.