AFGHAN EXPATRIATES KEEP THEIR MUSIC LIVE
Communists, Taliban Squelched Many Sounds
BY KIM CURTIS, Associated Press
11/17/01, in the San Jose Mercury News

FREMONT -- Naghma, an Afghan singer who fled her country after receiving death threats, watched for years from afar as the Taliban outlawed music.

Tapes were ripped from cassettes and hung like brown streamers from trees. A man caught hiring musicians for his daughter's wedding went to jail for 10 days. For musicians, performing could mean death.

``Unfortunately, serving others in our country is considered a crime, particularly in the arts. I was an artist. The community itself was against art and music,'' said Naghma, 36.

She and other Afghan musicians have kept their music alive from afar -- and despite the Taliban's five-year rule, they remain popular.

Their music can be found in bins of cassettes in Pakistani bazaars or on the Internet. It plays from loudspeakers in town squares in Iran, or in living-room concerts in Afghan-American homes. It was among the treasured possessions carried by some refugees leaving Afghanistan.

And this week, when Taliban soldiers retreated from some Afghan cities, people spontaneously celebrated with music. They held tiny tape recorders to their ears and danced in the streets.

``Without music, I could not live -- not even for one hour,'' said another Afghan singer, Mahwash, through a translator. Mahwash, who like many Afghans uses one name, lives in Fremont. She performs at concerts and weddings -- or just sings in the shower to keep her music alive.

Mahwash says she is anxious for peace so she can go back and ``sing for all the women who suffered under the various governments, to reduce a little of their pain and suffering.''

FLEEING AFGHANISTAN

Thousands of musicians have fled Afghanistan in the past 20 years. Some left because of the communists, who ruled from 1978 to 1992 and restricted the music that could be played. Others left during the chaos after the communists' fall. The few musicians who remained fled or went underground when the Taliban cracked down.

Naghma -- whose face is seen all over the Middle East, on walls, on posters, painted on the sides of trucks -- has never considered herself political. But she became a star in Afghanistan under communist rule, and her popularity made her a target of authorities.

She said the communists killed her sister, mistaking her for the singer. Fearing that her husband and children were next, Naghma fled to Pakistan a decade ago. Then Taliban sympathizers there threatened to kill her.

Two years ago, Naghma settled with her family in Fremont, and she was granted U.S. political asylum.

``If I don't speak out for the rights of the women and the people and the peace of the nation, then who will do it?'' she said in a phone interview from Pakistan, where she was on a secretive visit to record an album.

``I and other educated people must do it. We are threatened, but it will not stop us.''

Long before Afghanistan's current borders were drawn by British India and Russia in the late 19th century, the country enjoyed a rich musical tradition. As early as the 1860s, Indian musicians performed at court in Kabul.

Afghan music distinguished itself from its Indian roots with its use of spiritual and mystical poetry sung with heavy vibrato; a favorite subject is romantic love. The singer is usually accompanied by a harmonium, which looks and sounds much like an accordion. The singing is punctuated by fast sections.

Afghanistan's national instrument is the rubab, a short-necked lute. Long-necked lutes like the dambura and the uniquely Afghan tanbur and dutar are also widespread.

Before the Taliban banned all singing and instruments, music was sold in stores, and played on loudspeakers in town squares and at festivals. In the 1960s, Radio Afghanistan (www.radioafghanistan.com) was launched, creating an audience for modern, popular versions of Afghan music.

ACHIEVING FAME

Female singers also achieved fame. Mahwash, 54, first worked as a secretary at the radio station. Her musical career began in the 1960s, and in 1976 the government gave her the title of master musician. She fled in 1989.

While Naghma and Mahwash help keep traditional Afghan music alive, Qader Eshpari, 29, performs for a new generation.

He grew up in Kabul, where his brother owned a music store, and listened to Santana and Donna Summer. He's been in the United States since 1983, but ``the traditional music was still in the back of my head,'' he said.

He spent months searching for bits and pieces of Afghan instrumental and Eastern music on the Internet, albums and CDs. Then he transferred those small sampled songs to an electronic keyboard. Now his Middle Eastern-style electronic dance music reaches thousands of Afghans across the globe via the Internet.

Sher Ahmad, executive director of the Fremont-based International Refugee Services, Inc., recalls his desperate quest for tickets to a sold-out 1968 Mahwash concert in Afghanistan. He ended up with tickets that got him close enough to hear but not see.

When Ahmad visited his hometown of Kandahar last year, he found a deafening silence.

''It's like you're walking through dead bodies, through a graveyard,'' he said. ``Only the mountains were the same. Everything else was not the same at all.''