Poetry as Counter-Archive: Cultural Trauma, Militarization, and Narrative Agency in Pashtun Lived Experience

Poetry as Counter-Archive: Cultural Trauma, Militarization, and Narrative Agency in Pashtun Lived Experience | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Research Article Poetry as Counter-Archive: Cultural Trauma, Militarization, and Narrative Agency in Pashtun Lived Experience Awrang Khan This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-8496271/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Published Journal Publication published 08 May, 2026 Read the published version in Human Arenas → Version 1 posted 10 You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract This study examines contemporary Pashto poetry as a critical cultural site through which collective trauma, identity, and resistance are articulated under conditions of prolonged militarization and political marginalization in Pakistan. Drawing on Cultural Trauma Theory, the study conceptualizes poetry not merely as an aesthetic form but as a mode of cultural knowledge through which communities narrate suffering, contest dominant power structures, and preserve collective memory. Focusing on Pashtun regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former FATA, the analysis explores how poetic discourse represents state violence, surveillance, displacement, and the transformation of Pashtun identity into a securitized and suspect category. Using qualitative textual and thematic analysis, the study examines a selected corpus of contemporary Pashto poems produced in the post-2001 conflict context. The findings demonstrate that Pashtun poetry functions simultaneously as testimony, critique, and resistance by exposing the normalization of violence, the erasure of Pashtun agency, and the unequal valuation of life and death within dominant national narratives. Through metaphor, imagery, silence, and symbolic inversion, poets challenge imposed representations and reclaim narrative authority over Pashtun history, identity, and experience. The study argues that cultural trauma in Pashtun society is not produced by isolated events but is sustained through repetitive processes of militarization, misrepresentation, educational exclusion, and spatial control. By foregrounding poetic expression as a form of counter-archive, this research contributes to trauma studies, postcolonial literary scholarship, and South Asian cultural studies, demonstrating how marginalized communities employ poetry to resist erasure and articulate alternative moral and political imaginaries beyond securitized frameworks. Pashto poetry Cultural trauma Militarization and surveillance Postcolonial resistance Identity and marginalization Introduction When being who one is becomes the gravest of crimes, poetry ceases to function merely as language and emerges as a subtle yet potent mode of truth-telling. This sensibility, articulated by contemporary Pashtun poets, reflects the deep tension between ethnic identity and systemic oppression in Pakistan. The Pashtun community—historically subjected to militarization, displacement, surveillance, and structural discrimination—continues to endure profound individual and collective trauma. Such trauma is not confined to discrete violent events; rather, it becomes internalized within cognition, perception, emotional life, and collective memory, leaving long-term psychological and cultural imprints (Ledoux, 1992 ; Van der Kolk, 1996; Caruth, 1996 ). In contexts marked by political repression and identity-based stigmatization, poetry assumes a critical role as a medium through which communities articulate pain, reclaim dignity, and document experiences that remain unacknowledged within official narratives (Alexander et al., 2004; Ashraf & Akhtar, 2024 ). Global scholarship on trauma literature demonstrates that poetic expression often carries the burden of unspeakable histories, employing repetition, fragmentation, metaphor, spectral imagery, and strategic silences to render experiences that resist linear narration (Whitehead, 2004 ; Piatek, 2014 ). Studies of diasporic and conflict-zone poets, such as Agha Shahid Ali, illustrate how poetry transforms displacement, nostalgia, and memories of violence into artistic narratives that preserve cultural identity while raising public consciousness (Majumdar, 2008 ). However, trauma articulated through Pashtun poetry emerges within a distinct political ecology shaped by prolonged militarization, ethnic profiling, and the securitization of identity, conditions that exceed the explanatory scope of generalized trauma frameworks. While these studies establish poetry as a key medium of trauma articulation, they remain largely detached from the specific political and ethnic configurations shaping Pashtun experiences in Pakistan. Despite the extensive theoretical engagement with trauma and memory in world literature, systematic scholarly attention to Pashtun poetry through the lens of cultural trauma remains limited. Research on political violence in Pakistan has largely foregrounded security, militancy, and geopolitical dynamics, rarely examining poetic expression as a site where trauma, identity, and resistance intersect (Ashraf & Akhtar, 2024 ). As a result, the cultural and emotional dimensions of Pashtun lived experience remain under-theorized within existing scholarship. This study seeks to address this gap by examining how contemporary Pashto poetry represents cultural trauma under conditions of prolonged militarization and political marginalization. Guided by Cultural Trauma Theory, it examines a selected corpus of contemporary Pashto poems from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former FATA region to explore (a) how poets represent state oppression, including militarization, surveillance, displacement, and collective punishment, and (b) how Pashtun identity is discursively constructed as a ‘crime’ or ‘threat’ within poetic narratives. The study further examines how poetry functions simultaneously as an emotional, political, and cultural instrument of resistance. It argues that Pashto poetry not only documents trauma but also transforms it into a reflective, dignifying, and communal act of survival, positioning literature as a vital site through which marginalized communities articulate what remains silenced within dominant discourses. Cultural expression, particularly poetry, has long been recognized as a critical medium for communities experiencing political conflict, identity contestation, and structural violence. Literary forms frequently evolve into mechanisms of cultural resistance, collective memory, psychological resilience, and ideological negotiation. Within South Asia, Pashto poetry has functioned simultaneously as a cultural archive and a political voice, particularly during periods marked by colonial domination, displacement, militarization, and terrorism. Existing scholarship provides important theoretical insights into poetry as resistance, yet also reveals conceptual limitations in addressing contemporary Pashtun poetic responses to post-9/11 conflict. Cultural Resistance: Global Perspectives International literature conceptualizes cultural resistance as the strategic deployment of symbolic, artistic, and expressive practices to challenge dominant power structures, negotiate identity, and articulate collective suffering. Foundational postcolonial theorists such as Said ( 2006 ), Bhabha ( 1995 ), and Jefferess ( 2008 ) demonstrate how marginalized communities resist hegemony by reclaiming cultural heritage and subverting ideological control. Empirical studies from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East illustrate how poetry, song, and oral traditions confront authoritarianism, destabilize dominant narratives, and sustain collective memory under conditions of oppression. Recent scholarship further emphasizes cultural resistance as a means of symbolically processing trauma and transforming suffering into collective resilience (Naegler, 2025 ). Within the South Asian context, Ahmad and Alam (2019) reinforce these insights by demonstrating that Pashto poetry historically emerged as a response to state-driven homogenization policies. They argue that Pakistan’s nation-building project—centred on Islam and Urdu—systematically marginalized regional ethnic identities, prompting Pashto poets to develop counter-discourses asserting linguistic pride and historical memory. This positioning of poetry as symbolic resistance aligns closely with broader postcolonial theories while highlighting the specificity of the Pashtun case. Postcolonial scholarship identifies multiple modalities of resistance, including rewriting, subversion, opposition, and transformation. However, the application of these frameworks to contemporary Pashto poetry produced under counterterrorism regimes remains limited. In militarized contexts marked by surveillance and ethnic profiling, Pashto poets engage in symbolic resistance through metaphor, imagery, and narrative inversion, articulating experiences that remain suppressed within dominant political discourse. This global literature provides the conceptual groundwork for examining how Pashtun poetry operates as a localized form of cultural resistance, shaped by the specific historical, political, and securitized conditions of Pakistan’s Pashtun regions. Poetry in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies Studies of poetry in conflict and post-conflict societies demonstrate that poetic expression performs critical sociopolitical functions, including identity reconstruction, trauma documentation, and the production of counter-narratives where formal political expression is constrained. Palestinian resistance poetry and African liberation-era oral traditions illustrate how poetry sustains collective resolve and imagines alternative futures. Such scholarship establishes poetry as an epistemological and political resource rather than a purely aesthetic form. Psychophysiological research further supports these claims by showing that poetry activates affective and cognitive processes associated with emotional engagement and memory formation (Wassiliwizky et al., 2017 ). These findings underscore poetry’s relevance for examining trauma in societies experiencing prolonged violence. Pashtun Cultural Literature Poetry occupies a central position within Pashtun cultural life, shaping social norms, political consciousness, and everyday communication. Literary forms such as tappa, ghazal, and charbeta articulate themes of honour, loss, exile, defiance, and collective suffering. Scholars describe Pashto poetry as an ‘everyday philosophy’ through which personal emotion and political reality intersect (Ashraf, 2024 ). While substantial scholarship exists on folkloric traditions and historical developments, focused critical engagement with contemporary Pashto poetry emerging from the post-2001 war-on-terror context remains comparatively sparse. Ahmad and Alam (2019) situate Pashto poetic resistance within a historical continuum extending from Mughal rule through British colonialism to the Pakistani postcolonial state. Figures such as Khushal Khan Khattak and movements like the Khudai Khidmatgar demonstrate how poetry has historically mobilized resistance against domination. This lineage reinforces the political significance of Pashto poetry in contexts shaped by cultural trauma and surveillance. Cultural Trauma, Surveillance, and Pedagogy State violence and psychological control can be examined through Foucault’s conceptualization of surveillance as an internalized mechanism of discipline (Foucault, 1975). Scholars argue that surveillance reshapes collective identity and emotional life in militarized societies (Dobson & Fisher, 2007 ). When integrated with Cultural Trauma Theory, this framework enables analysis of how trauma becomes normalized and internalized through everyday practices and representations. Scholarship on poetic imagination further emphasizes poetry’s cognitive-affective power, particularly through metaphor and symbolic compression (Zalipour, 2011 ). Contemporary pedagogical studies highlight how imaginative engagement deepens ideological and emotional comprehension (Ko, 2024 ). These insights are particularly relevant for Pashto poetry, where metaphor functions as both aesthetic expression and social critique. Taken together, existing scholarship reveals several key gaps. Contemporary Pashto poetry produced after 2001 remains under-examined; poetry is rarely analyzed as a sustained form of cultural resistance to militarization and state narratives; and cognitive-affective approaches to Pashto poetic discourse remain largely absent. Addressing these gaps, the present study situates contemporary Pashto poetry as a critical site for examining cultural trauma, resistance, and identity formation in conflict-affected Pashtun society. Theoretical Framework This study is grounded in Cultural Trauma Theory, as articulated by Jeffrey C. Alexander ( 2004 ), to examine how contemporary Pashto poetry represents state oppression, collective suffering, and identity-based marginalization in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former FATA region. Cultural Trauma Theory conceptualizes trauma not merely as an individual psychological experience but as a socially mediated process through which suffering becomes collectively recognized, narrated, and symbolically constructed. Central to this process is the role of carrier groups—social actors who articulate communal pain and shape public understanding of injustice. Within this framework, Pashto poets function as carrier groups, translating lived experiences of violence, displacement, and stigmatization into poetic narratives that contest dominant state discourses and preserve collective memory. Rather than serving as a descriptive account of trauma, this framework functions as an analytical tool that guides interpretation of poetic texts. Specifically, it informs the analysis in three interconnected ways. First, it enables identification of how collective pain—produced through militarization, displacement, surveillance, and systemic discrimination—is encoded within poetic language and imagery. Second, it facilitates examination of how Pashtun identity is constructed within the poems, distinguishing between individualized suffering and the articulation of a shared, collective experience. Third, it directs attention to questions of responsibility and moral address, assessing how poets assign accountability, challenge state practices, and seek recognition from broader audiences. Alexander’s framework identifies four analytical dimensions that guide the interpretation of cultural trauma narratives. First, it examines the nature of the pain, focusing on how militarization, enforced displacement, surveillance, and systemic discrimination are encoded in poetic language. Second, it addresses the identity of the victims, exploring whether poems articulate localized suffering or construct a broader, collective Pashtun experience. Third, it considers the relationship between victims and audiences, analyzing how poetic representation fosters recognition, empathy, and moral engagement beyond the immediate community. Fourth, it interrogates the attribution of responsibility, assessing how poets critique state practices and expose structures of power that sustain collective suffering (Alexander et al., 2004). To complement this analysis, the study draws selectively on Foucault’s (1975) conceptualization of surveillance and disciplinary power. Foucauldian insights are not employed as an independent theoretical framework but as a supporting lens to illuminate how militarization and monitoring operate as normalized mechanisms of control that shape identity, behavior, and self-perception. This perspective assists in interpreting how fear, self-regulation, and silence become internalized within everyday Pashtun life and poetic expression. Through this lens, Pashto poetry is interpreted as a form of symbolic resistance that disrupts internalized regimes of silence and reclaims narrative agency in politically constrained environments. The framework also incorporates insights from cognitive-affective approaches to poetic imagination (Zalipour, 2011 ; Wassiliwizky et al., 2017 ) to account for the emotional force of poetic expression. Metaphor, imagery, and narrative compression are understood as mechanisms through which trauma is communicated, remembered, and shared collectively. These affective dimensions are treated not as aesthetic embellishments but as central vehicles through which collective memory and emotional knowledge are transmitted. Emotional resonance thus becomes central to how Pashto poetry conveys lived experience and sustains cultural resilience. By centering Cultural Trauma Theory and supplementing it with focused insights from surveillance studies and cognitive-affective literary scholarship, this framework provides a coherent interdisciplinary lens. It equips the study with a structured yet flexible analytical toolkit, enabling a nuanced examination of how contemporary Pashto poetry documents trauma, challenges hegemonic narratives, and performs cultural and political work within conflict-affected Pashtun society. Methodology This study employs a qualitative research design to explore the articulation of trauma, identity, and cultural resistance in contemporary Pashto poetry. A qualitative approach is particularly suitable for examining subjective experiences, symbolic representations, and collective meaning-making processes embedded in literary texts (Creswell, 2018 ). Through interpretive analysis, the study seeks to understand how Pashtun poets represent experiences of state oppression, militarization, displacement, and structural marginalization, and how poetry functions as a medium of cultural resistance and collective memory. The research adopts a textual and thematic analysis approach guided primarily by Cultural Trauma Theory (Alexander, 2004 ). This theoretical lens is complemented by Foucauldian perspectives on surveillance and social control (Foucault, 1977 ), as well as cognitive-affective frameworks that emphasize the emotional and psychological dimensions of poetic engagement. Together, these perspectives enable the study to examine how poetic techniques—such as metaphor, allegory, imagery, repetition, and silence—mediate trauma, challenge dominant narratives, and contribute to collective identity formation. Each poem is analyzed within its broader historical, social, and political context, allowing attention to both aesthetic form and socio-political meaning. Data for the study consist of nineteen contemporary Pashto poems composed after 2001. The poems were selected using purposive sampling based on thematic relevance rather than representativeness. Selection criteria included the explicit or implicit engagement with themes of trauma, militarization, displacement, surveillance, identity stigmatization, and cultural resistance related to the lived experiences of communities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and the former FATA region. Sampling continued until thematic saturation was reached, indicated by the recurrence of analytical patterns and the absence of substantively new themes in additional texts. The corpus includes poems by multiple poets representing different generational and stylistic backgrounds, encompassing both emerging voices and established literary figures. Texts were sourced from published anthologies, literary magazines, online literary platforms, and recorded recitations from public mushairas. This diversity of sources ensured a broad representation of contemporary Pashto poetic discourse while remaining focused on conflict-affected contexts. The analysis followed a systematic thematic procedure. Each poem was read repeatedly to achieve textual immersion and to identify its symbolic, linguistic, and narrative layers. Coding proceeded in three stages. First, open coding was conducted to identify recurrent images, metaphors, and narrative patterns related to trauma and resistance. Second, these codes were clustered into broader thematic categories informed by Cultural Trauma Theory. Third, themes were refined through cross-comparison across poems to ensure internal coherence and analytical consistency. Initial codes were generated inductively while remaining informed by Cultural Trauma Theory. These codes were then iteratively refined and grouped into broader thematic categories related to pain, victimhood, responsibility, collective memory, and resistance. Throughout this process, interpretive rigor was maintained through repeated readings, reflexive engagement with the data, and theoretical alignment. Interpretations were further contextualized by cross-referencing historical events, socio-political conditions, and existing scholarship on Pashto poetry and political violence. Ethical considerations were carefully observed throughout the study. All poets and published sources were properly acknowledged, and intellectual property rights were respected. Cultural sensitivity was maintained due to the political and emotional weight of the trauma narratives represented. For orally transmitted or unpublished material, anonymity was preserved where necessary to protect contributors. Several limitations are acknowledged. As a qualitative interpretive study, the analysis is inherently subjective, though this subjectivity is mitigated through theoretical grounding and systematic coding. While the selection of nineteen poems allows for in-depth analysis, it does not claim to represent the entirety of contemporary Pashto poetry. Additionally, as the poems were originally composed in Pashto, translation into English may involve partial loss of linguistic nuance; however, close attention was paid to preserving metaphorical, cultural, and contextual meanings during interpretation. Despite these limitations, the methodology provides a robust and contextually grounded framework for examining how Pashto poetry articulates cultural trauma and functions as a form of collective resistance. Analysis and Discussion Pashtun Poetry as Cultural Trauma, Discursive Power, and Postcolonial Resistance This chapter analyzes contemporary Pashtun poetry as a cultural site where collective trauma, power relations, and postcolonial marginalization are articulated and contested. Drawing on Cultural Trauma Theory, Foucauldian understandings of discourse and power, and postcolonial perspectives, the analysis treats poetry not merely as aesthetic expression but as lived testimony. In contexts marked by prolonged militarization, surveillance, and representational violence, poetry functions as an alternative archive—preserving experiences that remain absent or distorted within official histories and dominant media narratives. Rather than applying theory mechanically, the chapter reads poems as culturally embedded texts that reveal how trauma is experienced, normalized, and resisted in everyday life. The poet emerges as a cultural witness, translating diffuse and often silenced experiences into symbolic language. Through metaphor, irony, and repetition, Pashtun poetry captures the embodied, discursive, and structural dimensions of marginalization, while simultaneously producing counter-narratives that reclaim agency, memory, and ethical presence. Spectacle, Narrative Distance, and the Normalization of Pashtun Death ښکلې ډرامه ده، خو د یو کردار مې ډېر خفه کړی دغه پښتون چې په کې وژني، په رښتیايي وژني A strange drama unfolds, yet one character leaves me sorrowful; when they kill Pashtuns in the story, they kill them in truth as well. This verse offers a sharp critique of how Pashtun suffering is transformed into spectacle within dominant conflict narratives. The use of the word “drama” is deliberately ironic, suggesting that violence appears staged, distant, and consumable for external audiences. For Pashtuns, however, this narrative distance collapses entirely; what is dramatized for others is lived as irreversible loss. The poet exposes the moral gap between representation and reality. The line “they kill them in truth as well” collapses fiction and life, revealing how symbolic violence reinforces material harm. Repetition of Pashtun death across media, policy discourse, and security narratives normalizes loss and strips it of moral urgency. Pashtuns appear as recurring characters assigned an expendable role within the larger script of war. Their deaths sustain the narrative rather than disrupt it. From a postcolonial perspective, this normalization reflects frontier logics of governance in which exceptional violence becomes routine. Pashtun lives are framed as acceptable losses within geopolitical and security calculations. Power operates discursively: repeated representation produces desensitization, rendering Pashtun deaths ungrievable and expected. The poet’s sadness signals refusal—an insistence that death must not be absorbed silently into narrative routine. By transforming observation into poetry, the poet acts as a cultural witness. The verse interrupts passive consumption and demands ethical recognition, reframing Pashtun death as lived trauma rather than narrative necessity. Language without Identity: Fear, Silence, and Internalized Control دا څه خبره ده دا څه اورو دا څه وایی څوک پښتو به وايی خو پښتون به ځان ته نه وايی څوک What is this, what is being heard—someone says people may speak Pashto, but no one will call themselves Pashtun. This poem foregrounds a subtle yet deeply consequential form of cultural trauma: the separation of language from identity. While Pashto may be spoken, Pashtun identity itself becomes unspeakable. The poet frames this condition as something overheard rather than openly declared, indicating an atmosphere of caution and internalized fear. Here, trauma manifests not through direct violence but through constrained self-definition. Cultural practices survive, yet political and ethnic identification is suppressed. Individuals adapt by fragmenting identity—retaining language while disavowing the name that gives it historical and collective meaning. Silence becomes a strategy of survival, as identity regulation is internalized and sustained through everyday calculations of risk. This condition reflects disciplinary power operating through anticipation rather than force. No authority explicitly bans Pashtun identification; instead, fear of suspicion, profiling, or ideological labeling produces self-censorship. Postcolonially, this phenomenon mirrors the politicization of Pashtun identity as a security concern. Speaking Pashto is tolerated as cultural folklore, while asserting Pashtunhood is framed as political excess. The result is a hollowing of identity—language without historical consciousness. By naming what “no one will say,” the poem reopens a discursive space, using poetry to resist silence and restore the possibility of self-recognition. Moral Policing and the Religious Delegitimization of Identity کافر کېږم، د جنت نه مې وباسي، که دا ووایم چې پښتون مې قومیت دی I will be declared an infidel; they will expel me from paradise if I say that Pashtun is my nationality. This verse exposes how religious discourse is mobilized to discipline ethnic identity. Pashtun self-identification is framed as morally dangerous, even spiritually damning. The fear expressed is not abstract; it reflects a deeply internalized anxiety where cultural belonging is imagined as incompatible with religious legitimacy. Here, trauma penetrates the moral and spiritual dimensions of life. The individual is forced into an impossible dilemma—choosing between faith and ethnic identity. Such framing embeds trauma within conscience itself, fracturing the self and producing long-term psychological and cultural damage. Power operates through moralization rather than coercion. There is no visible accuser; the fear of accusation is already internalized. Religious discourse becomes a technology of control, regulating identity through guilt, fear, and imagined exclusion. Within postcolonial contexts, such moral policing supports homogenizing national narratives that treat ethnic assertion as disloyal or dangerous. Yet the poem itself constitutes resistance. By articulating what is normally suppressed, the poet disrupts the moral monopoly over identity. Poetry becomes a space where imposed binaries—faith versus ethnicity—are exposed as constructed mechanisms of control rather than natural truths. Embodied Violence and the Normalization of Harm زه چیک کم طرف ته ګورم، زما سر لګی کاڼړی چی رازی د پښتون سر لګی Wherever I look, I often get struck by stones; because I am Pashtun, I am hit on the head by stones. This verse presents violence not as an isolated incident but as a continuous condition of existence. The phrase “wherever I look” conveys a world without refuge, suggesting that harm surrounds the Pashtun subject from all directions. Violence is not tied to a specific actor or moment; it is ambient, anticipated, and normalized, shaping an expectation of harm as a natural condition of life. The stone functions as both a literal and symbolic object—representing physical assault, social hostility, stereotyping, and institutional punishment. The explicit causal link—“because I am Pashtun”—is critical. It removes ambiguity and frames violence as identity-based rather than accidental. Within a cultural trauma perspective, such repetition of targeted harm produces collective memory. When injury is consistently experienced as a consequence of who one is, trauma becomes embedded within identity itself, shaping how individuals perceive space, safety, and belonging. The imagery of being struck on the head carries additional significance. Beyond bodily injury, it suggests an assault on dignity, thought, and consciousness. Violence here is directed not only at the body but at the capacity to think, speak, and assert agency. Each “stone” can be read as a military operation, a media accusation, a checkpoint, or a policy that treats Pashtun existence as inherently suspect. From a Foucauldian perspective, the poem reflects how prolonged exposure to violence produces internalized insecurity. This anticipatory fear illustrates how power reshapes perception, as surveillance, profiling, and suspicion generate an environment where danger becomes predictable and safety unimaginable. This anticipatory fear is itself a product of disciplinary power. Yet by articulating this condition, the poet transforms vulnerability into testimony. Naming the pattern of harm resists its normalization. The poem preserves memory and asserts that such violence is structural rather than deserved, converting personal pain into collective awareness. Selective Mourning and Hierarchies of Death مونږ مړه کېږو، نو په سوچ کې د چا نه یو؛ چې نور مړه شي، نو هېواد په ودرېدو شي۔ When we die, no one even thinks about it; when others die, the entire country comes to a halt. This couplet confronts the politics of mourning by exposing unequal valuations of life and death. The contrast between “we” and “others” reveals a moral hierarchy in which Pashtun deaths are rendered invisible, while the deaths of dominant groups provoke national pause, media saturation, and state response. Death is not equal; it is filtered through structures of power that determine whose loss matters. Collective trauma emerges not only from death itself but from the denial of recognition after death. When loss is repeatedly ignored, communities internalize the message that their lives are disposable. The poet’s restrained tone mirrors the emotional neglect it describes—suffering is not denied loudly but quietly bypassed. This selective mourning reflects broader regimes of visibility. Some deaths are dramatized and individualized; others are absorbed into statistics. Pashtun fatalities, often occurring in conflict zones, are framed as routine and therefore unremarkable. Such routinization dulls ethical response and sustains long-term violence. The poem resists this erasure through simplicity. Without ideological language, it articulates a devastating truth: national empathy is unevenly distributed. By naming this disparity, the poet transforms silence into critique, insisting that unacknowledged deaths still demand moral recognition. Land, Extraction, and the Political Economy of Loss چې راووځي، نو فقط لاشونه د دې ځمکې؛ باقي چې سم وو، وړل شوي دي ترې۔ From this land, only corpses have emerged; everything else has been taken away. This verse situates Pashtun suffering within a political economy of extraction and dispossession. Land—traditionally associated with sustenance, continuity, and belonging—is redefined as a site of death. What remains are bodies, while all that could signify prosperity or autonomy has been removed. The poem thus reframes geography itself as traumatized. The passive construction—“has been taken away”—is revealing. Responsibility is diffuse, faceless, and systemic. Exploitation operates through institutions rather than identifiable perpetrators, making resistance difficult. Pashtun regions are repeatedly mined for strategic value—military positioning, ideological sacrifice, and geopolitical leverage—while development and restitution remain absent. Trauma here is spatial as well as social. When land becomes synonymous with death, insecurity is reproduced across generations. Geography no longer offers protection or continuity; instead, it preserves loss. Militarization reorganizes space, normalizing exceptional violence and suspending accountability. By naming this condition, the poet rejects developmental rhetoric and exposes its violent underside. Poetry becomes a form of political accounting, documenting what official narratives omit. The verse crystallizes how Pashtun suffering is sustained through cycles of giving—bodies, land, endurance—without return. خدایہ ورپہ غاړہ کړې ټوپک ورلہ د ټول عمر څوک چې قلم نه پریګدي زما د پښتنو سره O Allah, give them a gun for their entire life those who never leave my Pashtuns’ pen alone. This verse articulates one of the most critical tensions within the Pashtun experience: the systematic replacement of intellectual agency with militarized identity. The juxtaposition of bandook (gun) and qalam (pen) is not accidental; it exposes a structural strategy through which Pashtuns are repeatedly pushed toward violence while being denied spaces of learning, critical thought, and self-representation. The prayer-like form of the verse intensifies its moral charge, transforming poetic critique into ethical indictment. The line does not glorify weapons; rather, it curses those who disrupt the pen by wishing upon them the same fate imposed on Pashtuns—lifelong association with the gun. This inversion reveals how militarization is not a natural cultural trait but a forced condition. The pen symbolizes education, memory, narrative authority, and future-making. Interfering with it signifies an assault on epistemic agency, ensuring that Pashtuns remain objects of policy rather than subjects of knowledge. From a cultural trauma perspective, silencing the pen perpetuates collective injury by preventing communities from narrating their own suffering. Trauma becomes cyclical when memory is suppressed and storytelling interrupted. The poet identifies those responsible not through naming institutions but by highlighting their actions—persistent disruption of literacy, discourse, and cultural expression. Power operates here in a Foucauldian sense through normalization. Pashtuns are expected to fight, sacrifice, and endure, while intellectual pursuits are framed as secondary, dangerous, or subversive. The pen becomes suspicious; the gun becomes familiar. This disciplinary arrangement produces subjects trained for conflict rather than citizenship. At the same time, the poem itself resists this logic. By choosing poetry—the very embodiment of the pen—the poet reclaims agency. Writing becomes an act of defiance, transforming imposed silence into articulation. The verse thus functions as counter-discourse, exposing the mechanisms that convert a thinking community into a fighting body. زه ساده پښتون تصوير د ميني او د اَمن يم تا ته مې چا هسې چرته وران تصویر ښودلې دې I am always the Pashtun image of peace and love; someone has made a false image of me. This couplet represents an explicit act of identity reclamation. The speaker refuses externally imposed definitions and asserts a self-authored identity grounded in peace and affection. The word sada (always) is crucial—it affirms continuity, suggesting that humane values are not reactions to violence but enduring elements of Pashtun culture. The second line shifts responsibility outward. “Someone has made a false image of me” points toward a system rather than an individual. Media narratives, security discourse, and state ideology converge to construct Pashtuns as inherently violent, aggressive, or disposable. This manufactured image erases lived realities of hospitality, ethics, and communal care. Such misrepresentation constitutes epistemic injustice. When a community is denied the authority to define itself, knowledge about it is produced externally and circulated as truth. This produces cultural trauma by distorting collective self-perception and reinforcing stigma. Over time, imposed narratives begin to overshadow lived experience. From a postcolonial perspective, this distortion is not new. Pashtuns have historically been framed through colonial logics of the “martial race” and frontier instability. These categories persist in postcolonial governance, shaping policy and public imagination alike. The poem resists this legacy by re-centering Pashtun voice. The act of self-definition is therefore political. By speaking in the first person, the poet shifts from object to subject, disrupting representational hierarchies. Poetry becomes a site where dignity is restored and ethical presence reclaimed. وخت چی په ما د څه احسان کوی نو داسی کوی مانه سرمن وباسی ما له تی سادرجوړه ووی “The time that claims to favor me does so in this way : it peels off my skin and turns it into a sheet for me.” څوک ئ اشرو له بلی څوک ترے لښکر جوړوی هر زوره ور د پښتنو د پاره شر جوړوی “Some take it to the assembly, others turn it into an army; for every oppressed Pashtun, it becomes a foundation.” د پښتنو زمکه به څه فصلونه اوټوکوی څوک پکښې جنګ جوړوی څوک پکښې سنګر جوړوی “How can crops grow on Pashtun land when some turn it into war and others into fortresses?” داسې څوک نشته چې په دې ورانۍ کې لاس نه لري؛ داسې څوک نشته چې کابل او پېښور جوړا وي۔ “There is no one who is not responsible for this destruction; there is no one who brings peace to Peshawar or Kabul.” This poem presents a cohesive critique of Pashtun marginalization by linking cultural erasure, militarization, and political abandonment into a single structure of sustained harm. Violence is not portrayed as accidental or temporary; rather, it appears as an organized and normalized process maintained through time, institutions, and competing power interests. The poetic voice speaks from a position of accumulated historical awareness rather than immediate suffering, transforming personal pain into collective diagnosis. The central metaphor of chamrra (skin) and chadar (sheet) is crucial to the poem’s analytical force. Here, chamrra symbolizes Pashtun culture, traditions, language, and inherited ways of life. Its removal signifies cultural dispossession. In contrast, the chadar represents development, protection, and state-sponsored progress. The exchange depicted is profoundly unequal: culture is extracted, and development is returned as compensation. What is presented as benevolence ( ihsaan ) is, in fact, loss reframed as care. This reframing exposes how cultural violence is normalized through the language of progress. Development appears not as an inclusive right but as a conditional reward, granted only after indigenous identity has been stripped away. The chadar does not repair the wound created by the removal of chamrra ; it merely conceals it. Trauma, therefore, operates symbolically—loss is rendered invisible by being narrated as necessity and advancement. The poem then extends this critique by depicting Pashtun lives as resources repeatedly converted for political use. Whether mobilized for assemblies or armies, Pashtuns appear as instruments rather than citizens. Their oppression becomes a “foundation” upon which political legitimacy and security narratives are built. This suggests a system where suffering is not a governance failure but a functional requirement. Belonging is demanded in times of conflict yet withdrawn in moments of peace and reconstruction. The shift from body to land reinforces this structural argument. Pashtun territory is described as incapable of producing crops because it is continuously transformed into battlefields and fortifications. Militarization thus destroys not only lives but the very possibility of growth and sustainability. Trauma becomes spatial and ecological, embedded in land as much as in memory. Finally, the poem refuses singular blame. By asserting collective responsibility and pointing to the absence of peace in both Peshawar and Kabul, it indicts overlapping regional, state, and institutional actors. The poem therefore moves beyond lament toward political critique, challenging narratives that naturalize Pashtun violence and instead revealing how it is systematically produced and sustained. Overall, the poem functions as counter-knowledge. By linking cultural loss, imposed development, militarization, and abandonment, it reclaims the authority to define Pashtun experience. Poetry here operates as analysis, exposing forms of violence that official discourse seeks to obscure and insisting that peace remains impossible so long as culture, land, and life are valued only for their utility. په خپل سکول کښ پردیو ژبو او پردی تاريخ ته ناست يم د زه کم کم سبق وایمِ، د خپل ځانه يي پردی کړم I sit in a school learning others’ languages and histories; what kind of curriculum is this that has taken me away from myself? This verse critiques education as a mechanism of cultural alienation. The paradox is stark: schooling promises enlightenment yet produces estrangement. By prioritizing external histories and languages, the curriculum displaces Pashtun epistemology, rendering local knowledge invisible. The rhetorical question functions as indictment. Education is exposed not as neutral but as ideological—shaping subjects aligned with state priorities while distancing them from their own cultural roots. The phrase “away from myself” captures the psychological dimension of this process: identity fracture through institutional neglect. Culturally, this constitutes symbolic violence. Trauma here is not inflicted through weapons but through omission. When generations are denied access to their own histories, a form of internal exile emerges—people remain physically in their homeland but intellectually displaced. The poem thus links education to power, showing how domination operates quietly through syllabi rather than force. By naming this process, poetry interrupts normalization and restores critical awareness. سبا چی امن شي نو مونږه به څوک نه یادوی نن هر سړی وائي چی جنګ ته دي پښتون مخکښ شي When peace returns tomorrow, none of them will remember us; yet today, everyone asks the Pashtun to step forward for war. This couplet captures the cyclical disposability of Pashtun lives within conflict economies. The temporal contrast between aaj (today) and kal (tomorrow) is not merely poetic; it reveals a recurring political pattern. In moments of crisis, Pashtuns are summoned, praised, and mobilized. Once violence subsides, their sacrifices dissolve into silence. Memory becomes selective, and peace becomes exclusionary. The poem exposes a moral contradiction at the heart of war narratives. Participation is demanded collectively, but remembrance is denied selectively. The Pashtun body is useful in war yet inconvenient in peace. This conditional visibility produces cultural trauma by embedding loss without acknowledgment. Trauma deepens when suffering is neither memorialized nor transformed into justice. Power operates here through what may be understood as strategic amnesia. Forgetting is not accidental; it is functional. By erasing Pashtun presence after conflict, dominant narratives avoid accountability while preserving the myth of national unity. The poem resists this erasure by recording what official histories omit. The speaker’s tone is restrained rather than emotional, which intensifies its impact. There is no plea—only exposure. This restraint reflects an exhaustion produced by repetition, where trauma no longer needs to scream to be understood. Silence itself becomes evidence. دې کتاب کې (ش) شهید او (ج) جهاد دي؛ دې کتاب کې (ت) توپنګ او (ټ) ټوپک دي۔ In this book, (Sh) stands for martyr and (J) for jihad; in this book, (T) stands for topang (rifle) and (Ṭ) for gun. This verse delivers one of the most profound critiques of institutionalized militarization. By using the alphabet—traditionally a symbol of innocence, learning, and beginnings—the poet reveals how violence is introduced at the earliest stages of cognition. Language itself becomes weaponized. The issue here is not faith or sacrifice but repetition and framing. When martyrdom and jihad dominate symbolic learning, while creativity and peace remain absent, a narrow moral universe is produced. The gun does not enter later; it appears alongside letters, normalized before critical awareness develops. This process illustrates how trauma is transmitted intergenerationally. Children inherit not only conflict but the vocabulary of conflict. Education becomes a silent conveyor of violence, shaping subjectivities aligned with endurance and sacrifice rather than reflection or dissent. The poem also gestures toward inequality across regions. While some children are prepared for citizenship, innovation, and leadership, others are trained symbolically for loss. This uneven distribution of educational purpose reinforces structural marginalization. Importantly, the critique is subtle. The poet does not reject learning; he exposes its distortion. By reclaiming language through poetry, he interrupts the cycle and restores the alphabet as a site of resistance rather than submission. زمونږ په زمکه یی تل جنګ لیکلی بس قبر راغلی دی زمونږ برخه کښ War has been written upon our land, and all that came to our share were graves. This couplet condenses decades of conflict into a devastating moral account. War is described as something written —suggesting planning, scripting, and authorship—while death is merely received. Pashtuns are not authors of war; they are its surface. The land becomes both witness and victim. Graves replace futures, and burial replaces belonging. This spatial imagery emphasizes how violence reshapes geography, converting homeland into a landscape of loss. Trauma here is not episodic; it is territorial. The poem challenges dominant claims that conflict is unavoidable or organic. By framing war as written, the poet implies intention and design. This invites ethical questioning: who writes war, and who pays its cost? Memory again becomes central. Graves mark presence, but without narrative control, they risk becoming anonymous. Poetry intervenes by naming loss, ensuring that death is not reduced to statistics. د جنګ زمونږه نه دی بس لاشونه يي زمونږ دې This is not our war, yet the bodies are always ours. This couplet delivers a blunt ethical indictment of proxy conflict. The speaker refuses ownership of the war while simultaneously exposing ownership of its consequences. The brevity of the lines mirrors the brutal clarity of the argument: decision-making and dying are radically separated. Power decides elsewhere; death arrives locally. The denial of agency is central here. When a community is repeatedly drawn into conflicts it neither initiates nor controls, trauma becomes structural rather than episodic. Loss accumulates without resolution. This condition fosters a sense of historical paralysis, where suffering is normalized because alternatives are systematically denied. The poem resists narratives that frame Pashtun participation as voluntary or heroic. Instead, it highlights coercive inclusion—being made part of wars through geography, surveillance, and strategic necessity. Such inclusion produces a citizenship defined by sacrifice rather than rights. Memory again plays a critical role. Bodies testify to truth when official narratives refuse accountability. The poem positions death itself as evidence, refusing abstraction. زمونږ په ښار کښ چوک يو پاتی نه دی بس چیک پوسټونه او خاموشی پاتی ده No public squares remain in our cities; only checkpoints and silence are left. This verse shifts attention from bodies to space, revealing how militarization transforms everyday life. Public squares—sites of gathering, dialogue, and social continuity—are replaced by checkpoints, which regulate movement and visibility. Space becomes disciplinary. Silence here is not peace; it is enforced quiet. The absence of communal space fractures social bonds, intensifying cultural trauma. When people can no longer assemble, collective memory weakens, and resistance becomes individualized and risky. The poem demonstrates how control operates not only through violence but through architecture and routine. Checkpoints become normalized features of life, embedding power into daily movement. Over time, surveillance ceases to shock and begins to feel inevitable. By recording this spatial loss, the poem reclaims memory against normalization. It insists that what appears ordinary is historically produced and ethically charged. بل څوک لیکی زمونږه قيصه مونږه يوازی پاتی شوی بس کردار یو پکښ Someone else is writing our story, and we have been reduced to mere characters. This couplet returns to the theme of narrative dispossession. To be written by another is to lose authorship over one’s past, present, and future. The Pashtun subject appears not as a narrator but as a figure within someone else’s script. Such narrative domination produces epistemic trauma. Knowledge about Pashtuns circulates without Pashtuns. Their experiences are interpreted, categorized, and instrumentalized by external frameworks that prioritize security over humanity. The poem’s power lies in its meta-awareness. By naming the act of being written, the poet interrupts it. Poetry becomes counter-authorship—a reclaiming of narrative space. Even if the broader structure remains unequal, articulation itself becomes resistance. When these poetic fragments are read together, a coherent pattern of cultural trauma becomes visible—one that is cumulative and structural rather than episodic or accidental. Across the verses, Pashtun experience is consistently situated at the intersection of war, representation, education, and space. Marginalization emerges not as a single outcome but as a process sustained through multiple, interconnected domains. What unifies the poems is not only their engagement with violence, but their insistence that violence functions as a system of meaning-making, shaping how Pashtuns are perceived, remembered, educated, and governed. A recurring theme throughout the poetry is the denial of agency. Speakers repeatedly distance themselves from wars fought in their name, question educational narratives that estrange them from their own identities, and protest the fact that their stories are authored by others. This displacement is not solely political; it is epistemic. Knowledge about Pashtuns—who they are, what they signify, and why they fight—is produced externally and circulated with authority, while Pashtun voices are reduced to symbolic or reactive positions. The poetry intervenes by reversing this relation, transforming the Pashtun from an object of discourse into an articulating subject. Education appears as one of the most subtle yet enduring sites of this displacement. Rather than functioning as a neutral space of enlightenment, schooling is portrayed as a mechanism of cultural erasure. By privileging other languages, histories, and epistemologies, educational structures construct hierarchies of knowledge in which Pashtun ways of knowing are marginalized. This form of symbolic violence is particularly effective because it is normalized early, shaping identity prior to the development of political consciousness. The resulting subjectivity is fractured: individuals inhabit their homeland physically while learning to interpret it through externally imposed intellectual frameworks. The militarization of identity further intensifies this fracture. Cultural attributes such as bravery, honor, and masculinity—often framed as markers of pride—are revealed as tools of instrumentalization. Within the poems, such traits operate as recruitment logics that channel Pashtun youth toward cycles of conflict. The repeated contrast between the gun and the pen is especially revealing. While the pen signifies critical thought, narrative agency, and alternative futures, the gun represents a narrow, state-sanctioned role. Restricted access to the former and overexposure to the latter reduces the Pashtun subject to a fighting body rather than a thinking citizen. Spatial transformation reinforces these dynamics. Landscapes dominated by checkpoints and cities lacking communal public spaces illustrate how militarization restructures everyday life. Space itself becomes pedagogical, producing habits of obedience, caution, and silence. The erosion of shared spaces undermines collective dialogue and memory, isolating individuals within regimes of surveillance. In this context, silence does not signify peace; it signifies enforced absence—of dissent, gathering, and shared meaning. The poetry insists on naming this silence rather than allowing it to pass as normality. Selective remembrance constitutes another persistent motif. Pashtuns are urgently mobilized during periods of conflict but rendered invisible once strategic objectives are met. This temporal asymmetry exposes a moral economy in which Pashtun lives are valued instrumentally during crisis and neglected afterward. Such erasure compounds trauma by denying symbolic recognition. Losses that are not remembered cannot generate accountability, and suffering that is normalized remains politically unaddressed. The poems therefore operate as acts of memory, preserving experiences excluded from official narratives. Taken together, these verses demonstrate that cultural trauma is reproduced through repetition rather than singular catastrophe: repeated wars, recurring stereotypes, curricular exclusions, spatial controls, and systematic forgetting. Trauma becomes a condition of everyday life rather than an interruption of it. At the same time, the poetry does not position Pashtuns solely as passive victims. The act of poetic articulation itself signals resistance. By questioning dominant meanings and reframing lived experience, the poetic voice reclaims interpretive authority within constrained conditions. In this sense, the poems function as counter-archives. They document lived realities that remain absent from institutional histories, policy discourse, and securitized representations. Grounded in affect, memory, and everyday experience, these poetic interventions challenge reductionist portrayals of Pashtun regions and foreground the human consequences of abstraction. The analytical force of the poems lies in their exposure of the logic underlying marginalization rather than in descriptive accounts of its outcomes. Violence is depicted as routinized and administratively sustained, entering language, education, space, and memory as an organizing principle of social life. Pashtun suffering is rendered predictable: conflict scripts the Pashtun body as a site of sacrifice during war and disappearance during peace. By disrupting this predictability, the poetry reintroduces ethical disturbance, forcing recognition of what has been normalized. Language plays a central role in this process. Terms associated with faith, honor, and sacrifice operate as ideological shortcuts, compressing complex lives into simplified moral categories. Once stabilized linguistically, these categories justify unequal treatment without continuous coercion. The poems’ attention to naming, metaphor, and alphabetic imagery reveals how power operates at the level of language, shaping consciousness before physical violence occurs. Equally significant is the insistence on self-definition. Declarations of peace, love, and humanity challenge the authority of external actors who claim the right to define Pashtun identity. By exposing representation itself as a problem, the poetry shifts attention from alleged cultural deficiencies to the systems that produce and circulate dominant images. In doing so, it destabilizes imposed narratives without directly confronting them, revealing their constructed nature through refusal. Overall, the poems demonstrate that Pashtun poetry constitutes a form of critical knowledge production. It records histories of exclusion, interrogates mechanisms of domination, and preserves alternative moral imaginaries. Where formal archives remain silent or complicit, poetic expression assumes the role of witness. Through language, memory, and critique, these verses resist erasure and assert the continued presence of Pashtun subjectivity. Conclusion This study has examined Pashtun poetry as a critical site for understanding how cultural trauma is produced, normalized, and contested under conditions of prolonged conflict and political marginalization. Rather than approaching poetry as a purely aesthetic or emotive form, the analysis has demonstrated that Pashtun poetic expression functions as a mode of social critique that reveals the deeper structures through which violence, erasure, and dispossession are sustained. Across the analyzed texts, trauma emerges not as an isolated event but as a cumulative condition shaped by cultural extraction, militarization, misrepresentation, and systematic neglect. A central finding of this research is that Pashtun suffering is repeatedly reframed through dominant narratives of development, security, and necessity. The metaphorical exchange of culture for development—where loss is presented as progress—illustrates how symbolic violence operates alongside physical violence. Cultural traditions, language, and identity are stripped away under the promise of protection or advancement, rendering trauma socially invisible. This process deprives communities not only of material resources but also of interpretive authority, limiting their ability to name harm as harm. The analysis further shows that Pashtun identity is routinely instrumentalized within political and military frameworks. Pashtun bodies are mobilized for war, assemblies, and security agendas, while their humanity and citizenship remain conditional. This produces a form of disposable belonging in which sacrifice is demanded during conflict but recognition is withdrawn in moments of peace. Such dynamics reveal that marginalization is not accidental but structurally embedded within governance practices that depend on Pashtun endurance while avoiding responsibility for repair. Spatial and environmental dimensions of trauma also emerge as critical. The transformation of land into battlefields and fortifications demonstrates how militarization forecloses the possibility of life, growth, and sustainability. Trauma is thus inscribed not only in memory and identity but also in geography. The inability of land to “produce crops” becomes a powerful metaphor for how continuous conflict destroys futures before they can take root. Importantly, the poetry analyzed in this study refuses reductive explanations that locate blame in a single actor. By highlighting shared and diffused responsibility, the poems expose how violence persists through networks of power, silence, and complicity. This refusal to individualize blame shifts attention toward systems rather than symptoms, challenging narratives that portray Pashtun regions as inherently violent or culturally predisposed to conflict. At the same time, Pashtun poetry does not position its subjects solely as passive victims. The act of poetic articulation itself constitutes resistance. By naming loss, questioning imposed identities, and exposing the logic of domination, poetry reclaims narrative authority. It transforms lived experience into critical knowledge, interrupting dominant discourses that seek to manage Pashtun life through abstraction and stereotype. This study contributes to broader discussions on cultural trauma by demonstrating how trauma is reproduced through repetition—repeated wars, repeated representations, repeated exclusions—rather than singular catastrophe. It also underscores the importance of cultural texts as analytical resources, particularly in contexts where official archives remain silent or complicit. Pashtun poetry operates as a counter-archive, preserving memory, dignity, and critique in the absence of institutional recognition. Ultimately, this research argues that sustainable peace cannot be understood merely as the absence of armed conflict. Peace requires recognition—of culture, of history, and of humanity beyond political utility. As long as Pashtun lives are valued primarily for their function within security and power structures, the conditions described in these poems will persist. By foregrounding poetic knowledge, this study calls for a rethinking of how marginalized voices are engaged within academic, political, and policy discourses, emphasizing that meaningful understanding begins with listening to those who have long been spoken for rather than heard. Declarations Author Contribution The author conceived the research idea, designed the study, conducted the qualitative analysis of Pashto poetry, wrote the main manuscript text, and provided critical insights on the theoretical framework, specifically Cultural Trauma Theory. The author also reviewed and revised the manuscript to ensure accuracy and clarity. Acknowledgement I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Syed Irfan Ashraf, author of The Dark Side of News Fixing: The Culture and Political Economy of Pakistan and Afghanistan, for his invaluable guidance and encouragement in pursuing this research. His insights and support were crucial in motivating me to explore this topic, as research in this specific context of Pashto poetry and cultural trauma is limited. Funding This research received no external funding. References Alexander, J. C. (2004). Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma. In J. C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. J. Smelser, & P. Sztompka (Eds.), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (pp. 1–30). University of California Press. Ashraf, R., & Akhtar, R. (2024). Writing Trauma: Poetics of Cultural Trauma and Memory in Anglophonic Kashmiri Literature. Linguistics and Literature Review , 10 (2), 27–46. https://doi.org/10.32350/llr.102.02 Bhabha, H. K. (1995). The Location of Culture. Bloom, H. (1996). Poetry and trauma aesthetics . Yale Review. Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history . Johns Hopkins University. Creswell, J. W. (2018). Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches (4th ed.). SAGE. Dobson, J. E., & Fisher, P. F. (2007). The Panopticon’s Changing Geography. Geographical Review , 97 (3), 307–323. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2007.tb00508.x Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . Vintage Books. Gitau, L. W., Arop, A., & Lenette, C. (2023). My Dad Was, Is a Soldier’: Using Collaborative Poetic Inquiry to Explore Intergenerational Trauma, Resilience, and Wellbeing in the Context of Forced Migration. Social Sciences , 12 (8), 455. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12080455 Janoff-Bulman, R. (1992). Shattered assumptions: Towards a new psychology of trauma . Free. Jefferess, D. (2008). Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation . University of Toronto. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442688841 Ko, H. C. (2024). A Deep Exploration of Poetic Expression: Critical Interactive Learning Through Technology and Ethics. International Journal of Research (IJR) , 11 (06). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12655797 LeDoux, J. E. (1992). Emotion and the amygdala. In J. P. Aggleton (Ed.), The amygdala: Neurobiological aspects of emotion, memory, and mental dysfunction (pp. 339–351). Wiley-Liss. Majumdar, R. (2008). Diasporic nostalgia and identity in Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry . Comparative Literature Review. Naegler, L. K. (2025). Resistance: Theorising understandings of conflict, opposition and transformation in an unstable world . Palgrave Macmillan. Piatek, B. (2014). History, memory and trauma in contemporary British and Irish fiction . Jagiellonian University. Said, E. (2006). Culture and Imperialism. van der Kolk, B. A., McFarlane, A. C., & Weisaeth, L. (Eds.). (1996). Traumatic stress: The effects of overwhelming experience on mind, body, and society . The Guilford Press. Wassiliwizky, E., Koelsch, S., Wagner, V., & Jacobsen, T. (2017). and Winfried Menninghaus. The Emotional Power of Poetry: Neural Circuitry, Psychophysiology and Compositional Principles. Frontiers in Psychology . https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5597896/ Whitehead, A. (2004). Trauma fiction . Edinburgh University. Zalipour, M. (2011). The Cognitive-Affective Effects of Poetry Reading . Journal of Literary Studies. Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. 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This sensibility, articulated by contemporary Pashtun poets, reflects the deep tension between ethnic identity and systemic oppression in Pakistan. The Pashtun community\u0026mdash;historically subjected to militarization, displacement, surveillance, and structural discrimination\u0026mdash;continues to endure profound individual and collective trauma. Such trauma is not confined to discrete violent events; rather, it becomes internalized within cognition, perception, emotional life, and collective memory, leaving long-term psychological and cultural imprints (Ledoux, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR13\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1992\u003c/span\u003e; Van der Kolk, 1996; Caruth, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1996\u003c/span\u003e). In contexts marked by political repression and identity-based stigmatization, poetry assumes a critical role as a medium through which communities articulate pain, reclaim dignity, and document experiences that remain unacknowledged within official narratives (Alexander et al., 2004; Ashraf \u0026amp; Akhtar, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR2\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eGlobal scholarship on trauma literature demonstrates that poetic expression often carries the burden of unspeakable histories, employing repetition, fragmentation, metaphor, spectral imagery, and strategic silences to render experiences that resist linear narration (Whitehead, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR20\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2004\u003c/span\u003e; Piatek, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR16\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e). Studies of diasporic and conflict-zone poets, such as Agha Shahid Ali, illustrate how poetry transforms displacement, nostalgia, and memories of violence into artistic narratives that preserve cultural identity while raising public consciousness (Majumdar, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2008\u003c/span\u003e). However, trauma articulated through Pashtun poetry emerges within a distinct political ecology shaped by prolonged militarization, ethnic profiling, and the securitization of identity, conditions that exceed the explanatory scope of generalized trauma frameworks. While these studies establish poetry as a key medium of trauma articulation, they remain largely detached from the specific political and ethnic configurations shaping Pashtun experiences in Pakistan.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDespite the extensive theoretical engagement with trauma and memory in world literature, systematic scholarly attention to Pashtun poetry through the lens of cultural trauma remains limited. Research on political violence in Pakistan has largely foregrounded security, militancy, and geopolitical dynamics, rarely examining poetic expression as a site where trauma, identity, and resistance intersect (Ashraf \u0026amp; Akhtar, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR2\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). As a result, the cultural and emotional dimensions of Pashtun lived experience remain under-theorized within existing scholarship.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis study seeks to address this gap by examining how contemporary Pashto poetry represents cultural trauma under conditions of prolonged militarization and political marginalization. Guided by Cultural Trauma Theory, it examines a selected corpus of contemporary Pashto poems from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former FATA region to explore (a) how poets represent state oppression, including militarization, surveillance, displacement, and collective punishment, and (b) how Pashtun identity is discursively constructed as a \u0026lsquo;crime\u0026rsquo; or \u0026lsquo;threat\u0026rsquo; within poetic narratives. The study further examines how poetry functions simultaneously as an emotional, political, and cultural instrument of resistance. It argues that Pashto poetry not only documents trauma but also transforms it into a reflective, dignifying, and communal act of survival, positioning literature as a vital site through which marginalized communities articulate what remains silenced within dominant discourses.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eCultural expression, particularly poetry, has long been recognized as a critical medium for communities experiencing political conflict, identity contestation, and structural violence. Literary forms frequently evolve into mechanisms of cultural resistance, collective memory, psychological resilience, and ideological negotiation. Within South Asia, Pashto poetry has functioned simultaneously as a cultural archive and a political voice, particularly during periods marked by colonial domination, displacement, militarization, and terrorism. Existing scholarship provides important theoretical insights into poetry as resistance, yet also reveals conceptual limitations in addressing contemporary Pashtun poetic responses to post-9/11 conflict.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eCultural Resistance: Global Perspectives\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInternational literature conceptualizes cultural resistance as the strategic deployment of symbolic, artistic, and expressive practices to challenge dominant power structures, negotiate identity, and articulate collective suffering. Foundational postcolonial theorists such as Said (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e), Bhabha (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR3\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1995\u003c/span\u003e), and Jefferess (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR11\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2008\u003c/span\u003e) demonstrate how marginalized communities resist hegemony by reclaiming cultural heritage and subverting ideological control. Empirical studies from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East illustrate how poetry, song, and oral traditions confront authoritarianism, destabilize dominant narratives, and sustain collective memory under conditions of oppression. Recent scholarship further emphasizes cultural resistance as a means of symbolically processing trauma and transforming suffering into collective resilience (Naegler, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWithin the South Asian context, Ahmad and Alam (2019) reinforce these insights by demonstrating that Pashto poetry historically emerged as a response to state-driven homogenization policies. They argue that Pakistan\u0026rsquo;s nation-building project\u0026mdash;centred on Islam and Urdu\u0026mdash;systematically marginalized regional ethnic identities, prompting Pashto poets to develop counter-discourses asserting linguistic pride and historical memory. This positioning of poetry as symbolic resistance aligns closely with broader postcolonial theories while highlighting the specificity of the Pashtun case.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003ePostcolonial scholarship identifies multiple modalities of resistance, including rewriting, subversion, opposition, and transformation. However, the application of these frameworks to contemporary Pashto poetry produced under counterterrorism regimes remains limited. In militarized contexts marked by surveillance and ethnic profiling, Pashto poets engage in symbolic resistance through metaphor, imagery, and narrative inversion, articulating experiences that remain suppressed within dominant political discourse.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis global literature provides the conceptual groundwork for examining how Pashtun poetry operates as a localized form of cultural resistance, shaped by the specific historical, political, and securitized conditions of Pakistan\u0026rsquo;s Pashtun regions.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec3\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003ePoetry in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eStudies of poetry in conflict and post-conflict societies demonstrate that poetic expression performs critical sociopolitical functions, including identity reconstruction, trauma documentation, and the production of counter-narratives where formal political expression is constrained. Palestinian resistance poetry and African liberation-era oral traditions illustrate how poetry sustains collective resolve and imagines alternative futures. Such scholarship establishes poetry as an epistemological and political resource rather than a purely aesthetic form.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003ePsychophysiological research further supports these claims by showing that poetry activates affective and cognitive processes associated with emotional engagement and memory formation (Wassiliwizky et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR19\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e). These findings underscore poetry\u0026rsquo;s relevance for examining trauma in societies experiencing prolonged violence.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003ePashtun Cultural Literature\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePoetry occupies a central position within Pashtun cultural life, shaping social norms, political consciousness, and everyday communication. Literary forms such as tappa, ghazal, and charbeta articulate themes of honour, loss, exile, defiance, and collective suffering. Scholars describe Pashto poetry as an \u0026lsquo;everyday philosophy\u0026rsquo; through which personal emotion and political reality intersect (Ashraf, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR2\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). While substantial scholarship exists on folkloric traditions and historical developments, focused critical engagement with contemporary Pashto poetry emerging from the post-2001 war-on-terror context remains comparatively sparse.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAhmad and Alam (2019) situate Pashto poetic resistance within a historical continuum extending from Mughal rule through British colonialism to the Pakistani postcolonial state. Figures such as Khushal Khan Khattak and movements like the Khudai Khidmatgar demonstrate how poetry has historically mobilized resistance against domination. This lineage reinforces the political significance of Pashto poetry in contexts shaped by cultural trauma and surveillance.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eCultural Trauma, Surveillance, and Pedagogy\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eState violence and psychological control can be examined through Foucault\u0026rsquo;s conceptualization of surveillance as an internalized mechanism of discipline (Foucault, 1975). Scholars argue that surveillance reshapes collective identity and emotional life in militarized societies (Dobson \u0026amp; Fisher, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2007\u003c/span\u003e). When integrated with Cultural Trauma Theory, this framework enables analysis of how trauma becomes normalized and internalized through everyday practices and representations.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eScholarship on poetic imagination further emphasizes poetry\u0026rsquo;s cognitive-affective power, particularly through metaphor and symbolic compression (Zalipour, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e). Contemporary pedagogical studies highlight how imaginative engagement deepens ideological and emotional comprehension (Ko, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR12\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). These insights are particularly relevant for Pashto poetry, where metaphor functions as both aesthetic expression and social critique.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTaken together, existing scholarship reveals several key gaps. Contemporary Pashto poetry produced after 2001 remains under-examined; poetry is rarely analyzed as a sustained form of cultural resistance to militarization and state narratives; and cognitive-affective approaches to Pashto poetic discourse remain largely absent. Addressing these gaps, the present study situates contemporary Pashto poetry as a critical site for examining cultural trauma, resistance, and identity formation in conflict-affected Pashtun society.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eTheoretical Framework\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis study is grounded in Cultural Trauma Theory, as articulated by Jeffrey C. Alexander (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2004\u003c/span\u003e), to examine how contemporary Pashto poetry represents state oppression, collective suffering, and identity-based marginalization in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former FATA region. Cultural Trauma Theory conceptualizes trauma not merely as an individual psychological experience but as a socially mediated process through which suffering becomes collectively recognized, narrated, and symbolically constructed. Central to this process is the role of carrier groups\u0026mdash;social actors who articulate communal pain and shape public understanding of injustice. Within this framework, Pashto poets function as carrier groups, translating lived experiences of violence, displacement, and stigmatization into poetic narratives that contest dominant state discourses and preserve collective memory.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eRather than serving as a descriptive account of trauma, this framework functions as an analytical tool that guides interpretation of poetic texts. Specifically, it informs the analysis in three interconnected ways.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFirst, it enables identification of how collective pain\u0026mdash;produced through militarization, displacement, surveillance, and systemic discrimination\u0026mdash;is encoded within poetic language and imagery.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSecond, it facilitates examination of how Pashtun identity is constructed within the poems, distinguishing between individualized suffering and the articulation of a shared, collective experience.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThird, it directs attention to questions of responsibility and moral address, assessing how poets assign accountability, challenge state practices, and seek recognition from broader audiences.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAlexander\u0026rsquo;s framework identifies four analytical dimensions that guide the interpretation of cultural trauma narratives. First, it examines the nature of the pain, focusing on how militarization, enforced displacement, surveillance, and systemic discrimination are encoded in poetic language. Second, it addresses the identity of the victims, exploring whether poems articulate localized suffering or construct a broader, collective Pashtun experience. Third, it considers the relationship between victims and audiences, analyzing how poetic representation fosters recognition, empathy, and moral engagement beyond the immediate community. Fourth, it interrogates the attribution of responsibility, assessing how poets critique state practices and expose structures of power that sustain collective suffering (Alexander et al., 2004).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTo complement this analysis, the study draws selectively on Foucault\u0026rsquo;s (1975) conceptualization of surveillance and disciplinary power. Foucauldian insights are not employed as an independent theoretical framework but as a supporting lens to illuminate how militarization and monitoring operate as normalized mechanisms of control that shape identity, behavior, and self-perception. This perspective assists in interpreting how fear, self-regulation, and silence become internalized within everyday Pashtun life and poetic expression. Through this lens, Pashto poetry is interpreted as a form of symbolic resistance that disrupts internalized regimes of silence and reclaims narrative agency in politically constrained environments.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe framework also incorporates insights from cognitive-affective approaches to poetic imagination (Zalipour, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e; Wassiliwizky et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR19\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e) to account for the emotional force of poetic expression. Metaphor, imagery, and narrative compression are understood as mechanisms through which trauma is communicated, remembered, and shared collectively. These affective dimensions are treated not as aesthetic embellishments but as central vehicles through which collective memory and emotional knowledge are transmitted. Emotional resonance thus becomes central to how Pashto poetry conveys lived experience and sustains cultural resilience.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eBy centering Cultural Trauma Theory and supplementing it with focused insights from surveillance studies and cognitive-affective literary scholarship, this framework provides a coherent interdisciplinary lens. It equips the study with a structured yet flexible analytical toolkit, enabling a nuanced examination of how contemporary Pashto poetry documents trauma, challenges hegemonic narratives, and performs cultural and political work within conflict-affected Pashtun society.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Methodology","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis study employs a qualitative research design to explore the articulation of trauma, identity, and cultural resistance in contemporary Pashto poetry. A qualitative approach is particularly suitable for examining subjective experiences, symbolic representations, and collective meaning-making processes embedded in literary texts (Creswell, \u003cspan class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). Through interpretive analysis, the study seeks to understand how Pashtun poets represent experiences of state oppression, militarization, displacement, and structural marginalization, and how poetry functions as a medium of cultural resistance and collective memory.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe research adopts a textual and thematic analysis approach guided primarily by Cultural Trauma Theory (Alexander, \u003cspan class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2004\u003c/span\u003e). This theoretical lens is complemented by Foucauldian perspectives on surveillance and social control (Foucault, \u003cspan class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1977\u003c/span\u003e), as well as cognitive-affective frameworks that emphasize the emotional and psychological dimensions of poetic engagement. Together, these perspectives enable the study to examine how poetic techniques—such as metaphor, allegory, imagery, repetition, and silence—mediate trauma, challenge dominant narratives, and contribute to collective identity formation. Each poem is analyzed within its broader historical, social, and political context, allowing attention to both aesthetic form and socio-political meaning.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eData for the study consist of nineteen contemporary Pashto poems composed after 2001. The poems were selected using purposive sampling based on thematic relevance rather than representativeness. Selection criteria included the explicit or implicit engagement with themes of trauma, militarization, displacement, surveillance, identity stigmatization, and cultural resistance related to the lived experiences of communities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and the former FATA region. Sampling continued until thematic saturation was reached, indicated by the recurrence of analytical patterns and the absence of substantively new themes in additional texts.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe corpus includes poems by multiple poets representing different generational and stylistic backgrounds, encompassing both emerging voices and established literary figures. Texts were sourced from published anthologies, literary magazines, online literary platforms, and recorded recitations from public mushairas. This diversity of sources ensured a broad representation of contemporary Pashto poetic discourse while remaining focused on conflict-affected contexts.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe analysis followed a systematic thematic procedure. Each poem was read repeatedly to achieve textual immersion and to identify its symbolic, linguistic, and narrative layers. Coding proceeded in three stages. First, open coding was conducted to identify recurrent images, metaphors, and narrative patterns related to trauma and resistance. Second, these codes were clustered into broader thematic categories informed by Cultural Trauma Theory. Third, themes were refined through cross-comparison across poems to ensure internal coherence and analytical consistency. Initial codes were generated inductively while remaining informed by Cultural Trauma Theory. These codes were then iteratively refined and grouped into broader thematic categories related to pain, victimhood, responsibility, collective memory, and resistance. Throughout this process, interpretive rigor was maintained through repeated readings, reflexive engagement with the data, and theoretical alignment. Interpretations were further contextualized by cross-referencing historical events, socio-political conditions, and existing scholarship on Pashto poetry and political violence.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eEthical considerations were carefully observed throughout the study. All poets and published sources were properly acknowledged, and intellectual property rights were respected. Cultural sensitivity was maintained due to the political and emotional weight of the trauma narratives represented. For orally transmitted or unpublished material, anonymity was preserved where necessary to protect contributors.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSeveral limitations are acknowledged. As a qualitative interpretive study, the analysis is inherently subjective, though this subjectivity is mitigated through theoretical grounding and systematic coding. While the selection of nineteen poems allows for in-depth analysis, it does not claim to represent the entirety of contemporary Pashto poetry. Additionally, as the poems were originally composed in Pashto, translation into English may involve partial loss of linguistic nuance; however, close attention was paid to preserving metaphorical, cultural, and contextual meanings during interpretation. Despite these limitations, the methodology provides a robust and contextually grounded framework for examining how Pashto poetry articulates cultural trauma and functions as a form of collective resistance.\u003c/p\u003e "},{"header":"Analysis and Discussion","content":"\u003ch2\u003ePashtun Poetry as Cultural Trauma, Discursive Power, and Postcolonial Resistance\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis chapter analyzes contemporary Pashtun poetry as a cultural site where collective trauma, power relations, and postcolonial marginalization are articulated and contested. Drawing on Cultural Trauma Theory, Foucauldian understandings of discourse and power, and postcolonial perspectives, the analysis treats poetry not merely as aesthetic expression but as lived testimony. In contexts marked by prolonged militarization, surveillance, and representational violence, poetry functions as an alternative archive—preserving experiences that remain absent or distorted within official histories and dominant media narratives.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRather than applying theory mechanically, the chapter reads poems as culturally embedded texts that reveal how trauma is experienced, normalized, and resisted in everyday life. The poet emerges as a cultural witness, translating diffuse and often silenced experiences into symbolic language. Through metaphor, irony, and repetition, Pashtun poetry captures the embodied, discursive, and structural dimensions of marginalization, while simultaneously producing counter-narratives that reclaim agency, memory, and ethical presence.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eSpectacle, Narrative Distance, and the Normalization of Pashtun Death\u003c/h3\u003e\u003ch2\u003eښکلې ډرامه ده، خو د یو کردار مې ډېر خفه کړی\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eدغه پښتون چې په کې وژني، په رښتیايي وژني\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eA strange drama unfolds, yet one character leaves me sorrowful;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ewhen they kill Pashtuns in the story, they kill them in truth as well.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis verse offers a sharp critique of how Pashtun suffering is transformed into spectacle within dominant conflict narratives. The use of the word “drama” is deliberately ironic, suggesting that violence appears staged, distant, and consumable for external audiences. For Pashtuns, however, this narrative distance collapses entirely; what is dramatized for others is lived as irreversible loss. The poet exposes the moral gap between representation and reality.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe line “they kill them in truth as well” collapses fiction and life, revealing how symbolic violence reinforces material harm. Repetition of Pashtun death across media, policy discourse, and security narratives normalizes loss and strips it of moral urgency. Pashtuns appear as recurring characters assigned an expendable role within the larger script of war. Their deaths sustain the narrative rather than disrupt it.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom a postcolonial perspective, this normalization reflects frontier logics of governance in which exceptional violence becomes routine. Pashtun lives are framed as acceptable losses within geopolitical and security calculations. Power operates discursively: repeated representation produces desensitization, rendering Pashtun deaths ungrievable and expected. The poet’s sadness signals refusal—an insistence that death must not be absorbed silently into narrative routine.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy transforming observation into poetry, the poet acts as a cultural witness. The verse interrupts passive consumption and demands ethical recognition, reframing Pashtun death as lived trauma rather than narrative necessity.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eLanguage without Identity: Fear, Silence, and Internalized Control\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eدا څه خبره ده دا څه اورو دا څه وایی څوک\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eپښتو به وايی خو\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003eپښتون به ځان ته نه وايی څوک\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat is this, what is being heard—someone says\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003epeople may speak Pashto, but no one will call themselves Pashtun.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis poem foregrounds a subtle yet deeply consequential form of cultural trauma: the separation of language from identity. While Pashto may be spoken, Pashtun identity itself becomes unspeakable. The poet frames this condition as something overheard rather than openly declared, indicating an atmosphere of caution and internalized fear.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHere, trauma manifests not through direct violence but through constrained self-definition. Cultural practices survive, yet political and ethnic identification is suppressed. Individuals adapt by fragmenting identity—retaining language while disavowing the name that gives it historical and collective meaning. Silence becomes a strategy of survival, as identity regulation is internalized and sustained through everyday calculations of risk.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis condition reflects disciplinary power operating through anticipation rather than force. No authority explicitly bans Pashtun identification; instead, fear of suspicion, profiling, or ideological labeling produces self-censorship.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePostcolonially, this phenomenon mirrors the politicization of Pashtun identity as a security concern. Speaking Pashto is tolerated as cultural folklore, while asserting Pashtunhood is framed as political excess. The result is a hollowing of identity—language without historical consciousness. By naming what “no one will say,” the poem reopens a discursive space, using poetry to resist silence and restore the possibility of self-recognition.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eMoral Policing and the Religious Delegitimization of Identity\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eکافر کېږم، د جنت نه مې وباسي،\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eکه دا ووایم چې پښتون مې قومیت دی\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eI will be declared an infidel; they will expel me from paradise\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eif I say that Pashtun is my nationality.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis verse exposes how religious discourse is mobilized to discipline ethnic identity. Pashtun self-identification is framed as morally dangerous, even spiritually damning. The fear expressed is not abstract; it reflects a deeply internalized anxiety where cultural belonging is imagined as incompatible with religious legitimacy.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHere, trauma penetrates the moral and spiritual dimensions of life. The individual is forced into an impossible dilemma—choosing between faith and ethnic identity. Such framing embeds trauma within conscience itself, fracturing the self and producing long-term psychological and cultural damage.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePower operates through moralization rather than coercion. There is no visible accuser; the fear of accusation is already internalized. Religious discourse becomes a technology of control, regulating identity through guilt, fear, and imagined exclusion. Within postcolonial contexts, such moral policing supports homogenizing national narratives that treat ethnic assertion as disloyal or dangerous.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYet the poem itself constitutes resistance. By articulating what is normally suppressed, the poet disrupts the moral monopoly over identity. Poetry becomes a space where imposed binaries—faith versus ethnicity—are exposed as constructed mechanisms of control rather than natural truths.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eEmbodied Violence and the Normalization of Harm\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eزه چیک کم طرف ته ګورم، زما سر لګی\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eکاڼړی چی رازی د پښتون سر لګی\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eWherever I look, I often get struck by stones;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ebecause I am Pashtun, I am hit on the head by stones.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis verse presents violence not as an isolated incident but as a continuous condition of existence. The phrase “wherever I look” conveys a world without refuge, suggesting that harm surrounds the Pashtun subject from all directions.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eViolence is not tied to a specific actor or moment; it is ambient, anticipated, and normalized, shaping an expectation of harm as a natural condition of life.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe stone functions as both a literal and symbolic object—representing physical assault, social hostility, stereotyping, and institutional punishment.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe explicit causal link—“because I am Pashtun”—is critical. It removes ambiguity and frames violence as identity-based rather than accidental. Within a cultural trauma perspective, such repetition of targeted harm produces collective memory. When injury is consistently experienced as a consequence of who one is, trauma becomes embedded within identity itself, shaping how individuals perceive space, safety, and belonging.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe imagery of being struck on the head carries additional significance. Beyond bodily injury, it suggests an assault on dignity, thought, and consciousness. Violence here is directed not only at the body but at the capacity to think, speak, and assert agency. Each “stone” can be read as a military operation, a media accusation, a checkpoint, or a policy that treats Pashtun existence as inherently suspect.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom a Foucauldian perspective, the poem reflects how prolonged exposure to violence produces internalized insecurity. This anticipatory fear illustrates how power reshapes perception, as surveillance, profiling, and suspicion generate an environment where danger becomes predictable and safety unimaginable. This anticipatory fear is itself a product of disciplinary power.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYet by articulating this condition, the poet transforms vulnerability into testimony. Naming the pattern of harm resists its normalization. The poem preserves memory and asserts that such violence is structural rather than deserved, converting personal pain into collective awareness.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eSelective Mourning and Hierarchies of Death\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eمونږ مړه کېږو، نو په سوچ کې د چا نه یو؛\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eچې نور مړه شي، نو هېواد په ودرېدو شي۔\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen we die, no one even thinks about it;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ewhen others die, the entire country comes to a halt.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis couplet confronts the politics of mourning by exposing unequal valuations of life and death. The contrast between “we” and “others” reveals a moral hierarchy in which Pashtun deaths are rendered invisible, while the deaths of dominant groups provoke national pause, media saturation, and state response. Death is not equal; it is filtered through structures of power that determine whose loss matters.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCollective trauma emerges not only from death itself but from the denial of recognition after death. When loss is repeatedly ignored, communities internalize the message that their lives are disposable. The poet’s restrained tone mirrors the emotional neglect it describes—suffering is not denied loudly but quietly bypassed.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis selective mourning reflects broader regimes of visibility. Some deaths are dramatized and individualized; others are absorbed into statistics. Pashtun fatalities, often occurring in conflict zones, are framed as routine and therefore unremarkable. Such routinization dulls ethical response and sustains long-term violence.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poem resists this erasure through simplicity. Without ideological language, it articulates a devastating truth: national empathy is unevenly distributed. By naming this disparity, the poet transforms silence into critique, insisting that unacknowledged deaths still demand moral recognition.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eLand, Extraction, and the Political Economy of Loss\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eچې راووځي، نو فقط لاشونه د دې ځمکې؛\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eباقي چې سم وو، وړل شوي دي ترې۔\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom this land, only corpses have emerged;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eeverything else has been taken away.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis verse situates Pashtun suffering within a political economy of extraction and dispossession. Land—traditionally associated with sustenance, continuity, and belonging—is redefined as a site of death. What remains are bodies, while all that could signify prosperity or autonomy has been removed. The poem thus reframes geography itself as traumatized.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe passive construction—“has been taken away”—is revealing. Responsibility is diffuse, faceless, and systemic. Exploitation operates through institutions rather than identifiable perpetrators, making resistance difficult. Pashtun regions are repeatedly mined for strategic value—military positioning, ideological sacrifice, and geopolitical leverage—while development and restitution remain absent.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTrauma here is spatial as well as social. When land becomes synonymous with death, insecurity is reproduced across generations. Geography no longer offers protection or continuity; instead, it preserves loss. Militarization reorganizes space, normalizing exceptional violence and suspending accountability.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy naming this condition, the poet rejects developmental rhetoric and exposes its violent underside. Poetry becomes a form of political accounting, documenting what official narratives omit. The verse crystallizes how Pashtun suffering is sustained through cycles of giving—bodies, land, endurance—without return.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eخدایہ ورپہ غاړہ کړې ټوپک ورلہ د ټول عمر\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eڅوک چې قلم نه پریګدي زما د پښتنو سره\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eO Allah, give them a gun for their entire life\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethose who never leave my Pashtuns’ pen alone.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis verse articulates one of the most critical tensions within the Pashtun experience: the systematic replacement of intellectual agency with militarized identity. The juxtaposition of \u003cem\u003ebandook\u003c/em\u003e (gun) and \u003cem\u003eqalam\u003c/em\u003e (pen) is not accidental; it exposes a structural strategy through which Pashtuns are repeatedly pushed toward violence while being denied spaces of learning, critical thought, and self-representation. The prayer-like form of the verse intensifies its moral charge, transforming poetic critique into ethical indictment.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe line does not glorify weapons; rather, it curses those who disrupt the pen by wishing upon them the same fate imposed on Pashtuns—lifelong association with the gun. This inversion reveals how militarization is not a natural cultural trait but a forced condition. The pen symbolizes education, memory, narrative authority, and future-making. Interfering with it signifies an assault on epistemic agency, ensuring that Pashtuns remain objects of policy rather than subjects of knowledge.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom a cultural trauma perspective, silencing the pen perpetuates collective injury by preventing communities from narrating their own suffering. Trauma becomes cyclical when memory is suppressed and storytelling interrupted. The poet identifies those responsible not through naming institutions but by highlighting their actions—persistent disruption of literacy, discourse, and cultural expression.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePower operates here in a Foucauldian sense through normalization. Pashtuns are expected to fight, sacrifice, and endure, while intellectual pursuits are framed as secondary, dangerous, or subversive. The pen becomes suspicious; the gun becomes familiar. This disciplinary arrangement produces subjects trained for conflict rather than citizenship.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt the same time, the poem itself resists this logic. By choosing poetry—the very embodiment of the pen—the poet reclaims agency. Writing becomes an act of defiance, transforming imposed silence into articulation. The verse thus functions as counter-discourse, exposing the mechanisms that convert a thinking community into a fighting body.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eزه ساده پښتون تصوير د ميني او د اَمن يم\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eتا ته مې چا هسې چرته وران تصویر ښودلې دې\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eI am always the Pashtun image of peace and love;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003esomeone has made a false image of me.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis couplet represents an explicit act of identity reclamation. The speaker refuses externally imposed definitions and asserts a self-authored identity grounded in peace and affection. The word \u003cem\u003esada\u003c/em\u003e (always) is crucial—it affirms continuity, suggesting that humane values are not reactions to violence but enduring elements of Pashtun culture.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe second line shifts responsibility outward. “Someone has made a false image of me” points toward a system rather than an individual. Media narratives, security discourse, and state ideology converge to construct Pashtuns as inherently violent, aggressive, or disposable. This manufactured image erases lived realities of hospitality, ethics, and communal care.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSuch misrepresentation constitutes epistemic injustice. When a community is denied the authority to define itself, knowledge about it is produced externally and circulated as truth. This produces cultural trauma by distorting collective self-perception and reinforcing stigma. Over time, imposed narratives begin to overshadow lived experience.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom a postcolonial perspective, this distortion is not new. Pashtuns have historically been framed through colonial logics of the “martial race” and frontier instability. These categories persist in postcolonial governance, shaping policy and public imagination alike. The poem resists this legacy by re-centering Pashtun voice.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe act of self-definition is therefore political. By speaking in the first person, the poet shifts from object to subject, disrupting representational hierarchies. Poetry becomes a site where dignity is restored and ethical presence reclaimed.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eوخت چی په ما د څه احسان کوی نو داسی کوی\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eمانه سرمن وباسی ما له تی سادرجوړه ووی\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003e“The time that claims to favor me does so in this way\u003c/em\u003e:\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eit peels off my skin and turns it into a sheet for me.”\u003c/h3\u003e\u003ch2\u003eڅوک ئ اشرو له بلی څوک ترے لښکر جوړوی\u003c/h2\u003e\u003ch2\u003eهر زوره ور د پښتنو د پاره شر جوړوی\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003e“Some take it to the assembly, others turn it into an army;\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003efor every oppressed Pashtun, it becomes a foundation.”\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eد پښتنو زمکه به څه فصلونه اوټوکوی\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eڅوک پکښې جنګ جوړوی څوک پکښې سنګر جوړوی\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003e“How can crops grow on Pashtun land\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003ewhen some turn it into war and others into fortresses?”\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eداسې څوک نشته چې په دې ورانۍ کې لاس نه لري؛\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eداسې څوک نشته چې کابل او پېښور جوړا وي۔\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003e“There is no one who is not responsible for this destruction;\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003ethere is no one who brings peace to Peshawar or Kabul.”\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis poem presents a cohesive critique of Pashtun marginalization by linking cultural erasure, militarization, and political abandonment into a single structure of sustained harm. Violence is not portrayed as accidental or temporary; rather, it appears as an organized and normalized process maintained through time, institutions, and competing power interests. The poetic voice speaks from a position of accumulated historical awareness rather than immediate suffering, transforming personal pain into collective diagnosis.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe central metaphor of \u003cem\u003echamrra\u003c/em\u003e (skin) and \u003cem\u003echadar\u003c/em\u003e (sheet) is crucial to the poem’s analytical force. Here, \u003cem\u003echamrra\u003c/em\u003e symbolizes Pashtun culture, traditions, language, and inherited ways of life. Its removal signifies cultural dispossession. In contrast, the \u003cem\u003echadar\u003c/em\u003e represents development, protection, and state-sponsored progress. The exchange depicted is profoundly unequal: culture is extracted, and development is returned as compensation. What is presented as benevolence (\u003cem\u003eihsaan\u003c/em\u003e) is, in fact, loss reframed as care.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis reframing exposes how cultural violence is normalized through the language of progress. Development appears not as an inclusive right but as a conditional reward, granted only after indigenous identity has been stripped away. The \u003cem\u003echadar\u003c/em\u003e does not repair the wound created by the removal of \u003cem\u003echamrra\u003c/em\u003e; it merely conceals it. Trauma, therefore, operates symbolically—loss is rendered invisible by being narrated as necessity and advancement.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poem then extends this critique by depicting Pashtun lives as resources repeatedly converted for political use. Whether mobilized for assemblies or armies, Pashtuns appear as instruments rather than citizens. Their oppression becomes a “foundation” upon which political legitimacy and security narratives are built. This suggests a system where suffering is not a governance failure but a functional requirement. Belonging is demanded in times of conflict yet withdrawn in moments of peace and reconstruction.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe shift from body to land reinforces this structural argument. Pashtun territory is described as incapable of producing crops because it is continuously transformed into battlefields and fortifications. Militarization thus destroys not only lives but the very possibility of growth and sustainability. Trauma becomes spatial and ecological, embedded in land as much as in memory.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFinally, the poem refuses singular blame. By asserting collective responsibility and pointing to the absence of peace in both Peshawar and Kabul, it indicts overlapping regional, state, and institutional actors. The poem therefore moves beyond lament toward political critique, challenging narratives that naturalize Pashtun violence and instead revealing how it is systematically produced and sustained.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOverall, the poem functions as counter-knowledge. By linking cultural loss, imposed development, militarization, and abandonment, it reclaims the authority to define Pashtun experience. Poetry here operates as analysis, exposing forms of violence that official discourse seeks to obscure and insisting that peace remains impossible so long as culture, land, and life are valued only for their utility.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eپه خپل سکول کښ پردیو ژبو او پردی تاريخ ته ناست يم\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eد زه کم کم سبق وایمِ، د خپل ځانه يي پردی کړم\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI sit in a school learning others’ languages and histories;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ewhat kind of curriculum is this that has taken me away from myself?\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis verse critiques education as a mechanism of cultural alienation. The paradox is stark: schooling promises enlightenment yet produces estrangement. By prioritizing external histories and languages, the curriculum displaces Pashtun epistemology, rendering local knowledge invisible.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe rhetorical question functions as indictment. Education is exposed not as neutral but as ideological—shaping subjects aligned with state priorities while distancing them from their own cultural roots. The phrase “away from myself” captures the psychological dimension of this process: identity fracture through institutional neglect.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCulturally, this constitutes symbolic violence. Trauma here is not inflicted through weapons but through omission. When generations are denied access to their own histories, a form of internal exile emerges—people remain physically in their homeland but intellectually displaced.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poem thus links education to power, showing how domination operates quietly through syllabi rather than force. By naming this process, poetry interrupts normalization and restores critical awareness.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eسبا چی امن شي نو مونږه به څوک نه یادوی\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eنن هر سړی وائي چی جنګ ته دي پښتون مخکښ شي\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen peace returns tomorrow, none of them will remember us;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eyet today, everyone asks the Pashtun to step forward for war.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis couplet captures the cyclical disposability of Pashtun lives within conflict economies. The temporal contrast between \u003cem\u003eaaj\u003c/em\u003e (today) and \u003cem\u003ekal\u003c/em\u003e (tomorrow) is not merely poetic; it reveals a recurring political pattern. In moments of crisis, Pashtuns are summoned, praised, and mobilized. Once violence subsides, their sacrifices dissolve into silence. Memory becomes selective, and peace becomes exclusionary.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poem exposes a moral contradiction at the heart of war narratives. Participation is demanded collectively, but remembrance is denied selectively. The Pashtun body is useful in war yet inconvenient in peace. This conditional visibility produces cultural trauma by embedding loss without acknowledgment. Trauma deepens when suffering is neither memorialized nor transformed into justice.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePower operates here through what may be understood as strategic amnesia. Forgetting is not accidental; it is functional. By erasing Pashtun presence after conflict, dominant narratives avoid accountability while preserving the myth of national unity. The poem resists this erasure by recording what official histories omit.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe speaker’s tone is restrained rather than emotional, which intensifies its impact. There is no plea—only exposure. This restraint reflects an exhaustion produced by repetition, where trauma no longer needs to scream to be understood. Silence itself becomes evidence.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003eدې کتاب کې (ش) شهید او (ج) جهاد دي؛\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003eدې کتاب کې (ت) توپنګ او (ټ) ټوپک دي۔\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003eIn this book, (Sh) stands for martyr and (J) for jihad;\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003ein this book, (T) stands for topang (rifle) and (Ṭ) for gun.\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis verse delivers one of the most profound critiques of institutionalized militarization. By using the alphabet—traditionally a symbol of innocence, learning, and beginnings—the poet reveals how violence is introduced at the earliest stages of cognition. Language itself becomes weaponized.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe issue here is not faith or sacrifice but repetition and framing. When martyrdom and jihad dominate symbolic learning, while creativity and peace remain absent, a narrow moral universe is produced. The gun does not enter later; it appears alongside letters, normalized before critical awareness develops.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis process illustrates how trauma is transmitted intergenerationally. Children inherit not only conflict but the vocabulary of conflict. Education becomes a silent conveyor of violence, shaping subjectivities aligned with endurance and sacrifice rather than reflection or dissent.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poem also gestures toward inequality across regions. While some children are prepared for citizenship, innovation, and leadership, others are trained symbolically for loss. This uneven distribution of educational purpose reinforces structural marginalization.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eImportantly, the critique is subtle. The poet does not reject learning; he exposes its distortion. By reclaiming language through poetry, he interrupts the cycle and restores the alphabet as a site of resistance rather than submission.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eزمونږ په زمکه یی تل جنګ لیکلی\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eبس قبر راغلی دی زمونږ برخه کښ\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWar has been written upon our land,\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eand all that came to our share were graves.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis couplet condenses decades of conflict into a devastating moral account. War is described as something \u003cem\u003ewritten\u003c/em\u003e—suggesting planning, scripting, and authorship—while death is merely received. Pashtuns are not authors of war; they are its surface.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe land becomes both witness and victim. Graves replace futures, and burial replaces belonging. This spatial imagery emphasizes how violence reshapes geography, converting homeland into a landscape of loss. Trauma here is not episodic; it is territorial.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poem challenges dominant claims that conflict is unavoidable or organic. By framing war as written, the poet implies intention and design. This invites ethical questioning: who writes war, and who pays its cost?\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMemory again becomes central. Graves mark presence, but without narrative control, they risk becoming anonymous. Poetry intervenes by naming loss, ensuring that death is not reduced to statistics.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eد جنګ زمونږه نه دی\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eبس لاشونه يي زمونږ دې\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is not our war,\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eyet the bodies are always ours.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis couplet delivers a blunt ethical indictment of proxy conflict. The speaker refuses ownership of the war while simultaneously exposing ownership of its consequences. The brevity of the lines mirrors the brutal clarity of the argument: decision-making and dying are radically separated. Power decides elsewhere; death arrives locally.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe denial of agency is central here. When a community is repeatedly drawn into conflicts it neither initiates nor controls, trauma becomes structural rather than episodic. Loss accumulates without resolution. This condition fosters a sense of historical paralysis, where suffering is normalized because alternatives are systematically denied.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poem resists narratives that frame Pashtun participation as voluntary or heroic. Instead, it highlights coercive inclusion—being made part of wars through geography, surveillance, and strategic necessity. Such inclusion produces a citizenship defined by sacrifice rather than rights.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMemory again plays a critical role. Bodies testify to truth when official narratives refuse accountability. The poem positions death itself as evidence, refusing abstraction.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eزمونږ په ښار کښ چوک يو پاتی نه دی\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eبس چیک پوسټونه او خاموشی پاتی ده\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo public squares remain in our cities;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eonly checkpoints and silence are left.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis verse shifts attention from bodies to space, revealing how militarization transforms everyday life. Public squares—sites of gathering, dialogue, and social continuity—are replaced by checkpoints, which regulate movement and visibility. Space becomes disciplinary.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSilence here is not peace; it is enforced quiet. The absence of communal space fractures social bonds, intensifying cultural trauma. When people can no longer assemble, collective memory weakens, and resistance becomes individualized and risky.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poem demonstrates how control operates not only through violence but through architecture and routine. Checkpoints become normalized features of life, embedding power into daily movement. Over time, surveillance ceases to shock and begins to feel inevitable.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy recording this spatial loss, the poem reclaims memory against normalization. It insists that what appears ordinary is historically produced and ethically charged.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eبل څوک لیکی زمونږه قيصه\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eمونږه يوازی پاتی شوی بس کردار یو پکښ\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSomeone else is writing our story,\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eand we have been reduced to mere characters.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis couplet returns to the theme of narrative dispossession. To be written by another is to lose authorship over one’s past, present, and future. The Pashtun subject appears not as a narrator but as a figure within someone else’s script.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSuch narrative domination produces epistemic trauma. Knowledge about Pashtuns circulates without Pashtuns. Their experiences are interpreted, categorized, and instrumentalized by external frameworks that prioritize security over humanity.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poem’s power lies in its meta-awareness. By naming the act of being written, the poet interrupts it. Poetry becomes counter-authorship—a reclaiming of narrative space. Even if the broader structure remains unequal, articulation itself becomes resistance.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen these poetic fragments are read together, a coherent pattern of cultural trauma becomes visible—one that is cumulative and structural rather than episodic or accidental. Across the verses, Pashtun experience is consistently situated at the intersection of war, representation, education, and space. Marginalization emerges not as a single outcome but as a process sustained through multiple, interconnected domains. What unifies the poems is not only their engagement with violence, but their insistence that violence functions as a system of meaning-making, shaping how Pashtuns are perceived, remembered, educated, and governed.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA recurring theme throughout the poetry is the denial of agency. Speakers repeatedly distance themselves from wars fought in their name, question educational narratives that estrange them from their own identities, and protest the fact that their stories are authored by others. This displacement is not solely political; it is epistemic. Knowledge about Pashtuns—who they are, what they signify, and why they fight—is produced externally and circulated with authority, while Pashtun voices are reduced to symbolic or reactive positions. The poetry intervenes by reversing this relation, transforming the Pashtun from an object of discourse into an articulating subject.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEducation appears as one of the most subtle yet enduring sites of this displacement. Rather than functioning as a neutral space of enlightenment, schooling is portrayed as a mechanism of cultural erasure. By privileging other languages, histories, and epistemologies, educational structures construct hierarchies of knowledge in which Pashtun ways of knowing are marginalized. This form of symbolic violence is particularly effective because it is normalized early, shaping identity prior to the development of political consciousness. The resulting subjectivity is fractured: individuals inhabit their homeland physically while learning to interpret it through externally imposed intellectual frameworks.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe militarization of identity further intensifies this fracture. Cultural attributes such as bravery, honor, and masculinity—often framed as markers of pride—are revealed as tools of instrumentalization. Within the poems, such traits operate as recruitment logics that channel Pashtun youth toward cycles of conflict. The repeated contrast between the gun and the pen is especially revealing. While the pen signifies critical thought, narrative agency, and alternative futures, the gun represents a narrow, state-sanctioned role. Restricted access to the former and overexposure to the latter reduces the Pashtun subject to a fighting body rather than a thinking citizen.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSpatial transformation reinforces these dynamics. Landscapes dominated by checkpoints and cities lacking communal public spaces illustrate how militarization restructures everyday life. Space itself becomes pedagogical, producing habits of obedience, caution, and silence. The erosion of shared spaces undermines collective dialogue and memory, isolating individuals within regimes of surveillance. In this context, silence does not signify peace; it signifies enforced absence—of dissent, gathering, and shared meaning. The poetry insists on naming this silence rather than allowing it to pass as normality.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSelective remembrance constitutes another persistent motif. Pashtuns are urgently mobilized during periods of conflict but rendered invisible once strategic objectives are met. This temporal asymmetry exposes a moral economy in which Pashtun lives are valued instrumentally during crisis and neglected afterward. Such erasure compounds trauma by denying symbolic recognition. Losses that are not remembered cannot generate accountability, and suffering that is normalized remains politically unaddressed. The poems therefore operate as acts of memory, preserving experiences excluded from official narratives.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTaken together, these verses demonstrate that cultural trauma is reproduced through repetition rather than singular catastrophe: repeated wars, recurring stereotypes, curricular exclusions, spatial controls, and systematic forgetting. Trauma becomes a condition of everyday life rather than an interruption of it. At the same time, the poetry does not position Pashtuns solely as passive victims. The act of poetic articulation itself signals resistance. By questioning dominant meanings and reframing lived experience, the poetic voice reclaims interpretive authority within constrained conditions.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this sense, the poems function as counter-archives. They document lived realities that remain absent from institutional histories, policy discourse, and securitized representations. Grounded in affect, memory, and everyday experience, these poetic interventions challenge reductionist portrayals of Pashtun regions and foreground the human consequences of abstraction.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe analytical force of the poems lies in their exposure of the logic underlying marginalization rather than in descriptive accounts of its outcomes. Violence is depicted as routinized and administratively sustained, entering language, education, space, and memory as an organizing principle of social life. Pashtun suffering is rendered predictable: conflict scripts the Pashtun body as a site of sacrifice during war and disappearance during peace. By disrupting this predictability, the poetry reintroduces ethical disturbance, forcing recognition of what has been normalized.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLanguage plays a central role in this process. Terms associated with faith, honor, and sacrifice operate as ideological shortcuts, compressing complex lives into simplified moral categories. Once stabilized linguistically, these categories justify unequal treatment without continuous coercion. The poems’ attention to naming, metaphor, and alphabetic imagery reveals how power operates at the level of language, shaping consciousness before physical violence occurs.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEqually significant is the insistence on self-definition. Declarations of peace, love, and humanity challenge the authority of external actors who claim the right to define Pashtun identity. By exposing representation itself as a problem, the poetry shifts attention from alleged cultural deficiencies to the systems that produce and circulate dominant images. In doing so, it destabilizes imposed narratives without directly confronting them, revealing their constructed nature through refusal.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOverall, the poems demonstrate that Pashtun poetry constitutes a form of critical knowledge production. It records histories of exclusion, interrogates mechanisms of domination, and preserves alternative moral imaginaries. Where formal archives remain silent or complicit, poetic expression assumes the role of witness. Through language, memory, and critique, these verses resist erasure and assert the continued presence of Pashtun subjectivity.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis study has examined Pashtun poetry as a critical site for understanding how cultural trauma is produced, normalized, and contested under conditions of prolonged conflict and political marginalization. Rather than approaching poetry as a purely aesthetic or emotive form, the analysis has demonstrated that Pashtun poetic expression functions as a mode of social critique that reveals the deeper structures through which violence, erasure, and dispossession are sustained. Across the analyzed texts, trauma emerges not as an isolated event but as a cumulative condition shaped by cultural extraction, militarization, misrepresentation, and systematic neglect.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA central finding of this research is that Pashtun suffering is repeatedly reframed through dominant narratives of development, security, and necessity. The metaphorical exchange of culture for development\u0026mdash;where loss is presented as progress\u0026mdash;illustrates how symbolic violence operates alongside physical violence. Cultural traditions, language, and identity are stripped away under the promise of protection or advancement, rendering trauma socially invisible. This process deprives communities not only of material resources but also of interpretive authority, limiting their ability to name harm as harm.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe analysis further shows that Pashtun identity is routinely instrumentalized within political and military frameworks. Pashtun bodies are mobilized for war, assemblies, and security agendas, while their humanity and citizenship remain conditional. This produces a form of disposable belonging in which sacrifice is demanded during conflict but recognition is withdrawn in moments of peace. Such dynamics reveal that marginalization is not accidental but structurally embedded within governance practices that depend on Pashtun endurance while avoiding responsibility for repair.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSpatial and environmental dimensions of trauma also emerge as critical. The transformation of land into battlefields and fortifications demonstrates how militarization forecloses the possibility of life, growth, and sustainability. Trauma is thus inscribed not only in memory and identity but also in geography. The inability of land to \u0026ldquo;produce crops\u0026rdquo; becomes a powerful metaphor for how continuous conflict destroys futures before they can take root.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eImportantly, the poetry analyzed in this study refuses reductive explanations that locate blame in a single actor. By highlighting shared and diffused responsibility, the poems expose how violence persists through networks of power, silence, and complicity. This refusal to individualize blame shifts attention toward systems rather than symptoms, challenging narratives that portray Pashtun regions as inherently violent or culturally predisposed to conflict.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAt the same time, Pashtun poetry does not position its subjects solely as passive victims. The act of poetic articulation itself constitutes resistance. By naming loss, questioning imposed identities, and exposing the logic of domination, poetry reclaims narrative authority. It transforms lived experience into critical knowledge, interrupting dominant discourses that seek to manage Pashtun life through abstraction and stereotype.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis study contributes to broader discussions on cultural trauma by demonstrating how trauma is reproduced through repetition\u0026mdash;repeated wars, repeated representations, repeated exclusions\u0026mdash;rather than singular catastrophe. It also underscores the importance of cultural texts as analytical resources, particularly in contexts where official archives remain silent or complicit. Pashtun poetry operates as a counter-archive, preserving memory, dignity, and critique in the absence of institutional recognition.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eUltimately, this research argues that sustainable peace cannot be understood merely as the absence of armed conflict. Peace requires recognition\u0026mdash;of culture, of history, and of humanity beyond political utility. As long as Pashtun lives are valued primarily for their function within security and power structures, the conditions described in these poems will persist. By foregrounding poetic knowledge, this study calls for a rethinking of how marginalized voices are engaged within academic, political, and policy discourses, emphasizing that meaningful understanding begins with listening to those who have long been spoken for rather than heard.\u003c/p\u003e "},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003ch2\u003eAuthor Contribution\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe author conceived the research idea, designed the study, conducted the qualitative analysis of Pashto poetry, wrote the main manuscript text, and provided critical insights on the theoretical framework, specifically Cultural Trauma Theory. The author also reviewed and revised the manuscript to ensure accuracy and clarity.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eAcknowledgement\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eI would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Syed Irfan Ashraf, author of The Dark Side of News Fixing: The Culture and Political Economy of Pakistan and Afghanistan, for his invaluable guidance and encouragement in pursuing this research. His insights and support were crucial in motivating me to explore this topic, as research in this specific context of Pashto poetry and cultural trauma is limited.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eFunding\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis research received no external funding.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAlexander, J. C. (2004). Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma. In J. C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. J. Smelser, \u0026amp; P. 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(2004). \u003cem\u003eTrauma fiction\u003c/em\u003e. Edinburgh University.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eZalipour, M. (2011). \u003cem\u003eThe Cognitive-Affective Effects of Poetry Reading\u003c/em\u003e. Journal of Literary Studies.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":false,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":true,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"human-arenas","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"huar","sideBox":"Learn more about [Human Arenas](http://link.springer.com/journal/42087)","snPcode":"42087","submissionUrl":"https://submission.nature.com/new-submission/42087/3","title":"Human Arenas","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"em","reportingPortfolio":"Springer Hybrid","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false},"keywords":"Pashto poetry, Cultural trauma, Militarization and surveillance, Postcolonial resistance, Identity and marginalization","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8496271/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8496271/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003eThis study examines contemporary Pashto poetry as a critical cultural site through which collective trauma, identity, and resistance are articulated under conditions of prolonged militarization and political marginalization in Pakistan. Drawing on Cultural Trauma Theory, the study conceptualizes poetry not merely as an aesthetic form but as a mode of cultural knowledge through which communities narrate suffering, contest dominant power structures, and preserve collective memory. Focusing on Pashtun regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former FATA, the analysis explores how poetic discourse represents state violence, surveillance, displacement, and the transformation of Pashtun identity into a securitized and suspect category. Using qualitative textual and thematic analysis, the study examines a selected corpus of contemporary Pashto poems produced in the post-2001 conflict context. The findings demonstrate that Pashtun poetry functions simultaneously as testimony, critique, and resistance by exposing the normalization of violence, the erasure of Pashtun agency, and the unequal valuation of life and death within dominant national narratives. Through metaphor, imagery, silence, and symbolic inversion, poets challenge imposed representations and reclaim narrative authority over Pashtun history, identity, and experience. The study argues that cultural trauma in Pashtun society is not produced by isolated events but is sustained through repetitive processes of militarization, misrepresentation, educational exclusion, and spatial control. By foregrounding poetic expression as a form of counter-archive, this research contributes to trauma studies, postcolonial literary scholarship, and South Asian cultural studies, demonstrating how marginalized communities employ poetry to resist erasure and articulate alternative moral and political imaginaries beyond securitized frameworks.\u003c/p\u003e","manuscriptTitle":"Poetry as Counter-Archive: Cultural Trauma, Militarization, and Narrative Agency in Pashtun Lived Experience","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2026-02-19 16:10:14","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8496271/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0},{"type":"decision","content":"Revision requested","date":"2026-03-04T10:14:14+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvitedReview","content":"","date":"2026-03-02T16:09:09+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvitedReview","content":"","date":"2026-02-20T07:12:56+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"257477996976710868912137365613376022263","date":"2026-02-20T06:41:59+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"289453716983363421079780324308050058651","date":"2026-02-20T04:27:59+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"45694354485203576344808263902827234068","date":"2026-02-19T13:18:50+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewersInvited","content":"","date":"2026-02-17T10:32:15+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorAssigned","content":"","date":"2026-02-14T16:38:03+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"checksComplete","content":"","date":"2026-02-14T04:19:31+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"submitted","content":"Human Arenas","date":"2026-01-01T16:28:26+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"human-arenas","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"huar","sideBox":"Learn more about [Human Arenas](http://link.springer.com/journal/42087)","snPcode":"42087","submissionUrl":"https://submission.nature.com/new-submission/42087/3","title":"Human Arenas","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"em","reportingPortfolio":"Springer Hybrid","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"94a9b918-7a1c-419a-8a4d-126edca39dbd","owner":[],"postedDate":"February 19th, 2026","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"published-in-journal","subjectAreas":[],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2026-05-19T17:26:55+00:00","versionOfRecord":{"articleIdentity":"rs-8496271","link":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-026-00589-z","journal":{"identity":"human-arenas","isVorOnly":false,"title":"Human Arenas"},"publishedOn":"2026-05-09 00:00:00","publishedOnDateReadable":"May 9th, 2026"},"versionCreatedAt":"2026-02-19 16:10:14","video":"","vorDoi":"10.1007/s42087-026-00589-z","vorDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-026-00589-z","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-8496271","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-8496271","identity":"rs-8496271","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"XKTyCvWXoU3ODBz1xrDgd","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}