Finding solace, empowerment through poetry
As an 11-year-old boy, he curled up quietly crying himself to sleep under mulberry trees each night.
It is what Abdul Samad Haidari describes as some of the darkest times in his life, working as a child labourer in Iran after first becoming a refugee at 10 years old.
But it wasn’t the only time of his life spent in solitude, surviving extreme adversity.
Most recently, the Hazara-Afghani journalist and poet spent almost a decade in Indonesia as a stateless refugee before arriving in Aotearoa
last February, being granted residency on humanitarian grounds.
It was where he started and finished his second book of poetry; a recollection, reflection and documentation of his life in transit, written as an act of resistance and survival.
The Unsent Condolences was his first book to be published since arriving in Aotearoa, whilst his first book, The Red Ribbon, was written and published in Indonesia.
But unlike that book, The Unsent Condolences was “very organic” and had no censorship, Haidari said.
The content could mean “life or death” in other countries, he said, with poems about colonisation, genocide, women’s rights, religion, the Taliban, persecution and discrimination.
A part of it was in memory of family who died along his journey, including his sister who was killed in the bombing of their home in Dahmardah, Ghazni province, Afghanistan by the Taliban in the late 1990s.
Haidari later lost his father because of his work as a journalist, he said, reporting on the war crimes and brutality, perpetrated by the Taliban on Hazara people – one of the country’s most persecuted ethnic groups.
“I don’t want pity, my story is different and full of courage and strength,” he said. “I survived.”
Haidari wrote in the preface: “But amidst the darkness, a flicker of light emerged from within me – the firm determination to reclaim my dignity, challenge the circumstances that sought to define me.
“In that state of defiance, I discovered solace and empowerment in the art of poetry after I lost my voice for the second time because of my status as a refugee.”
As a refugee in Indonesia Haidari had no right to work, access to public health or education, and was not being considered for resettlement, at times surviving only on rotten scraps of food.
He was forced to seek asylum because of his journalism and ended up in Indonesia in 2014. When it became apparent he couldn’t practice journalism, he shifted his focus to poetry, also writing about the unfair treatment of refugees in Indonesia.
Since November Haidari has worked as a refugee background students advisor at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. He said it was “beautiful” that he could take care of other students of refugee backgrounds, in spite of his life experiences. “I survived,” he repeated.
His poetry was an act of resistance, highlighting injustice; to not be silenced by those who inflicted harm – not only to him and his family but to all Hazara people.
“It is history, it is the people and what can be better than to lash them with my rhymes, I think this is more painful than the bullet.
“I write about the people who existed before me, sharing the burden of loss … thousands of condolences.”