Pashto Poetry in the Twenty-First Century: Voices of Identity, Resistance and Revival

Abstract

Contemporary Pashto poetry offers a rich literary record of the changing experiences, anxieties, and aspirations of Pashtuns in the twenty-first century. Focusing primarily on poets from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, this article examines how poetry represents ethnic, linguistic, cultural, historical, regional, economic, and religious identities while responding to conflict, displacement, political corruption, gendered customs, and restrictions on expression. Alongside poems of grief and resistance, the article considers the affirmative work of cultural memory: the celebration of Pashtunwali, the defence of Pashto, the reworking of folk narratives, cross-border belonging, and the demand that education and peace replace violence. Read together, the poems do not present Pashtun identity as fixed or internally uniform. They reveal a dynamic field in which inherited ideals such as honour, hospitality, courage, and attachment to place are defended, questioned, and reinterpreted in relation to contemporary social realities. Poetry thus becomes both a record of collective trauma and a medium for imagining a more just and peaceful future.