I Am the Wounded Victim of a Suicide Bomber

I Am the Wounded Victim of a Suicide Bomber presents a selection of poems, translated into English and including the Perisan texts, by Fazel Ahad Ahadi, a scholar and poet driven from his home in Afghanistan by the political and social disruptions that have beset his country since the mid-twentieth century. Drawing heavily on these years of warfare and domination by outsiders and by extremists, this collection highlights the struggles of Afghans to keep alive their individual and collective identities along with the loneliness and cultural dislocation of exile—conditions experienced by too many the world over. While Ahadi’s poems can be joyful and hopeful, most evoke the pain of separation and isolation mixed with the determination to endure, persist, and resist.

Fazel Ahad Ahadi’s works include scripts, plays, and poetry in Persian and Cyrillic. He was Professor in the Faculty of Arts at Kabul University and a visiting professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is Instructional Professor of Persian at the University of Chicago. She is the co-translator of Hafez in Love: A Novel, winner of the 2021 Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize. Patricia J. Higgins is University Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at SUNY Plattsburgh and was a Fulbright lecturer at Tehran University. She is the co-translator of Hafez in Love: A Novel, winner of the 2021 Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize. Nile Green is Professor of History and the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction.