Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
No registration required, visit the event website for more information.
Join us for a screening of the documentary film Two Poets and a River. The film explores the lives and musical poetry of the two most prominent and innovative Wakhi musicians in Central and South Asia: Qurbonsho in Tajikistan and Daulatsho in Afghanistan. These two poet-singers share a common language, faith, family network—and the river Oxus, which has long been a site of confrontation between great powers. During the 19th century, the Wakhan homeland of the Wakhi people became a buffer zone between Czarist Russia and the British Empire, and the river Oxus, which became the border, ran right through the center of Wakhan.
After the modern nation-states of the U.S.S.R. and Afghanistan shored up their boundaries around 1930, the communities living along one side of the river were severed from their counterparts on the other side. The specific condition of being separated by a river in the region has been the basis for poetry about the feeling of separation (firāq) in Persian and for Wakhi poetry more generally. The two poets express the love and loss in their own lives in their poetry as well as in their musical arts. Ethnomusicologist and filmmaker Richard K. Wolf shot and produced the film over two and a half years, with the editorial collaboration of both Qurbonsho and Daulatsho, who narrate the film in Wakhi, Tajik, and Dari.
Following the screening, there will be time for questions for Richard K. Wolf, Harvard professor and the film’s director, and Afghan musician Dawood Pazhman, whose work is drawn upon for the related Harvard course, Music and Politics in Afghanistan and Central Asia (Music 194R).