Writing Across Borders: Gender, Place and Literary Expression in Contemporary Pashto Literature

Abstract

The Pak–Afghan border, commonly associated with the Durand Line, has shaped Pashtun identity, mobility, cultural belonging, and literary expression. Although Pashto is spoken on both sides of the border, its speakers inhabit different political, educational, and institutional environments. This article examines how contemporary Pashto poetry represents the relationship between borders, gender, place, and identity by bringing together two bodies of literary material. Drawing on comparative literary analysis and thematic analysis, the article investigates border consciousness, transborder solidarity, homeland, displacement, gendered restrictions, cultural memory, and resistance. The analysis demonstrates that male poets in the border-focused corpus frequently articulate collective Pashtun unity and challenge political separation, whereas the selected women poets expand the meaning of borders through representations of gendered mobility, social exclusion, war, emotional experience, and individual agency. These distinctions are tendencies within the selected corpus, in which all male poets belong to Pakistan while among the four female poets two belong to Pakistan and two belong to Afghanistan, rather than universal differences between male and female writers. The article argues that contemporary Pashto poetry provides a literary space in which territorial boundaries and social divisions are simultaneously contested, reproduced, and reimagined.