Aslam Kakar

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Rutgers University- Newark. As a member of the Pashtun ethnic minority, I was born and raised in conflict, poverty and instability in Pakistan’s least developed province, Balochistan. I started my elementary education in a makeshift school in the province’s periphery and had not seen a library until I was eighteen. My childhood was spent in rearing sheep, wood foraging and fetching water in handcarts from miles away. My father died when I was two and my mother raised six children singlehandedly through the support of some relatives. She bought us stationary with the zakat (almsgiving in Islam) the well-to-do in the village used to give her. Two decades later, I came to the United States to earn my master’s in Peace and Justice Studies on Fulbright Scholarship Gandhi Fellowship at the University of San Diego. I left Pakistan in 2013 and never returned because of the growing fear of persecution of freethinkers and scholars critical of the state and oppressive religious ideologies. My poetry covers the themes of exile, un-belongingness, life, mortality, pain, fear, absurdity, perseverance, transcendence, etc. In the last five years, I have taught across interdisciplinary boundaries and departments, such as the Departments of English and Political Science and the Division of Global Affairs. My Ph.D. dissertation compares the Kurdish and Pashtun responses over the past century to state repression at the hands of the Turkish and Pakistani governments. I have written on global poverty and development issues for the Borgen Magazine and the Borgen Blog. I also write on human rights and social justice issues for Waging Nonviolence, Friday Times, and the Daily Times among other publications. Recently I founded the Pashtun Studies Network to connect scholars and researchers who study the Pashtuns and joined the journal of Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism as its Managing Editor.