Hilarious. Tender. Brutal. These are the trademarks of one of America’s most dazzling writers, Sherman Alexie. His latest book, War Dances (Grove Press), a collection of poetry and short stories, renders emotional landscapes—anger, joy, anxiety, grief, fear—with skill.

In “War Dances,” the short story that lends its name as the book’s title, the narrator remembers visiting his sick father in the hospital. His dad, post-surgery, is cold in bed, and the narrator asks a busy nurse for a blanket.

“With blanket in hand, I walked back to my father,” the narrator notes. “It was a thin blanket, laundered and sterilized a hundred times. In fact it was too thin. It wasn’t really a blanket. It was more like a large beach towel. Hell, it wasn’t even good enough for that. It was more like the world’s largest coffee filter. Jesus, had health care finally come to this? Everybody was uninsured and unblanketed.”

War Dances contains good poetry, too. My favorite of the bunch is his “Ode to Mix Tapes.” The digital revolution has changed how people create these soundtracks of seduction. Alexie writes that it’s too easy to make mix tapes these days with CD burners, iPods, and iTunes.

But I miss the labor

Of making old-school mix tapes—the
midair

Acrobatics of recording one song

At a time. It sometimes took days

To play, choose, pause,

Ponder, record, replay, erase,

And replace. But there was no magic
wand.

It was blue-collar work. . . .

But O, the last track

Was the vessel that contained

The most devotion and pain

And made promises that you couldn’t
take back.

Malalai Joya’s A Woman Among Warlords (Scribner) tells the amazing story of one of Afghanistan’s leading democracy activists.

The Progressive had the opportunity to meet and interview Joya for our radio show back in 2006. Her steadfast resolve in the face of death threats touched us deeply.

So it was a real pleasure to find out more about her life by reading her autobiography. As a girl she loved poetry and would “read late into the night by the light of our propane lamp” the works of Langston Hughes and Bertolt Brecht. Inspired by her father’s own activism, she tells of opening secret schools for girls in basements, calling it “the most important act of rebellion against the Taliban.” On her wedding day, for security reasons, her bodyguards had to search every flower arrangement for explosives.

Joya fearlessly denounced the warlords at the constitutional assembly in 2003, which she attended. Two years later she ran for office and won, becoming the youngest member elected to parliament. She was later suspended from office for her persistent criticisms of corruption and advocacy of human rights.

She predicted that the Afghan elections, held in August, would be a joke, and warns about Obama’s further escalation of the war. “It could well be that people in Afghanistan will soon say that Obama is even worse than Bush,” she writes. She urges the American people to pressure Obama to withdrawal all our troops.

“In the past thirty years, every kind of atrocity has been committed in Afghanistan in the name of socialism, religion, freedom, democracy and liberation,” she writes. “Now these acts are justified by a so-called war on terror.”

With A Woman Among Warlords, Joya takes her place alongside such leading democracy activists as Aung San Suu Kyi, Shirin Ebadi, and Rigoberta Menchu. It was Joya who should have won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Click here to read Favorite Books of 2009 by editors and writers for The Progressive magazine.

It has now been eight years since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan with the promise of building a democratic state and liberating women. The invasion has failed on both counts.

Malalai Joya is one of Afghanistan’s leading democracy activists. Joya, the youngest person ever elected to its parliament, was suspended in 2007 for her denunciation of warlords and their cronies in government.

“Rather than democracy, what we have in Afghanistan are backroom deals among discredited warlords who are sworn enemies of democracy and justice,” she writes on her website.

Joya became an international figure in 2003 after she fearlessly confronted the Grand Council of tribal leaders in a constitutional assembly.

“Why would you allow criminals to be present at this Loya Jirga?” she said. “They are warlords responsible for our country’s situation. They oppress women and have ruined our country. They should be prosecuted.”

The Progressive had the opportunity to interview Joya for our radio show back in 2006. Her quiet resolve in the face of death threats touched us deeply.

We profiled her courage in a June 2007 article by Matt Pascarella, “The Bravest Woman in Afghanistan.”

Here’s an excerpt:

“Ironically, Joya’s mission to take on the warlords and the drug lords, to promote democracy and women’s rights, appears to echo the rhetoric of the Bush Administration. And yet, according to Joya, rather than live up to that rhetoric, the U.S. government is actively supporting high-ranking officials who have been accused of corruption, drug trafficking, and war crimes, including mass murders. Several of these are in the cabinet of Hamid Karzai.”

Joya let us publish an adaption of her speech she gave at the Global Forum on Freedom of Expression, held in Oslo, Norway, June 1-6, 2009.

She predicted that the Afghan elections, held in August, would be a joke.

“Afghanistan has a presidential election scheduled soon, but everyone knows that the election is a show that is throwing dust in the eyes of our people. The actual choice is with the White House to select its next puppet in Afghanistan and give him legitimacy through this show,” she said two months before the fraudulent elections.

“But we Afghans know that despite international condemnation by human rights organizations and protests by Afghan people, Karzai will be the next president with the two criminals as his vice presidents.”

President Barack Obama, who ran on an anti-Iraq War platform, needs to stop this war, too. He needs to listen to people such as Joya.

“It is due to the wrong and devastating policies of the U.S. government and NATO countries,” she said, “that unfortunately today Afghanistan is a mafia state and ranked at the top of the most unstable and corrupt countries in the world.”

Malalai Joya is one of the bravest people in the world. She’s the outspoken Afghan parliamentarian who was unlawfully suspended from parliament for speaking out for human rights and against the warlords ruling her country. This is her speech at the Global Forum on Freedom of Expression held in Oslo, Norway in June.

Here’s part of her speech:

I am honored that my voice has become the voice my oppressed and unfortunate people. They are supporting me. I announce from your tribune that I will not stop for a moment from telling the truth in the face of death threats and intimidations, as I know achieving our rights requires force and risks. No one will donate to us freedom of expression and other human rights unless we struggle to achieve them. I believe in the inspiring words of Dr. Martin Luther King: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.