#qahar

Petals from the Same Flower: 

A Letter from the Canadian Cold to the Kabul Fire

Introduction and translations to Noozar Elias’ letter to Qahar Asi 

By Farhad Azad

Spring 2026 | بهار ۱۴۰۵

In May 1991, as spring began to settle over Canada, Noozar Elias sat in a public library and wrote to Qahar Asi. The letter was less news than a conversation—two poets, continents apart, still sharing their craft's language.

The relationship had deep roots. In a 1994 radio interview, Asi recalled that Elias "refined my mind, opening a window for me to see this garden for what it truly is." Asi and Elias spent time together at Kabul University in the early 1980s. They bonded through verse and discourse. This letter became a vital link in that ongoing exchange.

To understand Elias’s influences, it helps to know he walked in the path of Abdulilah Rastakhiz, the revolutionary Herati poet executed by the Khalq dictatorship in 1979. Yet, where Rastakhiz’s protest was overt and fiery, Elias’s own work moved in quieter, more concealed ways against injustice.

Under Elias’s guidance, Asi found his own form of resistance. In 1983, while working as an agricultural engineer in Logar, he cast off his family name, Aman. He began writing under the pen name "Asi” (عاصی), meaning "Rebel."

In 1984, he composed his poem Freedom (آزادی) in the lush landscape of Logar. The poem gave voice to an ancient longing for liberty. It captured a community whose tough exterior shielded a deeper, luminous hope of unshackling in the "Land of the Sun."

With this history in mind, the 1991 letter becomes a deep gesture from exile. Upon receiving Asi’s latest books, Elias describes the solace they bring—a rescued warmth and a vivid reminder of home.

This sense of separation mirrors the historical fate of the poets and artists of Timurid Herat in the early to mid-1500s. After the collapse of their world, they were scattered from Bukhara to Samarkand to Tabriz. Once a tight-knit circle, they became a diaspora. Each carried a fragment of a lost heritage, like petals plucked from a single flower and cast into distant realms.

Along with the letter, Elias enclosed his poem Strange Syllables (هجاهای غریب). The poem meditates on the uneasy life of the displaced: the haunting moment of departure, the endless waiting, and the complicated survival within the "gilded cage" of the West. The letter remains a stirring record of a connection between two poets—one who fled and one who stayed.

A Letter to Asi By Noozar Elias, May 9, 1991, Canada to Qahar Asi in Kabul  My Dear Qahar, As I write these few lines, it is the ninth of May, 1991. The weather in the city where I reside is partially turning warm. During these four years that I have been stuck in the depths of this country's cold, a kind of lethal restlessness has crept into my very veins and roots. I have let so many opportunities go to waste. Exile and cold are terrible things. May the Unseen God never let you, nor any living soul, be imprisoned by the shackles of exile and cold! Amen. I wrote that the weather of this city is partially turning warm—meaning one must still sit and wait for the heat! The long winters of this land have exhausted me. They have drained me of life, of living, and of loving. A massive dust of heavy exile has settled upon the very core of my soul: I am a wanderer, pacing aimlessly upon this soil. An hour ago, to escape the malice of the anxious marketplaces, I took refuge in a quiet corner—a library nearby. I gathered my writing tools. First, I wrote a letter to Farhad Saba, and then my thoughts drifted straight to you. Your blessed countenance and your spiritual light of the East within you—a grace rarely found in these lands. The people of these parts know nothing of "love," they know nothing of "pain." They are of a different sort, these people! Lest my words become scattered.. Yes, my dear Qahar! At last, the letter and the books—the fruits of your restless, aching spirit—reached me and drew me out from the exhaustion of waiting. Many thoughts have come to mind regarding your letter and your books. Had you been here with me, I would have shared much conversation with you. Now that you are not, I shall strive to write things to you through regular correspondence in the future. For the time being, I am sending you a piece I composed before receiving your first letter, so that you may understand the general state of my being. May your spirit and your work always carry the flame of awareness and love.

Translated from the Farsi by Farhad Azad