Carol
THERE IS A small restaurant favored by Kabul’s unlikely ladies who lunch, where local riffs on quiche lorraine and delicate little sandwiches are served as a war rages on unseen in the provinces. The yellow house with a small garden is tucked into a small alleyway behind a government ministry and flanked by enough roadblocks to make it an acceptable outing for foreign diplomats and aid professionals. As in many other places, the electricity goes out every half hour or so, but guests quickly pick up the habit of carrying on their conversations in absolute darkness until the switch between generators brings the small lamps up again—all while keeping calm when small creatures occasionally skitter past their feet under the table. I had come here to meet the grande dame of Kabul expatriates in the hope that she could shed some light on what seemed to be yet another of Afghanistan’s many secrets.
Thus far, I had mostly met resistance.
After my first visit to Azita’s family, I scoured the Internet and newspaper archives, thinking that I had missed something fundamental in my homework on the country. But my searches turned up nothing on any other girls who dressed as boys in Afghanistan. Was Azita just an unusually creative woman? Or could it be, as I still suspected, that more Afghan families turned their daughters into sons, as a way of both conceding to and defying an impossibly rigid society?
I had also consulted the experts. There were many to choose from.
Girls and women had become one of several urgent causes to the international aid community after the fall of the Taliban, with numerous specialists on the topic of Afghan women shuttling in and out of the country on short-term rotations from Washington, D.C., and various European capitals. Since many donor countries required development projects—from agriculture to politics—to consider specifically how the lives of Afghan women were to be improved, Kabul had turned into a place brimming with “gender experts”—a term encompassing many of the foreign-born aid workers, sociologists, consultants, and researchers with degrees in everything from conflict resolution to feminist theory.
After observing, but largely ignoring, the Taliban’s vicious treatment of women for years, consensus among foreigners now converged on the need to quickly usher Afghan women closer to a Western version of equality. A “gender workshop” seemed to be taking place at every upscale hotel in Kabul, where European and American women in ethnic jewelry and embroidered tunics held seminars and drew circles on whiteboards around words like “empowerment” and “awareness.” Throughout Afghanistan, hundreds of disparate aid projects were under way, whose euphemistically stated goals were to enlighten Afghans on topics such as “gender mainstreaming” and “gender dialogue.”
But senior officials at the United Nations and experts from both government and independent aid organizations delivered a unanimous dismissal when I approached them: Afghans did not dress daughters as sons to counter their segregated society. Why would they ever do that? Had more girls like Mehran existed, these experts, heavily invested in the plight of Afghan women, would certainly know about it, I was told. Anthropologists, psychologists, and historians would surely also have taken note, as such a thing would seem to go against the common understanding of Afghanistan’s culture, where one dresses strictly according to gender. Books would have been written and academic studies would have been made. Ergo, such a practice—if it was really a practice and not just an oddity—must not exist. Gender segregation in Afghanistan is among the strictest in the world, I was repeatedly told, making such an act unthinkable. Dangerous, even.
But persistent inquiries among Afghans offered a different, if muddled, view. My male translator casually remarked that he had heard of a distant girl cousin who dressed as a boy, but had never understood or thought much of it. Other Afghans echoed occasional rumors of such girls but uniformly advised that I better leave it alone; poking into the private affairs and traditions of families was never a good idea for a foreigner.
An Afghan diplomat eventually offered a firsthand sighting, remembering a friend on his neighborhood football team during the Taliban era in the 1990s. One day the friend just disappeared and a number of his teammates went to his house in search of the boy. His father stepped out of the doorway and said that unfortunately their friend would not be returning. She had changed back to being a girl. The team’s twelve-year-olds on the street outside were stunned.
This, however, was an anomaly, the diplomat assured me. Any such desperate and uncivilized measures could be blamed solely on the horrors of the Taliban era. A 2003 Afghan feature film, Osama, had actually told a story of a young girl who disguised herself as a boy under Taliban rule. But that was fiction, of course. And besides, these were new, enlightened times in Afghanistan, the diplomat said.
But were they really?
To a reporter, the aggressive pushback by expert foreigners and Afghans alike was intriguing. What if this pointed to something bigger than just Azita’s family—something that might raise questions about what else we were missing in our decade-long quest to understand Afghanistan and its culture?
I was hoping Carol le Duc might have some input on the topic. With her red hair and jewel-toned silk shalwars, Carol never seemed to offer the same confident and often-repeated theses about Afghans or what their country needed in terms of basic understanding of Western values. “I would never call myself a feminist,” she had said, for instance, when I first met her. “No, no, I leave that to the others.”
Instead, Carol is of a kind that eschews the expat crowd, preferring to socialize with the Afghan families she befriended many years ago, when fewer foreigners were allowed into the country under Taliban rule. She is believed by many to have the sharpest institutional memory in Kabul and is famous for having been one of few women to have negotiated with the Taliban when they were in power.
Carol arrived in this part of the world in 1989 after a divorce. She could have been perfectly comfortable back in England for the rest of her life. But she chose not to. “I hate traveling and passing through places. I like to get to know people. To go deeper,” she had told me. “And I realized I was a completely free woman at forty-nine.” In her almost two decades in Afghanistan and Pakistan since, she has worked for nongovernmental organizations and as a consultant to government ministries. With a degree in anthropology from Oxford, she has been involved in many studies involving Afghan women, children, and politics.
Holding a firm belief that tea scented with crushed cardamom served in fine bone china cups makes any disaster—and Kabul has seen its share—a little more bearable, she lives in modest grandeur in a peach-colored stone house surrounded by a well-tended garden with two peacocks “because they are beautiful to look at.” In winter, her fireplace is a rare find in Kabul; it actually works. And in summer, her large rattan chairs under a slow-moving ceiling fan render August slightly more livable. Every Afghan working for the taxi services that cater to foreigners in residence knows her walled home on a muddy Kabul street simply as “the Carol House,” and locals speak of her with a fondness and respect reserved for those who have come to be part of their own history, reaching further back than the most recent war.
At times, though, Kabul becomes a bit much even for Carol, and she hops on a flight to her “country cottage” in Peshawar, a violent Pakistani city formerly under British control, where the Afghan king used to summer. Today Peshawar is considered one of the most dangerous places in the world. It is so infested by Islamic extremists that few Westerners visit voluntarily, and when they do, it is usually with military-grade protection. But to Carol, accustomed to walking Kabul by foot with absolute disregard for what foreigners call “security,” and refusing to contain her firecracker hair under a head scarf, Peshawar offers only a marginally more complicated existence. The airport, of course, is a “huge kerfuffle,” in her words, where, in place of a hospitality desk, a “Mr. Intelligence” will always approach, presuming she is American. And each time, Carol takes great pleasure in stating she is British. And nothing else.
“NOW, WOULD YOU like the special white tea, or should we try the special red?” she asks me at the restaurant, after listening to my quandary. After a nod from Carol, the server pours the illegal red wine from a chubby blue teapot.
That an Afghan girl is being brought up as a boy makes complete sense to Carol: “As a woman, why wouldn’t you want to cross over to the other side, in a country like Afghanistan?” she exclaims. In fact, she is entertained by the idea; it appeals to her contrarian side.
While she has never observed the practice among children, she does recall a field trip several years prior with a small team of aid workers to Ghazni province, a Taliban stronghold. The men and women of one tribal village lived strictly separated, and when Carol was invited for tea in the women’s quarters, she was surprised to find a man living among them. The women called him “Uncle,” and he appeared to enjoy a special status in the village. The women served his tea and treated him with great respect. Uncle’s appearance was rugged, but he had a slightly softer face than the other men. It took a while, as well as a few helpful whispers, for Carol to understand that Uncle was actually an adult woman in a turban and men’s clothing.
In the small village, Uncle functioned as an intermediary between men and women, and served as an honorary male who could convey messages and escort other women when they needed to travel, posing no threat because she herself was a woman.
Like Azita’s daughter Mehran, Uncle had been raised as a boy, Carol was told. It was the local mullah’s doing, apparently: Uncle had been born as the seventh daughter in a family of no sons. As the spiritual leader of the village, the mullah had taken pity on the parents. So he simply designated the infant girl to be her parents’ son only hours after she was born. He gave the child a boy’s name, and then promptly dispatched her parents to present what was now their son. The mullah’s official proclamation that a son had been born was gratefully accepted by the parents—it both heightened their status and released them from the inevitable scorn of their village.
But why hadn’t Uncle ultimately reverted to her birth sex with the onset of puberty? How did she escape being married off? And did she appear pleased with this arrangement? Carol shrugs at my questions; she really doesn’t know. Uncle did not have a husband or children of her own, but she certainly enjoyed a higher status than the women. She was “an in-between figure.”
That no one seems to have documented any historical or contemporary appearances of other “Uncles” or little girls dressing as boys is entirely understandable, in Carol’s view. Even if they should exist, little documentation has survived Kabul’s various wars and revolving-door regimes. Afghans are not particularly fond of being queried about their families either: Government officials and their institutions are at best regarded with suspicion.
The closest thing to an Afghan national archive is, in fact, overseen by a longtime American resident in Kabul whom I had also consulted: expatriate Nancy Duprée, the quick-witted American historian in her eighties, affectionately known to many as the “grandmother of Afghanistan.” Celebrated for publishing several travel guides to the most remote parts of Afghanistan in the 1970s, she documented Afghanistan’s culture and history together with her late husband, archaeologist Louis Duprée. That said, Nancy had neither seen nor heard of girls who dressed as boys and could think of no documentation on the topic through all her time in Afghanistan, dating back to the country’s last king, who was ousted in 1973. But she was “not the least bit surprised” by my story of one little girl being brought up as a boy. Similar to Carol’s take on the subject, it made a certain sense to Nancy: “Segregation calls for creativity,” she had told me.
Nancy also offered up an old photograph left in her care by the former Afghan royal court. In the yellowed black-and-white shot taken in the early years of the twentieth century, women dressed in men’s clothing stand guard in Habībullāh Khan’s harem. The harem could not be supervised by men because they posed a potential threat to the women’s chastity and the king’s bloodline. These women dressed as men solved the dilemma, indicating that such solutions may have been used historically in the highest echelons of Afghan society as well.
But what goes on in the secluded lives of Afghan families may never have been open to much investigation by foreigners, Carol suggests. Especially not during this latest deluge of outsiders who want to change Afghanistan. Just like a longtime local who mourns the loss of a neighborhood’s soul, Carol describes what Kabul has become in recent years: a cement-gray fortress, where regular Afghans have been driven out of their own city due to an inflated war economy and skyrocketing rents that few but foreigners paid by international organizations can afford. They have created a place where the fear and rumors that drive expatriate communication circulate in a closed loop.
“Most foreigners in Kabul live much like the most shielded Afghan women they are trying to liberate,” Carol sarcastically remarks.
AFGHANISTAN HAS A culture of thousand-year-old customs and codes passed down through generations. The history of its women has been sparsely recorded. The history of many countries is often a history of their wars, only occasionally spearheaded by the rare queen. Most sociological research in Afghanistan has been done by foreigners—almost exclusively men—who rarely had access to women, and learned only what Afghan husbands, brothers, and fathers told them.
In Afghanistan, there is no child protection agency to call, no reliable office that retains statistics, no established research university. No one can even say with much certainty how many people live in Afghanistan—figures ranging from twenty-three to twenty-nine million are thrown around by the large aid agencies.
The first and only census in Afghanistan was conducted in 1979, and later attempts to actually count Afghans have been both controversial and riddled with difficulty. Three decades of constant war and the movement of large refugee populations make accuracy impossible. The task is further complicated by the complex ethnic makeup of Afghans and the ongoing debate over the exact location of the border with Pakistan.
Those who try to be diplomatic often say that Afghanistan is made up of a collection of minorities, a visible legacy from the many conquerors who came in from different directions throughout history. The largest minority, roughly estimated to make up 40 percent of the population, is the mostly Sunni Islam Pashtun group, many of whom consider themselves to be ethnic Afghans. They dominate the south and the east. The second largest minority is the Tajiks, who are strongest in northern and central Afghanistan. The Hazara people are believed by many to be ancestors of Mongols and were ruthlessly persecuted during the Taliban era as followers of the Shia strain of Islam. Mostly up north, there are also Afghans of Uzbek, Turkoman, and Kyrgyz ethnicity. The country also has Kuchi nomads. While alliances have been formed and broken between groups of ethnicities, those within each group are often suspicious about other ethnicities. This is another reason that little voluntary information, for instance, about how many children are born in a certain area, or within one group, is offered, not least what sex they are.
In Carol’s view, the West may also be more obsessed with children’s gender roles than what Afghans are. Although Afghan society is strictly built on the separation of sexes, gender in childhood in a way matters less here than in the West. “Here,” Carol says, “people are driven by something much more basic—sexuality. Everything before puberty is just preparation for procreation. That is the main purpose of life here.”
And perhaps we need to set aside what we in the West think of as the order of things to even begin to understand Afghanistan. Where a long lineage of tribal organization is far more powerful than any form of government, where language is poetry and few can read or write but it is common for an illiterate person to have memorized the work of Pashto and Persian poets and to speak more than one language, parameters for established truths and knowledge are manifested in other ways than those outsiders easily recognize. In Carol’s words, in a nation of poets and storytellers, “what matters here are the shared fantasies.”
For that reason, to find anything out in Afghanistan, one must instead look to the informal structures. For example, those who know Afghan women most intimately are not foreigners, nor Afghan men, but other Afghan women—and the doctors, teachers, and midwives who witness firsthand the desperation for sons and what women will do in order to have them. And no secrets will be offered up immediately, Carol cautions. “You must listen to what they never say.”
For effect, the restaurant generator gives up for the third time and we are in the dark again. I inhale deeply. In the darkness, Carol’s powerful scent of mandarin and black currant becomes more pronounced and I finally ask about the cloud of cologne that we are both ensconced in. My question delights her.
“Ah, yes. There is this man in Peshawar … he deals in essences and oils. He told me they deliver to a French perfumer who makes something rather famous out of this one. That’s just talk, of course, but it is pleasant, no?”
I nod, and cannot bring myself to tell Carol that her purveyor is telling the truth. It’s a scent I know quite well. As the lights come on I smile. I, too, am a completely free woman, and just as Carol once decided to do, I have time to go deeper.
BUT COULD I even write about Azita’s family, to start? Over the course of a few months, she and I have several takes of the same conversation.
“You told me that you have four daughters,” I began my first such call to her. “You also told me about the family’s son …”
It was a chance just to take it all back and tell me never to return. I almost hoped she would take it. It was only later that I understood she had already made up her mind.
“I think we should tell the reality.”
“But this is your secret. Are you sure?”
“I think so. It could be interesting for people. This is the reality of Afghanistan.”
With that, I was invited back to her house. And into her family.