Shahed
SETAREH IS CALLING for me. “Come! Now! Hurry.”
As I half-sprint from the house across the courtyard from my guesthouse toward the outer gate, I see her blocking the guards with her body. Behind her stands another figure, much taller, all dressed in white.
The guards look at Setareh in amazement as she waves her arms around in a most unfeminine manner and explains to them: Yes, she knows about the no-gun rule in the compound and yes, she is aware that all male visitors must be body-searched. It’s just that this guest is actually a woman and for that reason, they should not touch her. Must she say it again?
Setareh holds out her arms to halt them from advancing on the guest in white. The guards look to me for confirmation; is it true what Setareh is saying? That this one is not really a man?
They nod toward Shahed.
“Yes, just let her go. She’s a woman. I guarantee it.”
Shahed is a friend of Nader’s, and to the uninitiated, she looks like just another broad-shouldered, athletic male. She has arrived early for our lunch.
The bearded guards do not move away, but turn toward each other. Finally one guard, the shorter of the two, turns around and disappears into the hut by the entrance. The other silently follows. Before the door closes some muted chuckles dribble out. It will be a story retold for weeks to come.
Setareh enters Shahed’s name in the visitors’ log on the small table to spare her more embarrassment, since she does not read or write. Shahed appears unmoved, giving me a brief nod by way of greeting. It’s our compromise between a handshake and the cheek kissing I have learned not to try again. I nod with my head down and touch the left side of my chest in return, in a respectful greeting between men. She brushes off my apologies about the guards; I should not worry. It happens. As a member of an elite paramilitary police force, she knows better than to get worked up over small disputes that could lead to bigger ones.
Shahed is usually undercover in more ways than one.
The ID issued by her unit spells out her full name: Shaheda. And her birth date. Her mother could not even remember under which government Shahed had arrived, usually the most reliable calendar to determine age here. After unsuccessfully trying to determine her age, Shahed decided she was twenty-eight when she enrolled and that she had been born in winter. Over thirty seemed too old; too close to death. She could be older; the deep lines around her mouth indicate this is perhaps the case. But she has not always eaten so well, either.
The Americans who arrived in Kabul to train her never asked too many probing questions on age or gender. They were really good people, actually. Shahed knew it when she saw their women. The female instructors looked a lot like she did. With their broad shoulders, weathered skin, and baseball hats, they were no-nonsense. Not a single female trainer came in wearing a head scarf or skirt. They never brought up any of the usual woman talk either, about marriage or romance. They just taught Shahed how to shoot properly and how to run faster and longer than she thought she was capable of.
She admired their sunglasses and their shiny tracksuits and appreciated how they would joke, too, sometimes using a few words of Dari for encouragement, patting her on the back when she did well at training. The men shied away from the back patting by female trainers, but it made Shahed feel good. One time, she got to borrow a pair of Oakley sunglasses from one of them, and another snapped a picture of her wearing them. It was the sharpest she had ever looked—even better than when her entire team got thick, oversize sweatshirts with the letters “DEA,” just like the ones some of the Americans wore. Shahed keeps hers stashed away at home, next to a box of photos where she’s posing with foreigners in uniform, at lunch, with arms around each other’s shoulders. Always grinning, always holding up fingers in a “V” for victory.
The Americans did not probe, either, on why she had chosen to be in the paramilitary unit; a job far more demanding than regular police duty. Female officers were usually placed as security guards at the ministries to search female visitors. There was a constant need for that type of service, but the work seemed far too uninteresting to Shahed, with little chance of advancement. But mostly, it was about the money.
When she first enrolled in the Afghan national police force, she was picked to train on the foreigner compound for an antinarcotics unit. It meant another $70 per month, in addition to her regular $250. Shahed was grateful; it seemed like a plum job with which to feed her extended family of twelve. It was maybe even enough for an after-prayer picnic some Friday, she imagined—a luxury her family had often talked about for a future where things would get better. Bread, chicken, and sodas for all of them in a garden. Years into her employment, she is still hoping for the picnic. It symbolizes the ultimate treat to her—something that the rich can afford. But the money doesn’t stretch that far yet.
The promotion, and a higher salary, could still happen, she imagines. If God allows her to live. Her way with the Glock, the Makarov, and the Kalashnikov has earned her a designation of number two sharpshooter in the unit. She knows how to use a knife, too. Out in the field, she keeps one tucked into her belt and another strapped to her leg, just above the desert boots, over camouflage pants. Her helmet and goggles cover her face almost entirely, and when they gear up as a unit, there is no way to distinguish her from the other, male, members. In height, Shahed falls somewhere in the middle when they all line up, and the contours of her muscles match those of the others.
When her eyes are hidden behind those goggles, people listen when she speaks, in her low, dark voice. They even move out of the way for her. Some raise their hands in the air to signal defeat. They almost never run. Most just kneel down when she asks, their hands behind their backs, accepting the plastic cuffs.
Shahed’s unit always arrives unannounced, often in the dark. A man cried at her feet once, pleading with her not to kill him. It made her uncomfortable. She asked him to stand up, so he could be a man again.
She knows how humiliation feels. She knows it from the days when her salary is spent and she cannot afford bus fare and must walk home by foot—a journey of an hour and a half alongside one of the mountains that surround Kabul, where mud houses are scattered on the steep slopes and threaten to slide down at every heavy rainfall. No electricity, no heat, and very little cell phone coverage exist up here, and every horizontal layer of earth delineates a division of class. The higher up, the more unattractive the land and the poorer its residents. It is where the first snow lands in the winter and where the most unrelenting heat of summer lingers longest.
Whoever settles that high above the city makes their own roads, finds their own water, and—if they can afford it—makes their own power from Soviet-era rechargeable batteries. It is just a few steps above the permanent refugee camps on the outskirts of Kabul, where a decade into one of the greatest foreign aid efforts of a generation, children still freeze to death in the winters.
FOR OUR LUNCH, we unpack three large bags of foil-wrapped kebabs and minced-meat-filled manto from the restaurant next door to the guesthouse after learning that Nader will join us much later. Shahed grows slightly laconic sitting on the shimmering-green chintz couch. Only after we move to the floor where we sit cross-legged and I am instructed by Setareh to for once shut up (“With Afghans, you either talk or you eat”) does a hint of softness appear around Shahed’s eyes. She eats quietly. Then she asks for a cigarette. Any kind will do, but she likes the American brands Kabul vendors call “Smoking Kills” as the cartons dictate. She smells it and then licks it sideways before lighting it, to make it burn slower, then inspects it after each drag to see how much remains to be had. Ashes form slowly at the end, which she flicks down into the thick rug from Pakistan.
Meeting at a restaurant would be more complicated for her than coming to my small rented room. The guard incident earlier could escalate to the point at which she may not have been able to keep her cool. She likes to carry a little something with her—usually a knife—for protection at all times. Men with guns are a given everywhere, but women with guns are a provocation and both a public and social danger. It doesn’t matter that she is a police officer—it only adds to the insult. For her to bear arms confuses the entire concept of honor, where it is women who require protecting.
But Shahed knows what one of the Swedish diplomats has already taught me: The best way to enter any Kabul establishment armed is to just pass through the metal detector. When the beep sounds, one acts appropriately surprised and apologetic, and immediately hands over a gun, knife, or cell phone. After a nod of appreciation and understanding from the guard, one then walks away with a second weapon stashed somewhere on the body. Very rarely is a visitor asked to walk back through the arch again or to submit to a manual pat-down. Even then, a small knife is easily tucked inside the pants in the small of one’s back, as the hands of security guards—male or female—usually do not go there.
By the time Nader arrives to join us for tea, Shahed has gone through the entire tutorial, using the small army knife in my wash bag. Her own knives—the one at her back, the other strapped to a hairy leg—she rarely removes.
Unlike Zahra and Shukria, who are both isolated in their respective environments as somewhat male in female bodies, Nader and Shahed have navigated much of their adulthood together in the past few years. It has helped them figure out who they are. Both devout Muslims, they each sought advice from a religious leader on how to relate to God, worrying that God was angry with them for living as men. But the religious man told them each in turn that God was on their side and that there was hardly anything unusual about it. To prove his point, he introduced them to each other.
Before that, Nader and Shahed had both wavered on faith. But now, together, they decided that at least in God’s eyes, they are not outcasts, but rather, his creation. Nader, who has just arrived to our gathering, agrees when Shahed explains what they have both come to believe: “It was God who decided our destiny. It’s his decision we are like this. He did not create us as men, but he gave us all the abilities and strengths of men.”
It makes sense to them both: God is practical and generous, and he wants someone to take care of the family. When there are no suitable men around, God may leave that responsibility to a woman. Nader, who has a degree in Islamic studies from Kabul University, concludes: “We can never make ourselves into complete men, or complete women. But we try the best we can to be good humans before God.”
THEIR FRIENDSHIP IS an unlikely one: Nader is upper class, and Shahed, although she holds a job, is closer to the bottom of society. Neither initially chose to be a man, but now it is all they know. As a child, Shahed volunteered to work with her father, who took day jobs painting people’s houses. The Taliban was in control, and it was simpler and certainly less life threatening if she accompanied her father as a son. But she rarely made any friends. For poor children there are not many opportunities to play outside or roam. For Shahed, being a boy was mostly about work. As she became a teenager, boys came to fear her and girls shied away from her. She has spent most of her adult life sharing a house with her mother and sisters. Her brothers abandoned the family long ago, unable to find work or being able to afford to marry anyone. “Poverty made me like this,” she says, running her hands down from her cheeks and over her body.
As a woman, as a man, her looks display an androgynous beauty that defies a traditional gender, with unlikely green eyes and the occasional smile. When she curls her upper lip slightly Shahed looks as though she can hear what I am thinking: “If my family had been rich, I would have been a woman,” she says. “With five or six children.” She pauses and looks at Nader, who immediately gets the joke. “Or maybe more like ten or twelve.”
They both laugh at the idea. Children are not for them. If womanhood culminates with becoming a mother, they are very removed from it. Nader, too, used to be asked when she would change back. She always gave the same one-word response: Never.
Those around her used to argue that biology would overtake her one day, when she married and had children. She would agree, just to make them stop talking, knowing it would not happen. Both Nader and Shahed believe what others, too, have expressed: Once you have gone through the early teenage years as a man there is no turning back. When you go against nature, nature will follow, adjusting the body to the mind. They are slightly unsure about what they are, and they do not define themselves as one definitive gender.
It was a survival strategy that with time grew into an identity. Shahed offers an idea of what she has become, echoing a long history of women before her: “They say men are braver, stronger, and more powerful than women. But some women are braver and stronger than men. I am a warrior.”
She measures herself against other warriors, in both endurance and strength, during all the weightlifting and the explosive runs they practice. When thoughts of fatigue take hold in her mind, she fails sooner. When she pushes them away, she can keep going for longer. The Americans who trained her said a soldier needs a good mind more than a strong body. Her mother will sometimes worry, telling her it is not good for a woman to use her body in the ways she does. But Shahed ignores her. Showing fatigue should be avoided. A warrior must keep her focus and, beyond that, it doesn’t matter if the warrior has the body of a woman. Shahed looks to me for confirmation: In the West, everyone knows this, right?
MAYBE. THE TRADITIONAL narrative of war and gender is present throughout Western societies as well, even though the idea that women possess something inherently good and peaceful has proven to be flawed many times. And despite a legacy of female warriors, women are still traditionally seen as those who should be protected. Just like the range for acceptable sexual behavior shrunk in the past centuries, the definition of how a woman should act and what she is capable of has also narrowed. Dead or wounded soldiers were always a potential political problem. Dead or wounded women—mothers and daughters—are even harder to explain and justify. In the past few hundred years, leaders of many societies have demanded women stay behind as men fight the battles. Excluding women from battle has even been brought forward as a measure of a country’s degree of civilization—presuming, of course, that war is at all part of a civilized society.
Men may also need to keep war to themselves for other reasons.
While females endure rites of passage on the way to womanhood, including menstruating and later maybe motherhood, manhood does not automatically occur in such a distinct way. When anthropologist David D. Gilmore researched concepts of masculinity for his 1990 study Manhood in the Making, he found the pressure on men to demonstrate their gender was far greater than that on women in most societies. Going to war to protect the honor of a country and its women was always a certain way for a man to define himself. To then include women in warfare is to threaten one of the most effective ways men prove themselves in society. By cultivating what we may think of as a “natural” aggression in sons from an early age, we are raising future warriors, suggests international relations professor Joshua Goldstein in his book War and Gender.
Still, women today make up 15 percent of troops on active duty in the U.S. military. They have been shot down, killed, and maimed in the hundreds in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite that, women have not been officially allowed in “combat positions.” A third of positions in the U.S. Marine Corps as well as the army have been closed to women; the Pentagon made a decision to revisit the ban on women only recently, in 2012. The idea of women serving in some specialized units is still expected to be met with great resistance, with the familiar arguments: Women in the field are not as physically or mentally strong as men. It could also be too distracting for men to serve in close proximity to women. The biggest hesitation around allowing women in battle, however, as openly expressed by several male American military officials, may be that it changes the honor narrative of war, in which men are supposed to act as the protectors of women and home. And that may be the most dangerous thing of all to the military—if they cannot explain why we must fight.
Presenting a convincing threat to loved ones is vital in selling any war, with the underlying idea that war is absolutely necessary to preserve peace. In Western society, and particularly in the American political story, women are still the bearers of honor for their family and their country, and the very reason to defend freedom; the most often cited reason for going to war in our time.
FREEDOM IS AN interesting concept. When I asked Afghans to describe to me the difference between men and women, over the years interesting responses came back. While Afghan men often begin to describe women as more sensitive, caring, and less physically capable than men, Afghan women tend to offer up only one difference, which had never entered my mind before.
Want to take a second and guess what that one difference may be?
Here is the answer: Regardless of who they are, whether they are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, Afghan women often describe the difference between men and women in just one word: freedom.
As in: Men have it, women do not.
Shahed says the same thing, when I ask her. “When no one is the boss of your life,” is how she goes on to define it.
“So in the West, there is less difference between men and women?”
Shahed and Nader look at each other again and then back at me. They don’t know. Perhaps I am supposed to tell them? But then Nader changes her mind, telling me not to bother. She doesn’t want to hear it. “We are nothing. We would be nothing in the West, too.”
Shahed is more hopeful, inspired by snippets of information from her American trainers: “I have heard that people don’t care what you are or how you look in the West.”
Not exactly true. But our definition of “freedom” may be different, and it changes with each generation. The current war in Afghanistan, for instance, is named “Operation Enduring Freedom” to indicate something worth fighting a thirteen-year war over. But freedom as we know it today is yet another evolutionary luxury, American author Robin Morgan says, when I later tell her about Shahed and Nader. “[Birth] sex is a reality; gender and freedom are ideas.”
And it’s all in how we choose to define those ideas.
The Afghan women I have met, sometimes with little education but a lifetime of experience of being counted as less than a full human being, have a distinct view of what exactly freedom is. To them, freedom would be to avoid an unwanted marriage and to be able to leave the house. It would be to have some control over one’s own body and to have a choice of when and how to become pregnant. Or to study and have a profession. That’s how they would define freedom.
As we arrive at Nader’s house on another day, three of her sisters are visiting. Under each of their burkas are Indian-style saris with gold embroidery. A red, a yellow, and a purple sister gather on the floor around us, with their eleven children scattering between the kitchen and the reception room. The toddlers cannot make more than a determined crawl back and forth across the floor where we sit barefoot, our sandals piled up in a corner by the door.
“I would not be able to stand it,” Nader says, with the abundance of nephews and nieces around her. “I am lucky not to have to be pregnant all the time and to have one after the other. If I were a woman here, that would be my entire life.”
Nader’s sisters have carefully made-up faces framed by long curly black hair. One sister leans forward as she attempts to explain Nader to me: “Do you understand that it is the wish of every Afghan woman to have been born a man? To be free?”
The other two agree. If they had had their choice, they would have been born as men. Nader is living that fantasy, and that is why other women turn on her sometimes. She does not play by the rules to which they are all subjected. “Nader wants to be her own government,” one of the sisters explains. “Not like us, with our husbands as the government always.”
To make me understand why some bacha posh continue to live as men in Afghanistan when they reach adulthood, another sister asks a rhetorical question that is excruciatingly simple to answer: “If you could walk out the door right now as a man or stay in here forever as a woman, which would you choose?”
She is right. Who would not walk out the door in disguise—if the alternative was to live as a prisoner or slave? Who would really care about long hair or short, pants or skirt, feminine or masculine, if renouncing one’s gender gave one access to the world? So much for the mysteries of gender, or the right to a specific one, with this realization. A great many people in this world would be willing to throw out their gender in a second if it could be traded for freedom.
The real story of Nader, Shahed, and other women who live as men in Afghanistan is not so much about how they break gender norms or what they have become by doing that. Rather, it is about this: Between gender and freedom, freedom is the bigger and more important idea. In Afghanistan as well as globally. Defining one’s gender becomes a concern only after freedom is achieved. Then a person can begin to fill the word with new meaning.
FREEDOM IS ALSO what the sisters want to question me on.
What does a Western woman do with all that supposed freedom they hear about? After they whisper for a bit, one of them turns to me: “You can do anything you want, and you come to Afghanistan?”
“Is it the dust?” she jokes. “Or the war? We always have war.”
It’s more of a statement than a question, and the other sisters are with her; it is very strange for a woman to come to Afghanistan, presuming she could choose to be anywhere else in the world. It is also very strange of my father to allow it, they believe.
Not sure where to begin, I say nothing.
“This is what you do with your life,” the sister continues, incredulously, at my silence. “Don’t you want a family? To have children?”
She looks a little concerned.
“You should not wait too long to get married. You will be too old to have children!”
Yes. I may be too old already, I say.
Setareh stares at the floor, mortified. All three sisters look around, before one speaks again, with the question they want an answer to.
“Then what is the purpose of your life as a woman? What is the meaning?”
“You might as well have been born a man,” another fills in. “What is there now to make you a woman?”
“You have your freedom,” the first sister says again. “You can walk out when you want. But we also feel sad for you.”
She glances at Nader.
“We know our sister is sad sometimes, too. It is the sad issue of being a man.”
Nader looks embarrassed, and perhaps a little irritated. A toddler with three piercings in one ear and a polka-dot jumpsuit has wobbled up to her and maneuvered herself into her lap.
Nader’s face changes, and she adjusts her position on the floor to hold her niece with both hands. She leans her head down to inhale the scent of the girl’s wispy black hair. She closes her eyes for a moment.
“I have told them to save one for me,” she says to me, tilting her head at the sisters. “They have so many. We can pretend one of them is mine.”
Her sisters nod. They can all agree on that.
WHEN WE MANEUVER through Kabul’s outer neighborhoods on our way home with Nader at the wheel—she insists she is a better and safer driver than any man we might employ for the task—she suddenly has an announcement: “I will take you to my bachas.”
I press Setareh’s hand so she will just say yes and not inquire further. Of course we want to meet Nader’s boys.
Setareh catches Nader’s phone, tossed from the front seat. We stick our heads together to see what she wants to show us. There, in the middle of a tiny cell phone shot, is Nader, her arms around the shoulders of two teenagers. Both are dressed in suits, with slicked-back gamine hair. They have young, glowing faces with soft features and those confident, defiant eyes. They are not trying to be cute, nor do they look down. They are all grinning, exposing their teeth.
Nader turns around to see our reactions. I know better than to ask her to look at the road when she’s driving.
She tells us they are her protégés. Nader has no children, but she has already begun to build her legacy. They are her bachas, in training to become the next generation of refusers.