What do Afghan women want?” It’s a question so many now ask, and so many now feel they can answer.
“Who speaks for Afghan women?”
Not a week goes by—sometimes not a day—without a Zoom call, a conference, a statement from somewhere by someone about the rights of Afghan women and girls that must be promoted, protected. And all these words have multiplied since the Taliban swept back into power in August 2021, imposing new rules and restrictions on the lives of women and girls.
Answers to these questions are arguments, analyses, a focus for activists. They’re rallying cries on battlefields: nasty battles online, and the even uglier war on the ground in Afghanistan.
The Taliban accuse educated Afghan women of being a westernized elite, distant from the lives of the vast majority of the country’s women. Others draw stark, stubborn lines between urban and rural experiences in one of the poorest countries in the world. Metropolitan women activists have responded, stressing their umbilical ties to their sisters in the provinces.
Now this remarkable collection of stories offers us different kinds of words. They give us narratives that can start to provide more nuanced answers to these urgent questions. They do so because, like all great writing in this genre, they take us into the small-but-ever-so-significant minutiae of daily life. They do so because they are by Afghan women writing in the language in which they feel most at home—in Afghanistan’s two principal languages, Dari and Pashto—impressively and painstakingly translated into English by Afghan women, and men, some of whom are writers themselves.
This book is more than just a literary project. It’s a gift from the remarkable initiative of Untold: bringing Afghan women writers together, and allowing English-language readers to read their stories through translations that bring their words to life in another language. For most of these writers, even finding the space and peace of mind to write is a daily struggle. Literature is resilience, a release.
Inside the small, sometimes suffocating worlds they create, there are much bigger stories and disturbing issues—misogyny, patriarchy, terrible domestic abuse, horrifying oppression in both private and public spaces.
But this is first and foremost about storytelling, the art and joy of writing. It’s what draws us in. We smell onions frying in kitchens. We hear the jingle of an ice cream cart. We hold a purple handbag. We sit on the “soft chocolate-covered seats” of a luxury car which could only be afforded by someone else. These are details we may easily recognize, in our own lives. We may also have eyed a pair of boots that seemed to call our name in a shop. We convince ourselves they fit. Of course they don’t. What matters is that they make us feel so good.
But there is much we don’t recognize and don’t want to. These are the stories that cause us to recoil, in shock, in sadness. We shift our gaze from the page. I did, more than once.
A wedding is soaked in blood. Ordinary journeys between home and work are dangerous dances with fate. These are fictional accounts, not news reports. But it’s literature drawn from real life, real loss. For much of their lives, many Afghans have left home, hugging tight those near and dear, not knowing if they will return in the evening.
We meet Hamed, a teacher, on his way to work on the same route he has taken for eighteen years. The margin between life and death is breathtakingly tiny, counted in minutes. And there’s a startling contrast between the reassuring rituals of hair and makeup in the life of Sanga, a state television presenter, and the rockets falling all around her. She just keeps reading the news.
These are chronicles about the day-to-day for Afghan women—and men, too. Cruel war doesn’t discriminate by gender. Above all, these untold stories tell us about a society where men, and a web of societal rules and expectations, control so many aspects of so many women’s lives, no matter their standing in society. And remember—they were written even before the Taliban returned to power. Afghan women will tell you: their fight didn’t begin, and won’t end, with the ultra-conservative Taliban fixing the limits of their lives in a deeply conservative society. But now, for many, it is much worse. The end of aerial bombing and ground raids by US-led NATO forces and Taliban attacks brought relief, especially in rural areas. But the battles at home go on.
We read how so much of life is lived inside—inside rooms; inside heads and hearts. In this interiority, characters reveal fantasies and fears, their dread and dreams. Women look into mirrors; they look inside themselves. They yearn for silence and space. They venture, like Zahra, “onto the balcony of her imagination, a queen.” But even the mind isn’t step-son-proof: “Crazy woman,” her step-son taunts her, laughing, “come back to the real world.”
Everyday places are crime scenes; kitchens can provide refuge but also pose risks. Knives and boiling oil are weaponized. Everyday objects possess outsized importance. Zahra dreams of buying a ruby red ring—to feel the “weight of the ring on her finger,” to make the eyes of her husband’s first wife “burn with envy.”
There are turns of phrase to break your heart: “head hanging down as if she has been deprived of the right to raise it.”
So many sentences will give you pause. So much so, I started searching—hoping—for happy endings, to feel good about Afghan women, about all women, about ourselves. They are there, too, even in the worst of times. You’ll read of two girls’ friendship, forged in the heady days of high school. This fictional account was inspired by the all-too-real and savage attack on the Sayed al-Shuhada high school in west Kabul in May 2021. Suicide bombers struck at a time and place designed to kill as many girls as possible from the minority Hazara community. I visited the school soon after the attack, braced to see and feel palpable sadness and aching loss. It was there. But so too was impressive courage and strength among its young female students, a generation of women ready to fight for their right to be educated, to have a future. It was unforgettable. So too, in this book, is the young girls’ friendship, and an indomitable “spirit in the face of our struggles.”
This is how one writer so wonderfully describes some of the people you’ll meet in these pages: “a people full of joy and sadness and wishes and God.”
To an extent, this book sets to rest the argument over “Afghan women.” Of course there is no absolute uniformity; there are as many different lives as there are women. But in this collection, there are pressures and problems that transcend class, ethnicity, and social standing.
The way a society treats women is often a measure of that society. There is possibly no greater example of this than Afghanistan. Never have I worked in a country where the situation of women both dazzles and depresses. The heights of their achievements are awesome, the lows in their lives utterly shocking. Afghan women address the UN Security Council and top tables the world over in fluent English, their second or third language. But I’ve also met ambitious young women chained to their beds by their fathers for refusing to marry a man of his choice, or sent to prison for trying to escape abusive husbands—some even take refuge there.
For millions of Afghan women, it is a struggle just to get through the day.
This book reminds us that everyone has a story. Stories matter; so too the storytellers. Afghan women writers, informed and inspired by their own personal experiences, are best placed to bring us these powerful insights into the lives of Afghans and, most of all, the lives of women. Women’s lives, in their own words—they matter.
Lyse Doucet, BBC chief international correspondent