A child early to walking and talking and, it could be said, early to finding my writer’s voice, in that I wrote my first short story collection when I was five or six – see On the Shelf podcast – my need to express myself creatively has continued throughout my life, returning to my first love, prose fiction, in middle-age two decades ago. Feedback on earlier work referenced the glory of [my] voice and my innate understanding of the form, encouraging me to believe a late career as a published writer was possible; imagining a few faithful fans buying my collections, my voice occasionally heard at readings, a festival now and then. I mean, a girl, an older woman, can still dream, can’t she? Still hope. For where would we be without hope. Without believing things can get better. Without believing in ourselves. And so, here in the confines of this room, I cling to the literary voice I’ve nurtured for twentythree years. A voice not heard as widely as I’d hoped, but still my voice. Because to be who I truly am, this is what I must do.
But what must it feel like to be stripped of everything that makes you the woman you are? To be shrouded in a tent of material, your shrunken world seen through the mesh of your prison ‘window’; to be denied education; to be a girlchild with hopes of being a doctor, a scientist, a politician, or a writer, and have those hopes turned to hopeless fantasies. What must it be like to have your life reduced to living under virtual house arrest, to functioning only as a mother, a bearer of children, a wife in domestic servitude to male masters, and your armed prison warders. What must it be like to no longer walk in a public park; to never walk alone, nor even to run; to never feel the wind in your hair; to travel only if you have a male relative at your side. And all that, only part of a longer Forbidden list, would be bad enough, but now, having taken almost every freedom from them, the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, have also forbidden women to look at men not related to them by blood or marriage. Added to which, having deemed a woman’s voice intimate and therefore corrupting, singing, reciting or reading aloud in a public place is now a crime – for women only, of course. Even inside the home, if the voice can heard by those outside it, the woman can be committing a moral violation.
How strong these women must be to have so many armed to the teeth, small-minded men so afraid of them. How strong many of those women were, having gained so much in two decades, before the US, the UK following suit, abandoned them to what they knew to be a brutal, bullshitting, misogynistic, violent regime. Having gained so much in the previous two decades, only to lose it all in 1000 days.
And should not this have been front page news in The Guardian, rather than a short column in the World section towards the back.
A few days before the Supreme Leader’s latest edict, I read a book review in The Observer concerning 21 women in a creative writing group (back in the glory days before the Taliban were allowed to walk into Kabul), who, knowing the enemy was at the gates, were forced to destroy evidence of their creativity, burning precious books, qualifications of their years of study, rinsing ink from journal pages, their only remaining lifeline to the outside world: a WhatsApp group chat set up by a UK-based development programme for marginalised writers. And in the following months some 200,000 words, downloaded by Untold employees, the women deleting them from their devices, were collected; 70,000 of which, translated into English from Dari and Pashto, form the collective diary: My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group, charting their ever-diminishing lives over that first year.
And, now, three painful years later, their spoken voices are being silenced too, their oppressors unchallenged. Where are the protesting voices, of we who can speak for them? Voices of feminists, of women, of men? Of homosexuals and transgender folks who know what it is to be persecuted. Of politicians and human rights groups who can get their voices heard. Time to shout out!
It’s meaningless to hope, one of the women wrote, or to wish, forbidden in fact.
Time to shout louder! To give the women of Afghanistan the smallest scrap of hope.
Following on from the cartoon in We are not afraid: Blog 6, this image came to mind.
My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group
(published on the anniversary of the fall of Kabul by Coronet)
www.waterstones.com
Untold Narratives: work with writers marginalised by community or conflict to develop and
amplify their work.
www.untold-narratives.org
Also on UN Women, a United Nations site dedicated to gender equality and empowerment of
women, Women in Afghanistan: From almost everywhere to almost nowhere, by Mona
Chalabi August 15, 2023.
www.unwomen.org