Artwork by Roya Saberzada
Mahbooba Mufid Panah
It was 1998, during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, when I learned I had become a woman. I learned that I had to wear a burqa like my mother and older sister and I that was not allowed to leave the home without a male chaperon. I was told that I am considered worth half of what men are worth of and I am a “half-brained” object that does not have the right to go to school.
I remember the day my brother, Jamil, turned ten and learned how to ride my older brother’s Russian bicycle. My older brother had ran away from the Taliban to hide in the mountains of Panjshir and my younger brother. My father had been imprisoned in Mazar-e-Sharif by the Taliban a few weeks ago. Jalil was now the man of the house. He was short and had to ride the bicycle riding but as the man of the house, he had bigger responsibilities and concerns than playing kites.
Jamil had to speak to community elders to find a way to free our father from prison. He was hoping he would make a connection with someone powerful who would take on our plight and had gathered signatures and letters testifying to our father’s innocence. Either by some miracle or by the same arbitrary reasons for which he was arrests, our father was finally freed one day. We rejoiced when he returned.
—
One fall afternoon we were sitting in our small mud room. Father was lying down and as usual reading a book. I stared at him as his green tea cooled patiently waiting for his attention. It had been waiting three months since his return. I was thinking of my childhood; sitting on his stretched-out legs pretending to be horseback riding as he made loud noises. He would move his legs and down. I would hold his legs tight and scream equally terrified and excited. My day-dreams were interrupted when I saw a corner of his leg. It was bruised. Black and blue.
“Dad, what happened to your leg?” I asked in despair.
“Nothing.”
“What happened to your leg?”
He sat up straight, crossed his legs and looked at me.
“Nothing, child. Uncle Talib hit me a little.”
“How much did he beat you?”
“A few times during the nights in prison.”
“Did it hurt a lot?” I asked as my lips shook.
“It used to, but eventually it got numb. Now, it is getting better.”
“What did you do when he hit you?”
“I said ‘Ya Allah!’ hoping they would hit me less.”
—
Some time went by. With my father working we could afford to move out of our little mud house to a bigger house. The landlord, who was paralyzed in half of his body, had moved to Iran. Father was selected a Mullah (religious cleric) at a local mosque. He taught young men about Islamic lessons in the mosque. Every day, I stood by the wooden door waiting for him to come home. When I saw his tall shadow under moonlight, I would yell, “Let’s eat. Dad is here.”
I spent days reading books and helping with house chores. Fortunately, we had no shortage of books. We had hid hundreds of books in our basements. The Taliban used to burn books that were not exclusively Islamic and were against girls reading. My favorite pastime was listening to Radio BBC on Fridays at 3:00pm. Harun and Amina Yousfi, the hosts based in the United Kingdom, were my only link to the world outside the house and Afghanistan. I still remember my joy at hearing them speak and listening to the music they broadcast.
—
“Your nose is flat. Flat-nosed.”
I still remember the voices telling an 8-year-old me that I was inferior because of how I look, how people of my race look like. They were yelling at me. Wearing my blue burqa, I was going to the bazaar with younger brother, seen as my chaperon by the Taliban. The neighborhood’s children followed us. “Flat-nosed.”
I felt a rock swelling up in my throat about to explode. I was filled with the urge to seek revenge, but only the privileged can realistically have revenge or justice. The marginalized, those of who burned with the “wrong” facial feature in the “wrong” race, get the broken pieces of the desire to feel human.
Jamil followed me as I ran towards home. His face was drenched in tears. I saw him hold back his tears. He was not blinking out of the fear of his tear flowing down. He was becoming a man. Men don’t cry, he was told. Under my mobile prison of an imposed burqa, my face was wet with tears. There is no shame in women crying. I am an Afghan women. We always cry. We are expected to cry in silence. As my tears guided me home, I thought about home this was no longer a home. Our noses are not tall enough, Aryan enough, to give us the right to stay in this house. I wanted to leave. The time had come.
When my father came home that day, I asked him to take us to Iran.
“Why?” he asked.
“This place is no longer ours,” I said.
I told him what happened. He listened patiently.
“You think Iran is better? It is worse there. They will call us “Afghani” and humiliate us.”
“That is all right. At least we will have the chance to go to schools and have basic services, security, water, gas… There is less pain to be humiliated in a different country than our own neighborhoods. This is our home but the right to be human is taken from us. I am constantly expecting bad news. It is a miracle we are still alive.”
After hours of arguments and pleads, my father finally agreed to leave.
Elated, I stood up. Screamed. Cried.
“We are leaving. We are leaving.”
The next few days went by fast. We sold everything we had at the second-hand store. I was no longer walking under the blue burqa. I was flying. With my little chaperon, every day I took things to the market. I bargained. I sold. I came home and counted my money. I piled the nearly-worthless Taliban currency on top of each other and at the end of the week, my father took them and exchanged them for a few hundred dollars.
One morning, we woke up early and carried our few bags with us as we left our home searching for human dignity.
—
Read this piece in Persian here.