By Munera Yosufzada
My neighbor, Parasto, visited us yesterday. She told me about how after her husband’s death, her father-in-law had taken her daughter from her.
“I am still getting used to not being with my child,” she said. “Every night, I pray for her happiness and that she will forget me and have a good life, but every time I hear a child crying, I imagine her.”
She spoke and I listened as I contemplated the cruelty of a law that makes it illegal for a mother to be with her daughter. Parasto is not the only Afghan woman to have met this fate. In Afghanistan fathers have automatic child custody. If a father is unavailable, his father or brothers have custody over the child before the child’s mother.
For Parasto
Judge, smack your gavel of justice
Softly
On the desk that has never seen justice.
Remember me.
You search my equality
From behind your dusty glasses
And in laws and arguments
That set me ablaze.
Open your eyes, justice.
Your honor, before you separate my daughter from me,
Give me a sentence
That will erase motherly love from my heart,
And the colors of her mother
From my daughter’s drawing pad.
Read this piece in Persian here.