An intimate view of Afghan women

25 years ago a green-eyed Afghan girl cast a spell on the world from the cover of National Geographic. The young refugee was fleeing the war between the Soviets, who had invaded her country, and the American-backed mujahideen, and she became an icon of the tragedy in Afghanistan. Today the symbol of the country is once again a young woman, Bibi Aisha, whose nose and ears were sliced ​​off by her husband as punishment for escaping from him and his family. Aisha was fleeing from beatings and other abuse.

What leads husbands, fathers, brothers-in-law and even mothers-in-law to mistreat the women in her family? Is this violence the consequence of throwing a traditional society into the 21st century, after years of isolation and wars? Which members of this perpetrate it? There are notable differences between the Hazaras, the Tadzhiks, the Uzbeks and the Pashtuns, the largest and most conservative group, which has dominated the political sphere since 1880.

The Pashtuns of Afghanistan

In the Pashtun crescent, an area stretching from Farah province in the west to Kunar in the northeast, life was governed (and in many ways still is) by the so-called Pashtunwali, the Pashtun code of conduct. It is based on virile honor, which in turn is weighted according to three belongings: zar (gold), zamin (land) and zan (women). The foundations of the honorable life are hospitality (melmastia), refuge or asylum (nanawati), and justice or revenge (badal). The more hospitable a Pashtun is, the more honor is accorded to him. If a stranger or an enemy knocks on his door asking for shelter, the Pashtun's honor depends on his taking him in. If anyone does harm to a man's lands, women, or gold, on his honor he will have to exact revenge. A man without honor is a man without a shadow, without heritage, without dignity.

By contrast, Pashtun women offering hospitality or exacting revenge are generally frowned upon. They rarely act as agent subjects: they are patient subjects with whom to trade or objects to dispute… Until they can't take it anymore.

At a Kabul shelter for women who have fled domestic violence, I was told about a young woman from one of the wealthiest Pashtun families in a province bordering Pakistan. She fell in love with a boy from a tribe that she shouldn't have. The girl's father murdered the boy and his four brothers, and discovering that her own mother had helped her granddaughter escape her father's wrath, he also killed her. She is now offering a $100,000 reward for her daughter's body.

It is an extreme case perpetrated by an extreme man, but many Pashtuns believe their manhood and way of life are under attack (by a foreign army, alien religious leaders, foreign television, international human rights groups) and so cling to the traditions that have for so long defined the identity of the Pashtun man.

In a Kabul bookstore one day I found a collection of landays ("briefs"): the two-line poems that Pashtuns recite to one another at the village well or at wedding banquets. The book, titled Suicide and Song, is a compilation by Sayd Bahodín Majruh, a famous Afghan poet and writer assassinated in his Pakistani exile in 1988. He began by collecting female landays in the Kunar Valley, where he was a native. This humanist saw a treasure in those expressions born from the heart, defying convention and mocking male honor in more ways than one. From the time he is born until she dies, the fate of the Pashtun woman is one of shame and sadness. She is instilled in him that she does not deserve to be loved. For this reason, wrote Majruh, the landays are a lament at the impossibility of loving and a revelation of the suffering of the unmarried woman.

Often the husband is a child or an old man with whom the woman marries forced by tribal ties:

Aren't you ashamed, with your white beard?

You caress my hair, and I laugh to myself.

Harassingly, a woman spears a man's virility:

Today, during the battle, my lover has turned his back on the enemy.

I feel humiliated for having kissed him last night.

She or she expresses her frustrated desire for her:

Come, my beloved, quickly, come to me!

The "little horrible" dozes, and you can

hold me.

The "little horrible" is the man with whom the woman has been forced to marry, a kind of panfilo behind whose back she will find true love. According to Majruh, Pashtun women, despite their submissiveness, have always longed deeply for rebellion and the pleasures of earthly life. He titled his book Suicide and singing because with one act and another they give voice to her ordeal. In Majruh's time there were two forms of suicide, poison and drowning. Today they are poisoned and self-immolated like a bonze.

The Afghan parliament has just prepared a bill for the eradication of violence against women, who are beginning to reject archaic cultural practices and assert themselves in public and in private. In Kabul, I visited the home of Sahera Sharif, a Pashtun from Khost and the first woman to serve in the Afghan parliament. «Who would have thought that a woman could paper the walls of Jost with photos and electoral posters. If the men did not even allow us to work on Jost! », She told me.

When she was a child, Sharif confronted her father, a conservative mullah, by locking herself in a closet until he allowed her to go to school. She lived through the civil war between rival mujahideen groups, which devastated Kabul before the Taliban conquest in 1996. She witnessed inconceivable cruelties and many deaths. "Much of the violence and cruelty she sees today," she Sharif said, "is because people have gone mad with so many wars."

After the fall of the Taliban in December 2001, Sharif opened a radio station to educate women on hygiene and basic health. In a more radical move, she volunteered to teach at Khost University (an unheard of occurrence). She took off her burqa (something also unusual) and stood before the students (men) as a psychology teacher. They blushed. And so she began to re-educate them.

As we talked, I understood the extent to which Sahera Sharif has inspired Ella Shkola, a 15-year-old daughter of Islamic history and law. She wants to be a lawyer to help women defend themselves from violence and injustice. Meanwhile, she sifts through Iranian books for children's stories "like the ones you have," she explained. They practically don't exist here, so I'm translating them into Pashto, and I'm also writing a novel."

In various corners of the country (in Khost and Kandahar, in Herat and Kabul) I have come across girls like Shkola. They don't compose the old landays but they write poems and novels, and shoot documentaries and movies. Those are the modern female narratives of life in Afghanistan.