A fight to keep hope alive: How are Afghan women resisting?
By Zahra Nader
On February 11, I joined a poetry night event that was organized by a group of women in Afghanistan. I was invited to their Google Meet gathering by an organizer who also added me to their WhatsApp group. The poetry gathering was planned to start at 9 p.m. local time.
“Due to the electricity outage and slow internet connection, we will start at 10 p.m. We know most of you don’t have electricity,” an organizer posted to the WhatsApp group, notifying its 368 participants – all women, most living in Afghanistan – of the delay.
At 10 p.m. in Afghanistan, I joined the online meeting. That night, there were around 13 participants, including two organizers, Hijrat and Tahera. Though they’d never met in person, they’d run their online book club on WhatsApp for three years.
Hijrat, who lives in northern Afghanistan, created the WhatsApp book club to promote a culture of reading among youth during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was a way to keep them motivated when all education centres were in lockdown,” 23-year-old Hijrat, a former college instructor, said in a phone interview. She posted the idea of forming an online book club on her Facebook page and soon 100 participants signed up, including Tahera, the other organizer of that poetry night in February. After the Taliban took over and threw women to further isolation by forbidding them the right to work and education, the women decided to focus on keeping hope alive among its members, who now number 370.
Moving online is one way for women in Afghanistan to avoid increasingly dangerous confrontations with the Taliban. It’s also a way to organize, encourage each other, and to resist the regime’s draconian edicts. Most activists have moved their organizations online, including many of the women protesters with whom I have spoken over the past 19 months. Still, even the internet isn’t completely safe. Some have been forced to shut down their social media accounts after noticing their online presence were being surveilled or their accounts were hacked.
Yet, they found new ways to resist. A month after the Taliban took over, two sisters took to the internet to raise their voice: they wrote and performed ballads of hope and despair that went viral on social media. They even donned burqas to keep their identities anonymous. “This is our secret fight,” one of the sisters told me. “Even from under the burqa, we have the courage and power to raise our voice,” said the other sister.
So far, Hijrat and Tahera have managed to keep their online community safe. In their WhatsApp group, they conduct a weekly book club. The suggestions for which book to read comes from anyone in the group. Then, the organizers select a shortlist of four titles. Members decide on the final selection by voting in an online poll. Last week, Elif Shafak’s “Three Daughters of Eve” was selected, garnering 46 out of 66 votes.
While the WhatsApp group is usually closed for chat except by the administrators, they open the chat feature each Thursday to allow everyone to share their thoughts and critique of that week’s book. The group is where they also share their written words, express their feelings about each other’s view, and, of course, their poetry, as well as the monthly poetry night.
“Our online poetry night is a space where women from different parts of Afghanistan come together. We recite poems and share a laugh with each other to overcome this darkness,” explains Hijrat.
On that Saturday in February, the poetry night started with a general “check-in” chatter on how everyone was doing. One thing was clear: everyone was happy to be able to overcome electricity outages and slow internet connections to join the meeting.
They took turns reciting their favourite pieces of poetry, including some original works by members of the group. Also on the list were pieces by Simin Behbahani, Iran’s most famous female poet, and Mehdi Akhavan-Salis. The themes of the work had overwhelming echoes of their own lives: experiences of injustice, calls for resistance, and the desire to fight back.
One participant, who didn’t give her province, read a freshly written poem by her uncle:
“In the city of rage and bloodshed, life goes on! We are not leaving because our life is here! Even though we shut the door in its face, it still stands on the other side of the door!”
“I have never seen you, but I love your voice,” one of the participants utters after the reader completes her turn. In addition to the poetry, they were there to support each other. The message they exchanged after each citation seems to be the thread that helped sustain them.
“Considering the situation, this is the only thing we can do now. We are a group of women who have shared aspirations for literature and poetry, so we come together and read,” said Tahera, the organizer who lives in Kabul. “This is our way to keep ourselves from desperation.”
