By Zahra Nader
After Kabul fell to the Taliban, the potted flowers in my home dried up, just like my dreams to return to my homeland, teach at Kabul University, to write women’s history! I write these sentences with a lump in my throat. I want to tell someone about the strange pain that has been squeezing my chest for the past 19 months and does not allow me to live like the people around me. I am in a place where there is no sound of guns and I do not wake up in the morning to explosions, but it is as if there is a commotion in me, an uproar full of anger and ache!
When the Taliban cast their ominous shadow over Afghanistan for the first time, I was a little girl in the far reaches of Bamyan: somewhere between the river, the mountain, and the plains of potatoes and golden wheat fields. There was no electricity. We had to fetch water from the spring. We did not know what TV was. But life continued. I and the girls of the village made dolls from the leftover pieces of my mother’s sewing and tree twigs and invited each other to party under the starry sky at night.
I don’t know what happened that suddenly a strange hunger and famine engulfed our village and one night my father said, “The Taliban have come.”
After that, there was only talk of leaving. No one wanted to stay. We left our village on a dark night and after two days of walking, we boarded a Pakistani lorry. Inside that truck, we sat like goods on top of each other as we fled from the Taliban. I don’t know how many of us were there, but I do know that I sat on my mother’s lap the whole way. The truck took us first to Pakistan and then we went to Iran.
In the first days of our arrival in Iran, my mother, who had never had the opportunity to go to school, was determined to create a different destiny for her daughters. She took my hands from one school to another so that maybe a principal or a teacher will have mercy and let an Afghan immigrant girl learn to read and write. The answers were negative, one after another. My mother slowly wiped her tears with the corner of her chador. I didn’t know anything about studying and going to school, but I knew that whatever studying was, it was valuable to my mother. Maybe it was my mother’s tears that planted the love of learning in me. Achieving that in Iran was like passing through Rostam’s seven labours. To me, an Afghan immigrant, living in Iran was not just the pain of being deprived of education. In its streets, I was a “dirty Afghani.” I was a child who found her identity in the line of the bakery and in the dusty streets of Abbas Abad in the poor outskirts of Tehran, amidst cursing and insults. I was a child whose only desire was to go to school and return to her homeland.
The Monday when we left for Afghanistan was the best day of my life in Iran. To celebrate that day, I carpeted our street with rose flowers from our garden. I wanted everyone to know that we were returning to our homeland!
We built a house in the Regreshan area in western Kabul, which was then empty plain. The fields were painted with white plaster and few houses were going up. There was no electricity. The drinking water was not clean. But we had school. My sister and I used to walk for almost an hour to get there.
Arif Shahid school in Dasht-e-Barchi was in a rental building made of four clay walls, in which they pitched a tent for the school. Sometimes, the dust of Kabul created a break for our class and we were worried that the wind would blow away our class. One summer day, while teacher Arif Khan was teaching us math, a snake fell from the wall where the blackboard was hanging. We all started screaming, ““Snake! Snake!”
I lived those days with love and believed with all my heart in building a better future. That is, all my classmates, all my friends, believed in the future, that we would shape the future with our own hands. But we were delusional and didn’t know that our destiny was not in our hands. We were pieces of a chess game and the players gathered around the table were looking out for their own interests, removing us from the board when it suited their purposes.
I still carry a grudge. Reminiscing takes me back to when everything was possible. We just had to try, work, and toil. Those days, every girl who had the opportunity to study had a wish in her head – a wish to flourish! Some wanted to become teachers or doctors, while others wanted to become the president. I secretly wanted to be a writer; I wanted to write for change, for justice. I wanted to draw a different future with my pen, a future in which we had equal rights, despite all our differences, and above all, a future in which we were human beings and lived as human beings.
With this belief, I went to university, became a journalist, and wrote about the realities of life, whether the problems of crowded buses in Dasht-e-barchi or the unfulfilled promise to bring electricity to Kabul by Ismail Khan, who was then the minister of energy and water. Once I wrote my opinion about how to change the function of Kabul Municipality and criticized Hamid Karzai for holding a Loya Jirga. I was naive and thought that, by writing, it would be possible to change the minds of Afghan politicians, hold them accountable and keep them interested in building the country.
I was wrong. I was writing to change those who only listened to the sound of the dollar and worked for the chess players.
I still write but not to change politicians! Now, I write for the marginalized, for those who, like me, believed in building the future. Today, they are paying for this optimism with the sale of their kidneys and their children. I know the future is dark and life in the shadow of dinosaurs is impossible! But in this darkness, there are women who still nurture hope with chants and marches in the street. With a sore chest and a sore throat, I write for women who are turning a new page of history today, for those who boldly and empty-handed go to war. I write for you, for those who give me new hope. The hope of creating a future that will be in your hands this time and I will document this history.
Zahra Nader is a PhD student in Gender, Feminist and Women Studies at York University and is the editor-in-chief of Zan Times.
