A Facebook page called Poetry Club posted a memorial for Nadia Anjuman on November 5. In its introduction, it claimed she had “ended her life through suicide.” This is the third time I have read someone describe Anjuman’s death as “self-inflicted.”
I clearly remember sitting in front of the television when I was 12 years old and hearing the reporter say, “The young poet Nadia Anjuman was killed by her husband.” I felt that a thoughtful, gifted woman had been tortured to death by a man — beaten with fists and blows to her head. Later, as Nadia’s death became widely discussed in Afghanistan, I watched many TV programs about her. Again and again, my 12-year-old self wondered, “Why did her husband kill her?”
Once, a friend invoked Nadia’s name to warn a woman who was trapped in a marriage to a violent husband. She said, “Being killed by a husband is not so unlikely — we all remember Nadia Anjuman.” I also heard that Nadia’s husband still holds the same job, working as the librarian at Herat University.
I found myself thinking about how stories change shape over time, how even the bare facts a society once witnessed can be twisted — especially when the story is about a woman. Society bends her truth, rewrites her end, and, for the death of a poet killed by her husband, it now writes, “self-inflicted death.”
This year, Saborullah Siasang wrote about the translation of Nadia Anjuman’s poems on Facebook on November 3. Three women — Arya Aber, Maria Omar, and Diana Artarian — had translated her two poetry collections into English and published them together in a book titled Smoke Drifts. In her introduction to the book, Siasang mentioned the circumstances of Nadia’s death: how one night in November 2005, a man brought a woman’s body to the hospital and said, “I only slapped and punched her once. She had a heart problem — she also swallowed poison.” Under his post, friends, acquaintances, and many others left comments mourning the early death of Nadia Anjuman.
Among the commenters was Nadia’s husband, a man named Farid Majidnia. He wrote that the account of her death was false. He insisted that the world was lying and that only he, as the living witness, could tell the “true” story of how Nadia Anjuman died.
An American by the name of Diana Artarian had been collecting the poems of women killed by domestic violence. Arya Aber said she had been searching for a woman poet who resembled her own journey — and found Nadia, who had her bones fractured by her husband after publishing her first poetry collection. I watched silently as all these people spoke of Nadia’s pain, her beatings, her breaking, and her killing. And yet her husband stood tall in the comments section, declaring, “You are all wrong.”
That Facebook post stayed with me for days. I began thinking about Nadia and the countless women whose lives have been taken by a husband’s fist. Ten years ago, my mother attended the funeral of a woman. She told me, “Her husband hit her only once — she died herself!” At the funeral, people felt sorry not for the dead woman, but for the husband, sorry that “one blow” had killed his wife and left his children without their mother. The case was never prosecuted. Aside from a few tears from the woman’s mother and sister, the matter faded away.
There are many video and print reports on Nadia’s death, including some that summarize the prosecutor’s investigation. All emphasize that the husband was responsible. But he was released from prison after only three weeks and returned to his university position. When a man working in a supposedly educated space can be cleared of blame for his wife’s death, and people still listen to him attempt to justify himself (“she had a heart condition; she took poison”), what can we expect from the remote villages of the same country? When the government, the university, the media, and society operate in the interests of men, then a woman’s death will never lead to justice.
In a patriarchal society like Afghanistan, now ruled by one of the most misogynist regimes in the world, the killing of women by husbands or male relatives is routinely disguised as “poisoning,” “heart problems,” “heart attack,” “stroke,” or even “possession by spirits.” The latest example was just three weeks ago: the death of a 17-year-old young bride named Farkhunda. Her killing was not mysterious, yet once her death made the news, Taliban Kabul police spokesperson Khalid Zadran wrote that she had died of a stroke. We contacted many sources and heard every excuse: heart attack, stroke, poison, sleeping pills, and most recently, demonic possession. No one spoke in Farkhunda’s defence. It was as if she were just a young girl with no friends to demand the truth, or as if she had left behind no notebook of poems to document the suffering of her two-month marriage.
Afghanistan has plunged into the depths of patriarchy. Here, no one stands up for women, not society, not the state, and not the law. Even men accused of killing their wives feel confident enough to accuse those same wives of swallowing drugs or poison. But who was the one beside her? Who forced the pills into her hand? Who slammed her head against the wall until she “chose” poison? Where in this country is the shelter, the courtroom, or the safe space where a woman can speak, tell the truth, and claim her rights?
As we confront the reality that Afghanistan has no such space for women where they can recount their pain or even mourn it, we understand why women die quiet deaths, loud deaths, and why even the stories of their deaths are reversed and rewritten.
On several Facebook posts, I noticed men warning each other not to “inflame” the issue of Farkhunda’s death, with one saying, “God forbid her husband becomes distressed, or harmed, or pushed to suicide.” It was just like how Nadia’s husband was never removed from his university post, lest his feelings be hurt.
In Afghanistan, no one thinks about Nadia or Farkhunda, or about how their lives were extinguished under fists, kicks, strangulation, humiliation, and suppression. The society, the government, and the people join hands to protect the men, ensuring that the comfort of these men is never disturbed by the women they have killed.
Khadija Haidary is a Zan Times journalist and editor.
