Farida Faryad was born in 1992 in Kabul and later moved to Jaghori district of Ghazni province, where she completed her primary and secondary education in 2011. In 2015, she earned a bachelor’s degree in Persian language and literature from Kabul Education University. She then continued her studies at the master’s level at the Kabul branch of Payam-e-Noor University, where she graduated in 2019.
Today, Farida is a Ph.D. student at the University of Gilan in Iran and is researching Persian language and literature. She currently lives in France and has recently published two books: The Collector of Sorrows in French, and then The Women’s love-sorrow in Persian.
Zan Times’ Khadija Haidary interviewed Farida about memory, forced displacement, trauma, meaning of women’s sorrow, and why she thinks of writing as an act of survival and resistance. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Zan Times: Who is Farida Faryad? How do you describe yourself as a writer?
Farida Faryad: To be honest, the word “writer” feels overwhelmingly large to me. It is a title that immediately evokes the giants of Persian and world literature, and gives the term a profound weight in my mind. At the same time, I can’t deny that, perhaps unconsciously, this word has nestled itself somewhere between the lines of my books. But given the small and unripe knowledge I have, I see myself as too insignificant to deserve such a title.
When I introduce myself, I must say: Farida is a girl like thousands of Afghan girls born in the heart of war, and raised in the shadow of ruins and bigotry. When she came to know herself, she found herself drawn into the sorrows of her own people and before she could even pack her bags, she was forced out of her home and her homeland, a place where guns are placed in the hands of children instead of pens.
Now, living in another corner of the world, I write to be the echo of those voices. My experience was not formed in a vacuum but in the midst of structural violence, forced migration, and the systematic erasure of marginalized voices. That is why I want to recount these experiences — experiences that political equations have always pushed to the margins.
ZT: When and how did you end up in Paris, and did that migration give you the space to confront the sorrows ahead of you, the sorrows behind you, and the sorrows of Afghan women today?
Faryad: Coming to Paris, even though it was the city of my dreams, wasn’t a conscious decision. It was the result of the same sudden, unwanted rupture I mentioned earlier. Like the fate of thousands who were cast into uncertainty after the rise of Taliban to power, my arrival happened within an extremely short window of time and without preparation, so fast, so unbelievable, that I am still trying to understand its psychological mechanisms.
This forced geographical displacement was initially very difficult. It created a kind of conceptual homelessness, not just a physical rupture from my homeland, but also a rupture from language, oral history, and collective memory. Yet, as Homi Bhabha describes the “in-between space,” it is precisely this borderland that allows for rethinking, rereading oneself, rewriting the past, and redefining the future.
Since I had been immersed in the themes of women’s love and sorrow in recent years, this “third space” gave me the opportunity to rethink both. Distance from home did not lead to forgetting, that will never happen. Instead, the world of migration became a ground for seeing past sorrows more clearly, for understanding present challenges, and for confronting the growing terror that Afghan refugees, especially women and children, face each day. Maybe this distance also became a way to scream out what remained silenced and is still suppressed on our own soil.
ZT: In a previous interview you said your mother left you in a mosque during the war when you were a three-month-old infant. How did you come to terms with it? Do you believe that a terrified mother who left her baby in a mosque to save her own life deserves the respect, forgiveness, and love of her daughter?
Faryad: I heard this story from my mother herself, who occasionally spoke about the Afshar massacre [in which mujahideen gunmen killed scores of Hazara civilians in the Afshar district of Kabul in 1993]. I never asked her “Why?” because I never wanted to judge her for her decision, and I still don’t.
As for respect, forgiveness, and love toward such a mother, for me, there is no doubt at all. Afshar was not just an “incident.” In this bloody chapter of our history. A chapter in which the human body, especially the female body, was not only the target of bullets, but the site of plunder, assault, and violation by the same people who today pose as heroes.
What can a mother do in that horrifying moment, surrounded by violence, with six small children? She was voiceless, defenseless, without refuge. Her decision may be painful, even unbearable, but morally and historically, it must be understood within the context of conditions that stripped her of every human option.
She acted not out of neglect or coldness, but out of a primal instinct for survival, a decision that in itself is a scream against injustice. The scream of a frightened, trembling woman abandoned among bullets.
ZT: Have you ever wondered whether, if you had been a baby boy, your mother might not have left you in the mosque?
Faryad: The role of gender in my mother’s decision undoubtedly has roots in patriarchal structures that assign different values to sons and daughters. However, my mother’s experience cannot be judged by the usual scales of gendered values. That moment was not a time for choosing between a boy or a girl. It was a moment of survival, an explosion of reality, a moment in which she stood between life and death.
In such conditions, maternal love surpasses the symbolic order of patriarchy. What moved my mother in that terrifying moment was not a conscious gender-based preference, but a reflex of fear and survival, a decision she might have made even if the baby had been a boy, because I was at the time gravely ill and on the edge of life and death.
That is why I believe that not only my mother, but any mother confronting such circumstances would hold her child beyond the boundaries of gender. Such decisions must be analyzed within the traumatic context of the Afshar massacre and the structural violence inflicted on women, within the framework of gendered psychology.
ZT: You’ve spoken about the long period of depression you experienced in adolescence and your preference for isolation. Did this prolonged confrontation with yourself turn you into a “collector of women’s sorrow”?
Faryad: Yes. The depression that darkened my teenage years was not merely a psychological state, but an existential response to the violent and discriminatory society in which I lived. It was a society whose structural violence targeted women and children above all. I am one among thousands of others like me who became victims of collective and historical violence.
My depression was a reflection of constant insecurity, of ethnic–religious and gender marginalization, and of wounds that never had the chance to heal. My confrontation with sorrow was not voluntary; it arose from the necessity of understanding.
What I wrote in The Collector of Sorrows is not only a depiction of women’s suffering, but a map of the systemic discriminations that have placed ethnicity, religion, the female body, the female voice, and women’s choices as their primary targets.
As for isolation, it was never a choice for me, but a forced habit. The result of a situation in which children, especially girls, are deprived of choice, experience, and even movement. Girls must learn caution from their earliest days to avoid “bringing shame” to society — a traditional, patriarchal, controlling society. For me, isolation was a form of “forced safety,” a place beyond judging eyes.
In short, this isolation, depression, and confrontation with painful sorrows has allowed me to narrate women’s suffering not from the outside, but from within.
ZT: As an Afghan woman writer who collects women’s sorrows, how did you confront your own sorrow and decide that “women’s sorrow” is something that must be addressed?
Faryad: We cannot come to terms with collective sorrow. In my view, accepting it means surrendering to it. The sorrow I speak of is historical, social, and gendered — the sorrow of women who were pushed aside in the past and who are still pushed aside today. In such situations, silence cannot be the answer, and acceptance cannot be the solution.
I write because moving on is impossible. Writing, for me, is an attempt to expose what has been hidden, to disobey the rule of the powerful, and to build a collective memory of pains that have been denied.
This sorrow must be narrated because it carries an erased memory, a language of resistance, and the possibility of rewriting history.
ZT: Tell us more about The Collector of Sorrows. How was it received and understood by French-speaking readers?
Faryad: Although a bit more than a year has passed since its publication, the book has sparked remarkable and unexpected reactions in French-speaking society — so much so that it is already in its fourth printing.
For me, this reception was not merely a literary success; it affirmed that the voices of women from my homeland can be heard and can have impact even in the most distant places — but only if we do not stop trying and do not allow their cries to be silenced.
After the book was published on October 4, 2024, we decided to have parts of it performed musically by the French comedian Odile Bertotto, and to stage the program wherever possible. So far, we have successfully held 16 performances across different French cities.
At many events, French-speaking audiences reacted deeply — sometimes with shock — to the book’s content. They not only sympathized with the stories of ethnic discrimination and gendered violence in Afghanistan, but engaged in critical reflection. One reader wrote to me: “This book is a kick to the silence of the international community and the indifference of world powers toward the situation of Afghan women. It is as if your words scream the wounds.”
I am glad that, in my own small way, I helped awaken people for whom human suffering simply matters to the sorrow of Afghan women.
ZT: Tell us about your second book, The Love-Sorrow of Women. How did you decide that working on women’s folk couplets and the theme of women’s love-sorrow could help portray Afghan women today?
Faryad: My research began with the question of “woman,” viewed through the lens of sorrow. I wanted to understand the issue before approaching it more deeply. Reading women’s folk couplets, especially among the Hazaras, which I relate to most because they reflect my own lived experience, pushed me to continue.
With my limited knowledge, I picked up the pen, and the sorrow of my fellow women compelled me not to stop. Through reading these couplets, I realized that oral literature in general and folk couplets and tales can be powerful tools to introduce the contemporary condition of Afghan women, because they act as repositories of collective memory.
Culture is not an instant phenomenon; it is a historical process shaped over time and passed from generation to generation. Women’s oral couplets — especially those created and preserved by women — contain layers of lived experience, love, sorrow, resistance, and silence.
I believe cultural research brings women closer to the modern world and removes obstacles so that systems of domination can no longer maintain control over women’s lives or manipulate reality to serve themselves.
Oral literature is one of the few cultural arenas where we can trace women’s presence across history and observe diverse dimensions of their lives. So while my analysis of Hazara folk couplets may not have immediate practical impact, it undoubtedly carries immense significance for cultural and historical awareness, for re-recognizing women’s identity, emotional memory, and hidden structures of pain.
These couplets are not merely a medium of expressing women’s emotions, they are living documents of our social reality. Future generations, by returning to them, can gain a deeper understanding of the suppressed history of Afghan women.
ZT: In reading these couplets, I often felt that women — Hazara women and Afghan women in remote villages who have more access to mountains and fields than to cities and institutions — are the real creators of these verses. From what perspective did you study women’s couplets?
Faryad: Yes, I believe that most creators of folk couplets and tales are women who lacked access to formal cultural institutions but were deeply connected to nature, suffering, and oral language.
Folk couplets and stories have a distinctly feminine perspective. But with societal changes and the influence of power structures, these narratives sometimes undergo distortion as men alter them to serve their own interests. I’ve explained this in The Love-Sorrow of Women.
I did not study couplets merely as literary forms. I read them as social and political texts about power and control, in whose hidden layers lie relationships of authority, gender, control, and women’s lived experience.
My analysis drew on theories such as Kate Millett’s sexual politics and Stephanie Gert’s sociology of gender — frameworks that examine how one group (men) establishes dominance over another (women) through cultural, social, and linguistic structures, and distinguish between sex (biological reality) and gender (a social construct).
These distinctions allow us to see how couplets, which appear to be about love or daily life, actually reflect mechanisms of control, resistance, and women’s lived realities.
ZT: In Hazara couplets, you discuss how a woman’s identity in Afghanistan is tied to the men of her family. How long do you think it will take and what will it require for women to gain identities independent from their male family members?
Faryad: A woman’s identity is not only defined in Afghanistan but across patriarchal and authoritarian societies in relation to the men of her family. Hazara couplets also reflect this. But this dependency is not natural; it is the product of systems of power and cultural structures.
These structures are deeply rooted in a society’s culture. As I said earlier, they do not change overnight.
But an independent identity becomes possible when a woman recognizes her own authority, not the authority granted to her by men, but the real authority she claims for herself, when she thinks of herself, and simply considers herself “human,” beyond gender. When her humanity is not defined through a man.
The awareness that women, like men, have rights, will, and human dignity is the starting point of liberation. Achieving this transformation requires rethinking cultural narratives, reforming educational systems, and expanding women’s access to knowledge, language, and public spaces.
Khadija Haidary is a Zan Times journalist and editor.
