I stood on the roof of our house looking toward the provincial governor’s office and watched the flags change on the day the Taliban took Badakhshan. When I came down and sat with my family around the dastarkhan, I was caught between excitement and disbelief and could think of only one thing: What would happen to my university studies and to my sisters’ schooling?
My father was silent and withdrawn. He has lived through all of Afghanistan’s bitterness and still carries a war wound on his body. We were afraid of forced marriage and of an uncertain future, and we begged him to send us somewhere safer.
Finally, he sighed and said, “There are so many of you. What am I supposed to do with all these daughters? Who could do anything? Whatever is going to happen, let it happen.”
I broke down. I left my food half-eaten on my plate, broke the rules of the dastarkhan, and went to another room along with my sisters, where we wept. That night marked the beginning of a new chapter for our family: one of poverty and despair that gender restrictions make heavier with each passing day.
To get into university, I had stayed up many nights, studying beside a kerosene lamp. My sisters and I were top students, and every year we came home with certificates of merit and first place rankings. We were our father’s pride. Now those awards mean nothing to me.
My name is Sara*, and I am 25 years old. Today, I am living the very life I feared five years ago: deprived of education and work, unemployed, dependent on an aging father, and surrounded by a violence that can be felt in our home every day. The roots of this violence do not lie only within the family. They lie in the Taliban’s laws and restrictions that have erased women from society.
Life is gruelling for my father, whose only assets are a few plots of land and who must feed a large family from what they yield. Before the Taliban returned to power in 2021, he believed his daughters would study, become independent, and one day be his support. Once the door to work was shut in our faces, that knowledge became worthless in his eyes as it could not bring home bread and other necessities. He always says, “Education should put bread on the table.”
For years, as my father waited for a son, he was given many daughters. In the eyes of this farmer, a daughter is only a means of binding families together through marriage; beyond that, she is a burden on the man of the house. To him, I am mostly a consumer: a daughter who wants clothes and adds to the household’s expenses.
Not a day goes by that I don’t hear a version of “If you were boys, you’d be the breadwinners,” “If you were boys, I’d have some peace,” “If you were a boy, you wouldn’t want so many clothes, or expect so much,” and so many other “ifs.” To me, these are not just words. They are wounds that fall like stones on my sisters and me, scraping away at our self-worth.
I did not choose my gender, my family’s poverty, or a life under such laws, yet every day I pay the price for all of them. For years, I have felt like a burden on my family. I no longer think about Eid, new clothes, or the dreams that all girls have.
Several times, I have fallen ill from severe anxiety and insomnia. The doctor said the cause was stress and overthinking, but I know the real pain is having no future and feeling worthless. I wanted to be an independent woman, reliant neither on my father’s money nor on a future husband’s. I wanted to be my father’s support in his old age, but now I see myself as a burden on his shoulders.
My sisters are all literate and educated, and my brother is unemployed. My greatest regret is that I was not born a boy. If I were a boy, I could work as a day labourer, carry loads, go down into the mines, or find a job in an office.
My sisters and I could provide for ourselves and our family. But all my sisters and I receive is scorn and humiliation. We can neither meet our mother’s needs nor escape our own emotional exhaustion. Hardest of all is that this blame comes from the person closest to us: our father.
Sometimes I think about marriage, and sometimes I fear that my future husband will be like my father, that he will remind me of every piece of bread and clothing he provides and taunt me for having daughters. Sometimes I wish I had never studied. If I had not gone to school, perhaps I would expect nothing from life and would not feel like such a failure.
As Eid and Nowruz approach, my parents argue over buying clothes for my sisters. At the slightest problem in the house, my father breaks my mother’s heart with demeaning words about us. Sometimes I resent my mother and ask her why she brought us into the world, but I know that neither bearing children nor the path of her own life was ever in her hands.
I did not want to become a continuation of my mother’s story. That is why, despite all the taunts and the stones thrown in my path, I went to university. Yet I, too, have become another link in the long chain that politics, law, and society have bound around women’s hands and feet for centuries.
I know this is not only the story of our home. In many homes, women who have been deprived of work and education are living this same life behind closed walls. Poverty in today’s Afghanistan is not just the absence of bread; it also strips people of dignity, independence, and hope.
When women are denied the right to work, it is not only the family’s finances that suffer. Love gives way to blame, and for daughters who once dreamed of independence, home becomes a prison without a locked door.
Names in this narrative have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewee and writer. Jarira Shokohmand is the pseudonym of a journalist and writer in Afghanistan.
