Freedom, war, and hope: Through the eyes of Afghan women

A new collection of short stories written by Afghan women in the local language and translated with sensitivity gives us an intimate understanding of the many truths we choose to ignore

Imagine a nation that’s solely known, at least to a white man, for its statistics on wars and murders. For many, the mere mention of Afghanistan conjures up claustrophobic visuals of women being denied an education, constrained in the kitchen to the bed, and not even allowed to move freely unless a male ‘guardian’ accompanies them.

What happens when dystopia becomes the norm? What is the human cost of leaders embarking on wars that they know serve no interests other than furthering their own petty, myopic agendas? It is no coincidence, then, that in the context of Afghanistan, these leaders have always been men.

In a new collection of short stories, My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird, published by Hachette in India, it’s the voices of 18 Afghan women that take centre stage. There are no literary flourishes, no unnecessary dramatic twists and certainly no meandering descriptions of rivers and mountains. The reality is brutal and any dilution while presenting it would be a disservice. So it’s only pertinent that journalist Lyse Doucet, in the introduction to the book, asks: Who speaks for Afghan women? The implication is that narratives about what Afghan women really want have always been tightly controlled, and mansplained.

“The idea behind this project came during my work trip to Afghanistan in 2019 where I was a scriptwriter on a local radio soap opera and encountered these women who were hired,” Lucy Hannah, the director of Untold Organisation, tells The Established. “We were talking about the lack of opportunities for women writers, in particular, to have their prose and fiction work published. It was almost impossible for them to try to get readers beyond their [existing] readers.”

Hannah, with her background in writer development that includes setting up the BBC Writersroom, set out to create a project titled ‘Write Afghanistan,’ with the support of writers in the country that hinged on three aspects: develop and hone the craft of local writers by pairing them up editors; share their work already in translation globally; and share the work locally to build the capacity of local literary editors and translators.

Through fiction

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story,” wrote Richard Powers in his 2019 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Overstory.

Does this, perhaps, capture the essence of why these 18 short stories had to be fiction? Hannah agrees. “When the environment itself doesn’t let you write stories, you want to write more,” she says. “After all, people can engage more emotionally with a good story. More importantly, these writers have chosen to write fiction; it wasn’t an imposition on them.”

This is also where the title of the collection was born: My pen is the wing of a bird; it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think, those dreams we are not allowed to dream.

While reading the stories, seemingly bare and pared down in their approach to narration, there will be several instances when you’d want to look away from the page. In the short story Sandals, a family goes about business as usual only to be disrupted, casually, by a bomb that shatters their windows. The story ends with the corpse of the only daughter in the family, covered in blood, on a desolate street. Some stories are directly inspired by real-life events such as Zainab Akhlaqi’s Blossom, based on the Sayed ul-Shuhada high-school bombing in Kabul.

“These writers could have easily based their stories elsewhere, maybe even New York or Frankfurt,” says Hannah. “But they chose not to. They wanted to write for and about Afghanistan, so this will definitely create a market for work coming out of areas that don’t necessarily have a creative infrastructure.”

An ambitious project

Hannah’s team put out two open calls for submissions across Afghanistan, and the response was overwhelming. Some women even shared their stories over WhatsApp with pictures of handwritten pages. The medium didn’t matter. They didn’t have to subscribe to a westernised notion of pitching and sharing stories. As long as it was their voice, their world, that’s all that mattered.

“Finding translators was a giant challenge and also the fact that we were working across three time zones—the editor based in Sri Lanka, the writers in Afghanistan and the Untold team based in the United Kingdom,” she says.

Ten out of the 18 writers have since left Afghanistan, mostly after the Taliban gained power after the Americans left a ravaged country behind. For those left behind, it was also important for Hannah’s team to conceal their identity well. “We are also monitoring their safety all the time,” she says.

The lair of hope

In many ways, the essence of conflict has always been to crush the human spirit. In the case of Afghanistan, this is all the more true—we will crush you to the point that even the thought of exercising your agency will send chills down your spine.

“These stories were all written before the Taliban came to power,” explains Hannah. “Strangely, these stories now take on a different resonance now and seem very appropriate now. So, they now only gain in value.”

How then does one go about living life? How does the Afghan woman wake up in the morning, brush her teeth and go about life as an entire civilisation collapses under the reign of chaotic men who derive their sense of self-worth solely through American rifles?

In Please Turn the Air Conditioning On, Sir, written by Maryam Mahjooba and translated from the Dari language by Parwana Fayyaz and Dr Zubair Popalazi, the narrator takes in the hopeful winter sun and adds that it’s the “kind of day where one doesn’t want to think about death.” But death there is. In the shrieks of a wedding party bombed to death or the wails of school children, as the winter sun lies about listless on the wayside.

No one harbours the hope that these stories will change the world or even change the way the world looks at the women in Afghanistan, beyond the presumption that they are chattel for the men in their lives. But there will definitely be an overwhelming takeaway as you make your way through these 18 stories: you cannot look away.

The Write Afghanistan project is only made possible by generous supporters. To help the team continue their work with Afghan women writers, please donate here.

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