Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan (3 page)

Radio is the main source of mass communication in war-torn Afghanistan. Most people in the cities and rural areas have access to it. If you travel to even the most remote part of the country it is very rare to find a home without a radio, and so it was after just a few months of being on the air that I started receiving letters, phone calls and emails from our listeners. These were mostly from men – some of whom wrote on behalf of the women in their families – but women and girls also started getting in contact with our local Afghan reporters. Then in 2007 we won the BBC’s ‘best team of the year award’. And although Afghan Woman’s Hour was already being repeated twice a week on the BBC, a couple of local radio stations also started rebroadcasting the programme several more times a week. Following the success enjoyed by Afghan Woman’s Hour, other radio and TV stations started their own women’s shows. While most media outlets are still run by men in Afghanistan, there are now women working as presenters, producers and newspaper editors, and there are even women who run their own radio stations. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) play an important role in making this possible, by helping train Afghan women to make their own radio programmes.

After eleven years of absence from my country I went back in 2005. I touched down at Kabul airport, which I had never seen before. I found the whole experience of returning to my homeland extremely stressful. The city was nothing like I remembered. The Kabul of my childhood was green and calm, and far from crowded; when I got off the plane, I couldn’t believe this was the same city. This land of wild mountains and
dusty people scared me and I suddenly questioned why I was there. Why had I left my family behind and come to a dangerous place like this? Was my work really so important? It was even difficult for me to identify with my own people, although I wore a large scarf in deference to my culture. As I sat in the car, being driven from the airport to the BBC office in the centre of Kabul, I spotted the block of flats where I’d grown up. We even passed my old school, but I found it hard to make a connection to these places. I had to keep asking the driver where we were as the fighting had damaged many of the buildings and roads so badly I no longer recognised them. But it also seemed as if the war had changed the people themselves; sometimes men would stare at me as if I were an animal in a zoo. Yet despite my initial fear I fell in love with my country all over again and have returned several times since. The energy and commitment of the women who came to the BBC to be trained to make radio programmes inspired me. The bravery it took for them to leave their families and homes and come to Kabul gave me strength and hope, and their powerful stories energised me to continue my work with Afghan Woman’s Hour.

During that period I helped train more than twenty Afghan women from different parts of the country to interview and make reports about women in their provinces. Some of these women were still at school or university, while others had very little education and had to be taught how to use a computer. Take Kamila, for example. She reported for us from Khost province in the south-east of Afghanistan and was only partially educated. She contacted our Kabul office as one of the programme’s fans and told me she had many interesting stories she could record for us. She lived up to her promise by sending us a number of fascinating stories from her region, which we were able to broadcast from London to all over the world.

As well as presenting the programme, I was also its producer, which meant I had to edit the items to fit the length of the programme. A reporter like Kamila would send me a life story she had recorded in her province through the internet, and I would then have to cut it down to
fit the four-minute slot. The art of this job was to split the story into four pieces, and then broadcast one of them each week. As with all good storytelling, I had to end each section at a place where it would sound like a cliffhanger so the listeners would be impatient to know what happened next. Before I’d started this job, I’d assumed that the life stories section would be the hardest to edit, but the sheer brilliance of the stories and the shocking realities of the women’s lives made producing the slot an almost effortless process, with each paragraph so full of emotion and drama that every minute or so there would be another natural cliffhanger.

Through my work I learnt about the dark period that the women of my country had endured during the Taliban era, while I was living abroad. I heard just how hard life had been for them; how families had felt pressurised into giving away their daughters to older men, how women were treated as if they were no longer of any use because they couldn’t work or get an education. For a decade their faces had been hidden behind the walls of their houses and their voices had never been heard, but I decided – with the help of Afghan Woman’s Hour reporters across the country – to give these women a voice by airing their stories.

These life stories had such an impact on me that I started having dreams about my childhood in Afghanistan during wartime; I also felt closer to these women as the memories of my years in Kabul came flooding back. It didn’t matter whether the life story was that of Nangarhar in the east or Balkh in the north, or whether it came from a Hazara or a Pashtun woman, these were all Afghan women who lived amidst similar traditions and values. The women had all gone through a similarly wretched experience, yet back at the BBC office in London I could somehow identify with them all and, to a certain extent, I shared their feelings.

Their candour and readiness to share their stories gave me, in turn, the confidence to discuss more sensitive and controversial issues on the programme. Indeed these women inspired us to the point where I was often spoilt for choice about which life story to choose. When we’d first started Afghan Woman’s Hour I’d worried about filling this slot every
week and wondered what we could replace them with if we’d run out of stories. How wrong I was to be concerned. For six years Afghan women shared their stories with our reporters and listeners. Women would contact us and ask us to come and record their stories. After two years of being on air an audience survey carried out by an independent research company for the BBC showed that Afghan Woman’s Hour had become the second most listened to radio programme in Afghanistan, and the life stories was its most popular feature.

Now people in Afghanistan were able to hear these amazing stories on their radios – about brave men and women who fought to liberate their country from its darkest hour and bring peace and democracy; and from women, whose voices have been suppressed for so long. But I believe these stories are so good and so important that they deserve a wider audience. And as I sat on the tube each day going to work I started to wonder whether the woman sitting next to me reading her newspaper might also be interested in discovering these extraordinary stories told by ordinary women. And what about women in the rest of Europe, the United States and Australia, too? They might lead very different lives to most Afghan women but they too understand what it’s like to be a mother, a sister, a daughter, to fall in love and to face disappointment. So I resolved that I would become the channel through which these voices could be heard, and from the hundreds of life stories I have heard, I’ve chosen a selection that I think are the most fascinating and inspiring to set down here.

Together these stories offer a glimpse into a closed and complex society and give an insight into what it’s like to live in one of the world’s poorest and most dangerous countries. What, for example, does a young bride pray for on her wedding night? How does it feel to be sold into another family to settle a dispute? And what happens to those who dare to love a man of their choice? What about the women required to dress and act like men in order to protect their families? And what does a young carpet weaver girl dream of when she’s shut in a dusty room and expected to complete a rug so vast it’s even bigger than her? If an Afghan
widow wears make-up, does that mean she’s searching for a new husband? And how do the Kuchi nomads live?

I hope, like me, you’ll discover that Afghanistan has a beauty and richness all of its own and a character that’s revealed in the cultural diversity of its people, from Turkmen and Uzbek carpet weavers, Hazara tailors, to Tajik cooks and Pashtun poets. All these different voices speak in unison of the common desire for the human spirit to be recognised.

There was a time when I believed that once I was living in London all my problems would be solved and that I would be the happiest person in the world. How naïve I was. The combined hardships of living through war, losing my home and leaving my homeland may all be in the past, yet even now when I hear about war on the news, I realise I’ve not forgotten any of my experiences but that they are all stored away in my memory, ready to be triggered by an image on the television. The reawakening of past traumas is easier to endure if you’re with your family, but when I was unhappily married, I realised that even though I’d escaped the war and was living in London, happiness was far from guaranteed.

Life as an Afghan woman in London isn’t always easy and it can still sometimes be surprisingly painful. There are times when I sit in my small room in South London and think about how my life has turned out. I get so many mixed feelings: childhood memories can bring a smile to my face, while some from my teenage years make me feel sorry for myself, then memories of the war make me fearful and anxious. What if it were all to happen again? Would my family and I survive? As I try to suppress these fears, more memories of my adult life surface, reminding me just how much has happened in recent years and leaving me exhausted.

Somehow, though, despite the pain I’ve endured, I’ve had many good times too. From living a privileged life as the daughter of a government
minister in Afghanistan to being a war refugee and an asylum seeker, life has certainly shown me its many different faces.

Going back to the beginning, I was born into a family of four girls – I was the second eldest – and received an excellent education at a modern Russian-built school in Kabul. My father was a politician, my mother a housewife, and as the family of a government minister we had the luxury of living in a Soviet-built apartment block with electricity, hot and cold running water, central heating and modern toilets.

Life seemed uncomplicated then. My father was busy with his work as the head of national radio, in charge of all its programmes and publications, while my mother and our maid did the household chores and looked after us girls. In the morning I would go to school with two Uzbek girls, Freshta and Zainab, childhood friends and daughters of our neighbours. I sometimes miss those carefree days, playing games with my sisters and school friends, but even then I was aware of the cultural pressures that weighed heavily on my mother. Despite being happy as we were, just the six of us, my sisters and I still felt incomplete as a family because we had no brother. It wasn’t enough that we were well-behaved and successful at school, somehow as girls we were not considered good enough by our community; something that pained my mother. My father was an educated and open-minded man and it did not bother him that he had no son, but our life was about more than just our immediate family; we were part of a wider community. We still are.

This was in the late 1980s, as the Mujahedeen were getting stronger and the war against the Russian-backed government of President Najeebullah was intensifying. As a young girl I didn’t understand what was happening in my country. I didn’t care who was fighting whom, which party was in power or what was happening in the provinces or remote villages. I thought of the Mujahedeen as uncivilised and dangerous, while I’m sure they regarded my family as infidels because we supported a non-Muslim government which was under Russian control. I was the daughter
of someone the Mujahedeen considered to be a traitor, and whom some probably wanted dead. But apart from being frightened by some of the stories my friends told me about the Ashrar (a name given to the Mujahedeen by the Afghan government and used by ordinary people, meaning ‘people who bring violence’) I wasn’t all that affected by the war then. All I really cared about was going to a good school, wearing nice clothes and having a secure home life, and it was just the same for the boys and girls who sat next to me in class as – like me – they were the sons and daughters of government ministers or officials. Most of our teachers were similarly connected to the government in some way. And so in many respects we enjoyed a privileged way of life. Or at least we did until the rocket attacks got closer and closer to our homes and schools.

During these years the Mujahedeen fired rockets almost every day in and around Kabul; and because the rebels wanted to take down the government – so they could take control of Afghanistan – they usually aimed at markets, hospitals, schools, government offices and other public places where it was easy to kill civilians. It became a daily routine at school that whenever we heard the sound of a big explosion we would leave our desks and follow the teacher to the corridor, which was considered a safe haven.