The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years. Christina Lamb
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looking for work. Although he insisted that the Taliban had become an organization ‘in name only’, he feared for his life and I wondered why he had taken the enormous risk of speaking to me. ‘I want people to understand,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I have done terrible things and the only way I can make up for it is to tell the world the truth about these people.’
Kabul, September 24 2001
Respected Mr Jamil Karzai
Salam alay kum
I hope you and the rest of your family will be alright. I received your letter and I informed other female members of ours, Farishta, Najeba, Sadaf and Maryam about your request to write to a lady journalist who writes for the Sunday Telegraph of Britain.
Respected Karzai, we here really appreciate what you do for the new generation of Afghanistan and we are really worried about your life too. Please be careful.
Here is the letter for Miss Christina Lamb.
Dear Christina
Jamil Karzai has written about you that you are a nice kind beautiful and helpful lady and has asked us, specially me to write a letter about our life under the Taliban regime and I hope this will help you outside understand the feelings of an educated Afghan female who must now live under a burqa.
My name is Fatema, this is my real name but please I ask you to use this name of mine Marri, as what we are doing is dangerous. I’m thirty years old and live in a three-roomed flat with my family on a big estate, it’s called Microrayon. I was born here in Kabul and I graduated from the twelfth class of Hishai Durrani High School, our biggest girls’ school. I speak Dari, Pashto and English. I think you are surprised I know English but my father was a diplomat and my mother an English teacher. My mother went to university in India. So don’t worry.
I know from our friend that you have a kind husband and a beautiful son and you travel the world reporting and meeting people. I dream of a life like that. It’s funny we live under the same small sky yet it seems we live 500 years apart.
You see us now in our burqas like strange insects in the dust, our heads down, but it wasn’t always this way. I do not remember much before the Russian invasion as I was only eight when they came and I felt bad then when I saw the soldiers with their white faces and hair because my parents said they had made slaves of us but even at that time we still went to school. Women worked as professors and doctors and in government. We went for picnics and parties, wore jeans and short skirts and I thought I would go to university like my mother and work for my living.
I know in the villages many schools had been destroyed in the war but here in Kabul we were lucky. Only when the Taliban came were all the girls’ schools and university closed. When the mujaheddin came to Kabul my school was closed for a year because of all the fighting which was very bad particularly here in Microrayon and we were the first line of battle, but then I finished school and became a teacher. I particularly liked science and wanted to go to university to study science but there was no money because my father had lost his job.
When the Taliban came to Kabul, it was September 1996, they told us all to stay at home. They announced it on the radio just like they announced we all had to wear burqas. I had never worn one before, they were something from the village, and it was like not being able to breathe or see, just seeing in front through that small square like a cage, and in the summer it is so hot and the sun blinds you. I fell over twice the first day.
In our house behind all the burqas and shalwar kamiz is a red silk party dress, my mother’s from the time when the king was in power and my father in the foreign ministry. Sometimes I hold it up against me and imagine dancing but it is a lost world. Now we must wear clothes that make us invisible and cannot even wear heels. One of my friends was beaten with cable for wearing white shoes because the Taliban said, ‘how dare you wear the colour of our flag’, and another because they said they could hear her shoes click on the pavement.
You might think we women are doing nothing but my friends and I struggle for the rights of Afghan women working secretly here for the Afghan Women’s League, trying to educate our women and young girls. Some of our members make nan bread and distribute it to widows, there are so many widows from this long war, you see them in all streets in the city begging in their torn clothes but the Taliban beat them and say they are not allowed out without mahram, that’s what we call men relatives like a husband or father.
My sister and I hold secret English and science classes in our house. It is hard as all the time we fear someone might report us and we cannot get books. Our students pay a little and we use it for firewood to keep warm. We do not even have a blackboard. We tell them do not bring bags and sometimes we stop for weeks because we have heard the Taliban are onto us. We thought about contacting an NGO but we are worried the Taliban would find out. Some other schools have been found and the teachers beaten.
We have small rebellions. Maybe you do not know we are forbidden to wear make-up under the burqa but I have a red lipstick. One of my friends runs a secret beauty salon in her bedroom.
In my family I am the eldest and apart from my sister Latifa, I have two brothers. One is a tailor, the other still a student but in school now all he learns is the Koran and the Hadith, not science or foreign languages. Science was my favourite subject. I wanted to be a science teacher.
Life here is very miserable. We have no rights at all and we have asked many times other countries of the world for help but they have been silent. Now we heard about this attack on the towers in America with many people dead and my father says the Americans will come and remove the Taliban but we do not dare hope. I wonder, maybe the world will think all Afghans are terrorists and we are not. It is the Arabs, who drive around in their Datsuns with black windows and live in big houses behind high walls in Wazir Akbar Khan and buy their foods in tins in the import shops in Chicken Street. If you saw how we lived, you would know we cannot be terrorists, we are the forgotten people.
We do not have schools, the doors of education are closed on all, especially us. I don’t know if we will ever go to school again. We cannot paint or listen to music. The Taliban ran their tanks over all the televisions.
We asked the world, are we not human beings? Do we not deserve to live in peace? Can we not have rights as women in other countries?
I do not know what you want me to write to you. If I start writing I will fill all the paper and my eyes will fill with tears because in these seven years of Taliban no one has asked us to write about our lives. In my mind I make a picture of you and your family. I wonder if you drive a car, if you go out with friends to the cinema and restaurants and dance at parties. Do you play loud music and swim in lakes? One day I would like to see and I would also like to show you a beautiful place in my country with mountains and streams but not now while we must be hidden. Maybe our worlds will always be too far apart.
Marri
1 According to the US State Department, Afghanistan’s opium crop in 2000 was 3,656 tonnes, 72 percent of the world’s total, compared to 31 percent in 1985. Production fell in 2001 after the Taliban banned the growing of opium poppies, but in 2002, following the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan became the world’s biggest opium producer again.
2 The combination of US and Soviet aid probably made Afghanistan the world’s largest recipient of personal weapons during the 1980s, according to figures from the 1991 SIPRI Yearbook on World Armaments, with total weapon imports greater than those of Iraq. For more details see Barnett Rubin.
3 Population figures in Afghanistan