How novels are helping the women of Afghanistan

Article from the Australian Financial Review

For a decade, author Deborah Ellis has used fiction to tell the real stories of those whose lives have been upended by the brutal Taliban regime.

By Deborah Ellis, Nov 2, 2022

″Everyone says I have too much intelligence!” That’s what 14-year-old Faranoz said to me 10 years ago in Kabul. We were sitting on the floor of a room with low ceilings, so packed with women there was no walking space between them.

It was a women’s literacy class, held in the home of a woman who was once married to a member of the Taliban. I was in Afghanistan interviewing children for a book about their post-Taliban lives, Kids of Kabul. A wood stove kept the winter chill away as we talked.

Faranoz told me that the early weeks of classes were filled with women crying and talking about their problems, slowly at first, then like a waterfall of storytelling.

“No one ever asks them,” she said. “They are expected to just live their lives and be quiet.”

Even Faranoz was too ashamed in the beginning to shake the teacher’s hand or look her in the eye. Faranoz had never been to school and thought she was not smart.

All of that changed for all of them after just one year of learning.

“We stand up straight and read out the words we have written in loud, clear voices. We laugh more than we cry.”

The Taliban first took power in September of l996. I saw the articles in the Toronto newspapers, got together with some feminist, anti-war friends and did some solidarity fundraising.

I wanted to know more about how women in Afghanistan were managing to live their lives and hold on to their sanity under such a brutal regime. I went to Pakistan and spent some months interviewing women and their families in the Afghan refugee camps.

Many of the women were not thriving. War, rape, hunger, dangerous journeys on foot to escape, grief and untreated illness all conspired to capture the minds of women who otherwise would blossom and contribute.

Others managed to turn their oppression into fire, operating secretly as doctors, teachers and feminist organisers. They knew that at any minute they could be captured and taken to the football stadium where men would execute them on the end of a rope or by throwing rocks at their heads.

I sat with many women and heard about their lives from the Soviet era to the Taliban era. I heard stories of girls masquerading as boys to be able to work outside their homes and support their families. The idea for the children’s novel, Parvana, was born.

The Parvana series has raised around $2 million for women in Afghanistan. Young readers are attracted to Parvana’s courage, I think because we all need courage in our own lives, no matter our circumstances or location.

After the Taliban were kicked out of power, the Afghan people seized every opportunity for liberation and progress and ran with it as far and as fast as they could.

When I was in Kabul 10 years ago, I met young artists, entrepreneurs, scholars and community workers. I went to the stadium that had been used for torture and public executions and watched the Afghan Women’s National Football Team practise their skills.

Nothing was easy for the Afghan people. Poverty, destruction of infrastructure, ongoing violence, rocket attacks and old attitudes about the position of women in society made everything difficult. But people were reaching forward with vision, iron strength and the deep belief that they could make things better.

In August 2021, the Taliban returned to power and two decades of progress came to a halt.

Like countless others, I felt unable to help as I watched the news coverage of the chaos of the Kabul airport as people tried to leave ahead of the Taliban. I thought about the people whose dreams were suddenly snatched away.

As a species, we humans should only make progress, building on our knowledge and learning from our past mistakes. We should only get wiser and kinder and more able to work together to solve problems. But age doesn’t always bring wisdom with individuals and it clearly doesn’t with nations.

I decided to write a fifth instalment in the Parvana series. It was something I knew how to do, and it might help keep Afghanistan in the public eye and raise some money to alleviate a small bit of suffering.

In the book, One More Mountain, the main characters who were children in the first book, Parvana and Shauzia, are now adult women. They have spent their lives building Afghanistan and fighting for those who are vulnerable. The book starts when the Taliban roll back into power. Everything that Parvana and Shauzia have worked for is at risk of being destroyed.

The question I tried to address in this fifth book is: how do we manage when everything we hoped for is taken away?

Just like the fictional characters, Faranoz, the girl in the literacy class, is now an adult.

“I used to think, if only I could read, then I would be happy,” Faranoz told me when she was 14. “But now I just want more.” She thought she might like to be a doctor some day.

Where is she now? Where are her dreams now? Where are her books, where is her school, where are her teachers, where are her choices? Where is her future?

Faranoz and all the others deserve the opportunity to use their good minds without being blocked by brutality, not just for the benefit of Afghanistan, but for the whole world.

Like Faranoz said, “What else can I do with so much intelligence?”

One More Mountain by Deborah Ellis (Allen & Unwin) is published on November 1.