Your last days of being out on the streets
Early on Sunday morning I was heading to university for a class when a group of women came running out from the women’s dormitory. I asked what had happened and one of them told me the police were evacuating them because the Taliban had arrived in Kabul, and they will beat women who do not have a burqa.
We all wanted to get home, but we couldn’t use public transport. The drivers would not let us in their cars because they did not want to take responsibility for transporting a woman. It was even worse for the women from the dormitory, who are from outside Kabul and were scared and confused about where they should go.
Meanwhile, the men standing around were making fun of girls and women, laughing at our terror. “Go and put on your chadari [burqa],” one called out. “It is your last days of being out on the streets,” said another. “I will marry four of you in one day,” said a third.
Haha heehee. So funny.
She and her sisters went home and hid all their diplomas and other evidence of higher education.
All I could see around me were the fearful and scared faces of women and ugly faces of men who hate women, who do not like women to get educated, work and have freedom. Most devastating to me were the ones who looked happy and made fun of women. Instead of standing by our side, they stand with the Taliban and give them even more power.
…
Then today, when I heard that the Taliban had reached Kabul, I felt I was going to be a slave. They can play with my life any way they want.
I also worked as a teacher at an English-language education centre. I cannot bear to think that I can no longer stand in front of the class, teaching them to sing their ABCs. Every time I remember that my beautiful little girl students should stop their education and stay at their home, my tears fall.
Welcome to the 8th century.
It’s unbearable.
I guess there’s nothing left for these women to do but to change their pronouns to “he”/”him”.
I don’t even know how to respond. This is heartbreaking. I just came from teaching a class that is mostly women, all getting a higher education, all wearing what they want to wear. To think that all these bright, cheerful faces that started my morning being hidden behind walls of cloth just…chokes me up.
Just horrible, after 20 years of relative freedom.
Perhaps we could’ve helped create something more stable if we hadn’t gotten distracted by Iraq, but Afghanistan is where empires go to die.
Some survivors of Auschwitz reported that, when they looked out the narrow slats of the cattle cars approaching the death camp, they could see people who lived in the area. And a few of these people would look at the eyes peering out and make a slicing motion across their neck. “You’re going to die.” It wasn’t a warning. It was a silent gloat. “Take that, Jews. These are the last moments of your life, and good riddance. You’ll find no sympathy here.”
This, reminds me of that.
I can’t imagine how these Afghanistan women feel, but I can’t stop imagining it, either. Heartbreaking, indeed.
Afghanistan is about to enter a dark age. I think it could be hat the government there collapsed as rapidly as it did because a lot of young men opportunistically waited till late in the piece to decide which side they would support, and then chose the Taliban.
However, if the anti-Taliban forces have been wise, they will have empowered as many women and girls as possible by teaching them basic literacy and numeracy skills. Once these are learned, they cannot be ‘de-learned’ short of killing the woman or girl concerned, and the Taliban do not want to do that. They want the women for their multiple wives, concubines and harem slaves..
Ireland was the first conquest in the English imperial enterprise. The conquerors decreed that Irish children were to be kept illiterate and as pig-ignorant as possible. But a generation of Irish priests, called the ‘croppies’ after their hairstyles, ran illegal hedgerow schools (literally in the hedgerows) and kept learning alive there.
One would hope that there will now be enough educated women in Afghanistan to start something along the same lines as the Irish hedgerow schools there. As Mao’s dictum has it: ‘support what the enemy opposes; oppose what the enemy supports.
Afghanistan entered a dark age in 1978, and it has never recovered from the Saur Revolution. The subsequent invasion by the USSR, the creation and arming of the Mujahideen by USA, USSR’s defeat and the rise of the Taliban, followed by America’s 20 year long invasion, Afghanistan never stood a chance.
20 years, billions of dollars, thousands of lives lost, all because an American President, once again, could only see war as a solution to a problem, not the cause of future problems.
And already, the ‘proggies’ on FaceBook are denying it, and changing the subject to how the poor Taliban were oppressed by Big Bad Westerners.
JtD, that’s similar to what I see a lot, with people who cite the Islamic mantra that the world is ‘decadent’. They accept that (probably because they see decadence everywhere they look, too) without questioning what ‘decadent’ means to groups like the Taliban and Al Queda. A woman driving is “decadence”. A woman sitting beside a man on a park bench is “decadence”. Girls wearing poodle skirts and saddle shoes at a dance in a church in the 1950s were decadence. VAWA is decadence.
Many of the things the left have fought for over at least the past century are termed ‘decadence’ not only by Islamists but by a lot of Christians and Orthodox Jews. Now many on the left seem eager to agree that the western world is sunk into “decadence”.
The Taliban is not talking about nude beaches, internet hookups, and fuck buddies. They are talking about all of us. I’m a woman working in a school, a doctorate in Biology. My arms show in my short sleeved shirt. My face showed. I am wearing pants. I drove to work today. I went without my husband to the house of the man who is directing my play; I had no male guardian with me. To the Taliban, I am hopelessly decadent and should be forced back into the ‘proper’ role of a woman. And I should be stuffed in a bag with only my eyes showing.
If that’s the case I am ever so happy to keep my Facebook account deactivated indefinitely.
Twitter, too.
iknklast @9, and yet some would maintain that the worst thing that could possibly happen to you would be someone to use an incorrect pronoun. How have so many people lost any sense of perspective (or a grasp on reality)?
iknklast @#9:
Once they have you pigeonholed, no further thought or discussion is necessary.