Before the utter horror of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there was Afghanistan. The US military left the country on August 30, 2021. After nearly 20 years of US occupation, the Taliban took control. In the months and years leading up to the US departure, whatever the failings of the occupation, it was hard to overlook reports of Afghan women's anxiety about a future under the Taliban.
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Nonetheless, hearing from Afghan women directly about the American occupation, their experiences under a series of governments, or their hopes or fears, was almost impossible. For readers of fiction in English, books such as Khalid Hosseini's bestselling A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner are available, but fiction (and narrative nonfiction) written by Afghan women is nearly impossible to access.
My Pen is the Wing of a Bird gives Australian readers an introduction to the voices and experiences of Afghan women writers. The culmination of work by Untold, a writer development program for marginalised writers in areas of conflict and post-conflict, the collection is the result of the collaboration between editors, Afghan women writers, and translators. It comprises work written in the languages of Pashto and Dari and translated into English by Afghan intellectuals and journalists. The stories are about family, friendship, gender identity and real-life events. Many of the stories are also about the experience of work, both employed labour and work in the home. As BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet, who reported on the war in Afghanistan, argues in the introduction, these narratives give "more nuanced answers" to urgent questions about the predicament of Afghan women. They present the lives of Afghan people in complex, diverse and urgent ways. Moreover, they were written before the Taliban takeover, giving the reader a sense of how it felt to live in Afghanistan in recent years, and late in the 20th century, but also leaving the reader with questions about what it is like to live in Afghanistan now.
The stories range from being realistic, such as Maryam Mahjoba's "Companion", which artfully focuses on an older woman who has encouraged all of her children to leave the country, to the more impressionistic and surreal. These stories include "Falling from the Summit of Dreams" by Parand, in which a second wife dreams of escaping the suffering inflicted on her by her husband's family; and, "The Most Beautiful Lips in the World" by Elahe Hosseini, about a suicide bomber at a wedding. The stories also vary in setting in time and place. In "What Are Friends For?" by Sharifa Pasun, set in 1986, a university professor is told by her head of department that she will not be able to access the university housing she so desperately needs. Instead, this will be given to her friend, whose family already owns several apartments. "The Late Shift" also by Sharifa Pasun, is similarly set in Kabul in a 1980s, but in this story the protagonist is a newsreader during the Soviet-Afghan war in Kabul, who narrowly avoids being struck by a rocket before going on air. In many of these pieces, and especially those by Pasun, the women characters endure difficult circumstances with equanimity.
This is not to say that the stories lack emotion. One of the most moving stories in the collection, "Daughter Number Eight" by Freshta Ghani, depicts the experiences of a woman who has given birth prematurely to an eighth baby. The mother is desperate to find out the gender of her child, who she does not see for five days, because she is fearful of her husband's family's response if it is another girl. A story set in rural Afghanistan about a young woman who becomes blind, "Bad Luck" by Atifa Mozaffari, and whose beloved cousin disappears, depicts the cousin returning with the money for the surgery to cure the woman's blindness.
While these stories largely focus on women's lives in Afghanistan, individual pieces also suggest how the oppression of women affects Afghan men. "Dogs are not to Blame" by Masouma Kawsari is about a petition writer who helps illiterate people involved in court cases.
In all, My Pen is the Wing of a Bird gives a fascinating and affecting overview of life in Afghanistan from the perspective of diverse characters. Its value lies not only in its diverse representations of Afghan life, but in its establishment of Afghanistan as a place which had a thriving, though necessarily subdued, literary culture.
The only limitation of the collection is that it does not contain biographies of the individual authors and translators. Perhaps these were omitted due to concerns about their safety. Nonetheless, this reader longed to know more about the authors of these stories, and has resorted to googling their names in an attempt to find out what has happened to them since the Taliban took over.
- Lucy Neave is the author of the novels Believe in Me and Who We Were.