Review of My Pen is The Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women, pub. MacLehose Press 2022

[sheenaghpugh]

Now they say the Taliban has changed. But how could they change without reading a book? If a person never reads a book, how can he change?
 (“Blossom”, by Zainab Akhlaqi)

Shaherbano, the girl who utters this magnificent contempt for ignorance, will die in an attack on a girls’ school, which the Taliban have targeted because they, like her, know the power of education, though unlike her they also fear it. I don’t think I have ever read a book that breathes such a passion for learning as this collection of stories. They come from both urban and rural women all over Afghanistan, written in Dari and Pashto, collated by the organisation Untold, translated into English by Afghan women and men, at a time when the Taliban were busy repossessing Kabul. One story was hand-written, photographed and sent via a chain of WhatsApp messages.

Unsurprisingly, there is a considerable undercurrent of bitterness and irony in many of them, as when the protagonist of Marie Bamyani’s “The Black Crow of Winter” reflects: “If only I had a relative who worked as a government official, he would have helped us. I couldn’t think of anyone. Poor people have poor friends.” The narrator of Sharifa Pasun’s “What Are Friends For?” is similarly acerbic: “Thank god, I said to myself, that the sun is not someone’s property, otherwise I’d have to pay rent for that as well.”

Yet these authors are also keenly aware of the small sensual pleasures of the world around them, its sights, sounds, smells, tastes: “The sound of the azan broke through the dark blue and orange atmosphere of the evening. The smell of onion and tomatoes filled the alley, where you could guess what each neighbour was having for dinner” (“The Worms”; Fatima Saadat). There is a strong feeling that escaping to another country, though it might solve many problems, would leave them with a terrible sense of loss. They also value individual acts of kindness, female solidarity, the fellow-feeling that keeps people going. It can’t be denied that a great many of Afghan women’s problems stem from Afghan men.  Yet there are allies too, as we see from the male students refusing to take their university exams in solidarity with their sisters, and there is a remarkable sense of balance in these stories. For every cruel husband in these stories, there is a loving one, for every father who does not value daughters, another who does. Indeed, these authors are forgiving enough sometimes to take a male protagonist and think their way into his head, notably in “D for Daud”, where Anahita Gharib Nawaz uses the voice of a teacher who falsely confesses to a crime to protect his student, and “I Don’t Have The Flying Wings”, where Batool Haidari movingly inhabits the consciousness of a young man who longs to be a woman.

War and violence naturally figure, in an often chillingly matter-of-fact way: “Oh God’s mercy! Who have they shot this time?” (“Haska’s Decision”, by Rana Zurmaty). So do suicide bombers, and it is notable that these are portrayed less as fighters or martyrs than as mentally disturbed people, so damaged by an unloved or low-achieving past that they have lost all normal feelings of humanity. They are to be abhorred and pitied, never admired.

The actual quality of the writing is very high. These are subtle, accomplished writers who deserve a wide readership. I think there was just one story where I thought an object was being used symbolically in too obvious a way. One testimony to their quality is that although they are deeply rooted in their own time and place and bring it vividly alive, the stories go beyond it: their concerns are universally relevant. Reading Fatema Khavari’s “Ajah”, in which the achievement of a group of women astounds their menfolk, I found myself humming the union anthem “solidarity for ever”, while in “Bad Luck”, by Atifa Mozaffari, in which a woman makes a marriage of necessity, believing her real love to be dead or exiled, I recognised an old Scottish folk motif whereby a girl marries an old man, for her family’s sake, after her sweetheart is apparently lost at the fishing. The similarity shows not that “Auld Robin Gray” is well known in Afghanistan, which would much surprise me, but that love, loss and compromise are the same the world over.

At the end of “Bad Luck”, the protagonist wastes no time in useless regrets; things are as they are, and one must make the best of them. “She no longer wondered if Ali had been thinking about her all these years. She had to worry about what to cook for dinner and how to convince her husband to remove his artificial leg at night.” The women in these stories are not passive victims of fate; they are determined to have some agency in their own lives, however circumscribed this may be by men and authority. They are brimful of small schemes to improve things; a mother scrimps enough cash to buy her son a lollipop, a widow avoids remarriage by starting a biscuit-making enterprise. Not all their schemes work; cruelty and bigotry are powerful enemies. But the determination that shines through the protagonists is the determination which caused these authors to write down and publish their thoughts, sometimes even under their own names, a piece of courage that frankly astounds me. We must hope, not only that they will not suffer for it, but that one day they will be able to be published in their own land and language.  But in the meantime, enjoy this vivid, powerful, entertaining collection. The Taliban, poor ignoramuses, don’t know what they are missing.