The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan
Jenny Nordberg
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0307952509
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
An investigative journalist uncovers a hidden custom that will transform your understanding of what it means to grow up as a girl
In Afghanistan, a culture ruled almost entirely by men, the birth of a son is cause for celebration and the arrival of a daughter is often mourned as misfortune. A bacha posh (literally translated from Dari as “dressed up like a boy”) is a third kind of child – a girl temporarily raised as a boy and presented as such to the outside world. Jenny Nordberg, the reporter who broke the story of this phenomenon for the New York Times, constructs a powerful and moving account of those secretly living on the other side of a deeply segregated society where women have almost no rights and little freedom.
The Underground Girls of Kabul is anchored by vivid characters who bring this remarkable story to life: Azita, a female parliamentarian who sees no other choice but to turn her fourth daughter Mehran into a boy; Zahra, the tomboy teenager who struggles with puberty and refuses her parents’ attempts to turn her back into a girl; Shukria, now a married mother of three after living for twenty years as a man; and Nader, who prays with Shahed, the undercover female police officer, as they both remain in male disguise as adults.
At the heart of this emotional narrative is a new perspective on the extreme sacrifices of Afghan women and girls against the violent backdrop of America’s longest war. Divided into four parts, the book follows those born as the unwanted sex in Afghanistan, but who live as the socially favored gender through childhood and puberty, only to later be forced into marriage and childbirth. The Underground Girls of Kabul charts their dramatic life cycles, while examining our own history and the parallels to subversive actions of people who live under oppression everywhere.
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societies from the very beginning. In her book The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), she explains how patriarchy is not “natural” nor “God-given” but “a historic creation formed by men and women in a process that took nearly 2,500 years to its completion” (p. 212) and provides context for many things that happen in Afghanistan to this day. CHAPTER 5: THE POLITICIAN 1 most rural and undeveloped provinces Badghis ranks as the thirty-first least-developed province
village house, her eyes closed, and let the rain pour over her face. In her mind, she would go up to the locked gates at the end of the yard. She would open them, and just keep walking. It would be years before she began to dream of a big future again, but with time, she extracted permission to do more things beyond caring for her children. By teaching neighboring women to cook the exotic dishes she had learned to make in Kabul, she gained a reputation as the mashed-potato lady. Based on her
would later describe it: “I made the world dark. I thought that when I could not see the world, the world could not see me.” Arriving at kindergarten in Peshawar in the standard uniform for boys had been a mistake. Her mother had brought it to her, and Zahra had managed for a few days before the other children figured her out. The older ones began to taunt her: She was not a real boy, so why would she want to look like one? One of them ran for the teacher, who was not pleased to hear about the
her father about the issue—that would have been disrespectful and inappropriate—she made her case to her mother: “Please. I am not causing you any trouble. I do not demand anything of you, like other daughters. I never ask for new clothes, even for Eid. I am no burden. I am just trying to help.” Shukur’s mother listened to about half of what her daughter tried to say. Then she cut her off. She herself had been married at thirteen. Surely, Shukur could handle it, especially after so many years of
embroidery. A red, a yellow, and a purple sister gather on the floor around us, with their eleven children scattering between the kitchen and the reception room. The toddlers cannot make more than a determined crawl back and forth across the floor where we sit barefoot, our sandals piled up in a corner by the door. “I would not be able to stand it,” Nader says, with the abundance of nephews and nieces around her. “I am lucky not to have to be pregnant all the time and to have one after the
