The Underground Girls of Kabul (29 page)

As a woman, as a man, her looks display an androgynous beauty that defies a traditional gender, with unlikely green eyes and the occasional smile. When she curls her upper lip slightly Shahed looks as though she can hear what I am thinking: “If my family had been rich, I would have been a woman,” she says. “With five or six children.” She pauses and looks at Nader, who immediately gets the joke. “Or maybe more like ten or twelve.”

They both laugh at the idea. Children are not for them. If womanhood culminates with becoming a mother, they are very removed from it. Nader, too, used to be asked when she would change back. She always gave the same one-word response:
Never
.

Those around her used to argue that biology would overtake her one day, when she married and had children. She would agree, just to make them stop talking, knowing it would not happen. Both Nader and Shahed believe what others, too, have expressed: Once you have gone through the early teenage years as a man there is no turning back. When you go against nature, nature will follow, adjusting the body to the mind. They are slightly unsure about what they are, and they do not define themselves as one definitive gender.

It was a survival strategy that with time grew into an identity. Shahed offers an idea of what she has become, echoing a long history of women before her: “They say men are braver, stronger, and more powerful than women. But some women are braver and stronger than men. I am a
warrior
.”

She measures herself against other warriors, in both endurance and strength, during all the weightlifting and the explosive runs they practice. When thoughts of fatigue take hold in her mind, she fails sooner. When she pushes them away, she can keep going for longer. The Americans who trained her said a soldier needs a good mind
more than a strong body. Her mother will sometimes worry, telling her it is not good for a woman to use her body in the ways she does. But Shahed ignores her. Showing fatigue should be avoided. A warrior must keep her focus and, beyond that, it doesn’t matter if the warrior has the body of a woman. Shahed looks to me for confirmation: In the West, everyone knows this, right?

M
AYBE
. T
HE TRADITIONAL
narrative of war and gender is present throughout Western societies as well, even though the idea that women possess something inherently good and peaceful has proven to be flawed many times. And despite a legacy of female warriors, women are still traditionally seen as those who should be protected. Just like the range for acceptable sexual behavior shrunk in the past centuries, the definition of how a woman should act and what she is capable of has also narrowed. Dead or wounded soldiers were always a potential political problem. Dead or wounded women—mothers and daughters—are even harder to explain and justify. In the past few hundred years, leaders of many societies have demanded women stay behind as men fight the battles. Excluding women from battle has even been brought forward as a measure of a country’s degree of civilization—presuming, of course, that war is at all part of a civilized society.

Men may also need to keep war to themselves for other reasons.

While females endure rites of passage on the way to womanhood, including menstruating and later maybe motherhood, manhood does not automatically occur in such a distinct way. When anthropologist David D. Gilmore researched concepts of masculinity for
his 1990 study
Manhood in the Making
, he found the pressure on men to demonstrate their gender was far greater than that on women in most societies. Going to war to protect the honor of a country and its women was always a certain way for a man to define himself. To then include women in warfare is to threaten one of the most effective ways men prove themselves in society. By cultivating what we may think of as
a “natural” aggression in sons from an early age, we are raising future warriors, suggests international relations professor Joshua Goldstein in his book
War and Gender
.

Still,
women today make up 15 percent of troops on active duty in the U.S. military. They have been shot down, killed, and maimed in the hundreds in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite that, women have not been officially allowed in “combat positions.” A third of positions in the U.S. Marine Corps as well as the army have been closed to women; the Pentagon made a decision to revisit the ban on women only recently, in 2012. The idea of women serving in some specialized units is still expected to be met with great resistance, with the familiar arguments: Women in the field are not as physically or mentally strong as men. It could also be too distracting for men to serve in close proximity to women. The biggest hesitation around allowing women in battle, however, as openly expressed by several male American military officials, may be that it changes the honor narrative of war, in which men are supposed to act as the protectors of women and home. And that may be the most dangerous thing of all to the military—if they cannot explain why we must fight.

Presenting a convincing threat to loved ones is vital in selling any war, with the underlying idea that war is absolutely necessary to preserve peace. In Western society, and particularly in the American political story, women are still the bearers of honor for their family and their country, and the very reason to
defend freedom;
the most often cited reason for going to war in our time.

F
REEDOM IS AN
interesting concept. When I asked Afghans to describe to me the difference between men and women, over the years interesting responses came back. While Afghan men often begin to describe women as more sensitive, caring, and less physically capable than men, Afghan women tend to offer up only one difference, which had never entered my mind before.

Want to take a second and guess what that one difference may be?

Here is the answer: Regardless of who they are, whether they are
rich or poor, educated or illiterate, Afghan women often describe the difference between men and women in just one word:
freedom
.

As in: Men have it, women do not.

Shahed says the same thing, when I ask her. “When no one is the boss of your life,” is how she goes on to define it.

“So in the West, there is less difference between men and women?”

Shahed and Nader look at each other again and then back at me. They don’t know. Perhaps I am supposed to tell them? But then Nader changes her mind, telling me not to bother. She doesn’t want to hear it. “We are nothing. We would be nothing in the West, too.”

Shahed is more hopeful, inspired by snippets of information from her American trainers: “I have heard that people don’t care what you are or how you look in the West.”

Not exactly true. But our definition of “freedom” may be different, and it changes with each generation. The current war in Afghanistan, for instance, is named “Operation Enduring Freedom” to indicate something worth fighting a thirteen-year war over. But freedom as we know it today is yet another evolutionary luxury, American author Robin Morgan says, when I later tell her about Shahed and Nader. “[Birth] sex is a
reality;
gender and freedom are
ideas
.”

And it’s all in how we choose to define those ideas.

The Afghan women I have met, sometimes with little education but a lifetime of experience of being counted as less than a full human being, have a distinct view of what exactly freedom is. To them, freedom would be to avoid an unwanted marriage and to be able to leave the house. It would be to have some control over one’s own body and to have a choice of when and how to become pregnant. Or to study and have a profession. That’s how they would define freedom.

As we arrive at Nader’s house on another day, three of her sisters are visiting. Under each of their burkas are Indian-style saris with gold 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 other. If I were a woman here, that would be my entire life.”

Nader’s sisters have carefully made-up faces framed by long curly black hair. One sister leans forward as she attempts to explain Nader to me: “Do you understand that it is the wish of every Afghan woman to have been born a man? To be free?”

The other two agree. If they had had their choice, they would have been born as men. Nader is living that fantasy, and that is why other women turn on her sometimes. She does not play by the rules to which they are all subjected. “Nader wants to be her own government,” one of the sisters explains. “Not like us, with our husbands as the government always.”

To make me understand why some
bacha posh
continue to live as men in Afghanistan when they reach adulthood, another sister asks a rhetorical question that is excruciatingly simple to answer: “If you could walk out the door right now as a man or stay in here forever as a woman, which would you choose?”

She is right. Who would not walk out the door in disguise—if the alternative was to live as a prisoner or slave? Who would really care about long hair or short, pants or skirt, feminine or masculine, if renouncing one’s gender gave one access to the world? So much for the mysteries of gender, or the right to a specific one, with this realization. A great many people in this world would be willing to throw out their gender in a second if it could be traded for freedom.

The real story of Nader, Shahed, and other women who live as men in Afghanistan is not so much about how they break gender norms or what they have become by doing that. Rather, it is about this: Between gender and freedom,
freedom
is the bigger and more important idea. In Afghanistan as well as globally. Defining one’s gender becomes a concern only
after
freedom is achieved. Then a person can begin to fill the word with new meaning.

F
REEDOM IS ALSO
what the sisters want to question
me
on.

What does a Western woman do with all that supposed freedom they hear about? After they whisper for a bit, one of them turns to me: “You can do anything you want, and you come to
Afghanistan
?”

“Is it the dust?” she jokes. “Or the war? We always have war.”

It’s more of a statement than a question, and the other sisters are with her; it is very strange for a woman to come to Afghanistan, presuming she could choose to be anywhere else in the world. It is also very strange of my father to allow it, they believe.

Not sure where to begin, I say nothing.

“This is what you do with your life,” the sister continues, incredulously, at my silence. “Don’t you want a family? To have children?”

She looks a little concerned.

“You should not wait too long to get married. You will be too old to have children!”

Yes. I may be too old already, I say.

Setareh stares at the floor, mortified. All three sisters look around, before one speaks again, with the question they want an answer to.

“Then what is the purpose of your life as a woman? What is the meaning?”

“You might as well have been born a man,” another fills in. “What is there now to make you a woman?”

“You have your freedom,” the first sister says again. “You can walk out when you want. But we also feel sad for you.”

She glances at Nader.

“We know our sister is sad sometimes, too. It is the sad issue of being a man.”

Nader looks embarrassed, and perhaps a little irritated. A toddler with three piercings in one ear and a polka-dot jumpsuit has wobbled up to her and maneuvered herself into her lap.

Nader’s face changes, and she adjusts her position on the floor to hold her niece with both hands. She leans her head down to inhale the scent of the girl’s wispy black hair. She closes her eyes for a moment.

“I have told them to save one for me,” she says to me, tilting her
head at the sisters. “They have so many. We can pretend one of them is mine.”

Her sisters nod. They can all agree on that.

W
HEN WE MANEUVER
through Kabul’s outer neighborhoods on our way home with Nader at the wheel—she insists she is a better and safer driver than any man we might employ for the task—she suddenly has an announcement: “I will take you to my
bachas
.”

I press Setareh’s hand so she will just say yes and not inquire further. Of course we want to meet Nader’s boys.

Setareh catches Nader’s phone, tossed from the front seat. We stick our heads together to see what she wants to show us. There, in the middle of a tiny cell phone shot, is Nader, her arms around the shoulders of two teenagers. Both are dressed in suits, with slicked-back gamine hair. They have young, glowing faces with soft features and those confident, defiant eyes. They are not trying to be cute, nor do they look down. They are all grinning, exposing their teeth.