The Underground Girls of Kabul (41 page)

Siddiqua interrupts herself. “If there had not been war, everything would have been different for her. But Azita is the daughter of her father. She is strong. We are who we must be.”

That their youngest granddaughter is growing up as a boy is just another concession to their own society. Over the years, they have made many.

W
E ARE STUCK
. I have promised Setareh’s family to take her back to Kabul soon, and my own visa is about to expire. But after saying
good-bye to Azita’s family, we soon realize we may actually not get very far.

Our Afghan military friends are busy elsewhere, and the United Nations is not flying into the remote province at all, due to the current “security situation,” the details of which are not shared. It’s either the road or we stay put, hoping the United Nations will change its policy. When I tell Setareh this, she looks about as crestfallen as I feel, faced with the prospect of several more weeks in the now 104-degree heat of Badghis.

As we stare at each other, I realize that of course there is one, and only one, air service that runs reliably in Afghanistan. The American one.

We do not have enough clout to work our way into the U.S. military’s infrastructure, nor do we really want to, having successfully avoided any entanglement with them so far. But the U.S. Agency for International Development routinely charters small private planes manned by tan Western pilots in white, short-sleeved epaulet shirts for every impossible-to-get- to corner of this country. However I am well aware, as I am often told by Americans, that “Sweden doesn’t matter.” In this particular situation, my humble and presumed neutral Swedish passport will not necessarily get us anywhere at all.

Time has come to fully shape-shift into my studied American immigrant persona again, honed for a decade among impossibly assertive New Yorkers. I finagle the number for the lone USAID officer, who controls both agricultural policy and flight manifests for the entire province.

And whether it is my best attempt to sound confident with a thick American accent, or a dose of Afghan magic, the generous State Department employee on the phone offers us two leather-clad seats on one of their scheduled flights out of Badghis, courtesy of American taxpayers—one for me, and one for my “Afghan partner,” as I have just dubbed Setareh in a poor attempt at official-speak. There is no request for any kind of security vetting or discussion about her ethnicity or her father’s clan: a small miracle of its own. I exclaim a
mimed “God Bless America” to Setareh, who offers a silent high five in return.

L
ATER
,
WITH OUR
departure sorted, on our final night in Badghis, Setareh has a request. “Do you know how to
couple dance
?”

It’s when a man and a woman dance together, she clarifies when I look puzzled. She has seen pictures of it online—two people hold on to each other while moving across the floor. Setareh has only ever danced by herself, or with other women, corralled in the bride’s area at weddings. So could I teach her this other way of dancing, please?

After checking to make sure the staircase is empty and that no one seems to be coming, I place my arm around her waist and her hand on my shoulder.

Our soundtrack is a Viennese waltz, hummed by me, as we go over the steps.
One-two-three, one-two-three
. Anything more modern than a waltz would require more brainpower on my part, and the waltz seems fitting—it is how I was taught to dance for my first formal dinner party in Stockholm when I was sixteen.

As I lead Setareh out in a barefoot swirl on the carpets of the governor’s guesthouse in northern Afghanistan, we tell each other about our big gowns with flowing trains. Or maybe I am in tails, with slicked-back hair and shiny patent leather shoes.

After a few staggering rounds, we move smoothly through the thick dark air streaming through tattered mosquito nets. Setareh bends her back outward against my hand, letting her uncovered waist-length black hair fall toward the floor.

She has been my bodyguard and my negotiator and my researcher and my buddy, whom I in return have taught things no proper woman should speak of. She is all woman, all the time, of a certain, very confident kind. But just like several of the
bacha posh
, she has a trusting and progressive father, who has allowed her to work and travel with me, into the unknown. She has risked her life for me, and I will always guard her secrets.

If Afghanistan again takes a more fundamentalist turn, all the Setarehs, all the Mehrans, all the Azitas, and all the refuser girls will go first. Whatever they wear and regardless of the gender they display, they will once again risk being locked behind closed doors, in darkness; their education, wisdom, and spunk wasted. These women who have sprouted up in the past decade will disappear from a magical place full of secrets, bristling with power and promise, that they could have helped run.

As we waltz in our sweat-drenched pants and tunics with a touch of Swedish bug repellent, most certainly ridiculed by Afghan mosquitoes, I think about how I should dance more when I return to my world.

T
HE WAY
I have come to see it now is that
bacha posh
is a missing piece in the history of women.

We have an idea of how patriarchy was formed. But back then, a resistance was also born.
Bacha posh
is both historical and present-day rejection of patriarchy by those who refuse to accept the ruling order for themselves and their daughters. Most
bacha posh
, including Zahra, Shukria, Shahed, Nader, and Mehran, have paid dearly for living as boys, and their circumstances were rarely chosen. But once they found themselves on the other side, they fought back. And it was noted. So can a story of concession and resistance, of tragedy and hope, exist at the same time?

For women, it always has.

Despite Afghans’ awareness of the practice, individual
bacha posh
are often isolated, and left alone to ponder their notions of gender. But each older
bacha posh
I have come to know has at one point turned to me and asked if there are others like her. Some have been stunned to learn that there are—not only in Afghanistan, but also in other countries. How can we speak to them? they have asked. How can we meet? Or, as Shahed once asked me, how could they build a village where they would all live together?

Nader is trying to do just that, in her own small way, by building resistance among her group of tae kwon do students.

It is a beginning, and we should do a lot more to help her expand that circle. Because throughout history, when European and American women disguised themselves as men to fight wars, pursue higher educations, and, for instance, become doctors—all of which were initially off-limits to women—it was eventually followed by a larger shift, where more areas slowly and painfully were pried open to women. Single acts of dressing like men did not cause that shift, but they were part of something bigger—an underground of women slowly coming to disregard what they had been told about their weaker gender by learning to imitate and disguise themselves as the other.

Some may call that tragic—that women “are not allowed to be women,” to wear billowy skirts and flowers in their hair, and instead adopt the exterior and mien of men. But that is what
most
women, in
most
countries, have had to forgo in order to infiltrate male territory. Ask female executives, lawyers, and those who work on Wall Street how much femininity they can allow themselves to display on a daily basis. And who is to say that those embellishments are what make a woman?

Afghanistan is a story of patriarchy, in a raw form. In that, it is also a story of Western history, with elements of the lives our foremothers and forefathers led. By learning about an ill-functioning system in Afghanistan, we can also begin to see how most of us—men and women, regardless of nationality and ethnicity—at times perpetuate a problematic culture of honor, where women and men are both trapped by traditional gender roles. Because we all prefer those roles—or maybe because it is how we were brought up and we know of nothing else.

B
ACHA POSH
ALSO
provides clues for the larger question of when and how the strict patriarchal and patrilineal system can begin to disintegrate in Afghanistan. Westerners have sometimes attempted to teach Afghan women about gender, freedom, human rights, and how they might conjure up the confidence to speak for themselves.
But dressing your daughter as a son, or walking out the door as a man, are only two of the creative ways Afghan women buck an impossible system. It tells us this: Being born with power, as a boy, doesn’t necessarily spur innovation. But being born entirely without it forces innovation in women, who must learn to survive almost from the moment they are born. Afghan women do not need much well-intentioned training on that.

But as Azita says, the burkas, and any other ways of hiding, will disappear only once there is safety and rule of law in Afghanistan. Until then, nothing much will happen in terms of easing harsh social codes or opening up opportunities for women. Because most of all, and first of all, there needs to be peace.

In times of war, the argument for pulling a teenage daughter out of school is simple to make—just as it’s easy to argue for marrying her off at a young age, or to use her to pay off a debt. In war, there are few dreams; the future may not exist and the prospect of reaching old age is abstract. War does away with ambition for change and even faith. The fear that the extreme insecurity of war creates fuels conservatism and closes minds, making families turn inward and trust no one. Alliances through marriage, in which women are used as trading chips, become even more important. To effect change on a larger, political scale—to defy society or one’s own family in a time of war—may be too much to ask of most.

A
FTER THAT
, it is about following the money.

The value of women in society can be fully realized and accepted—by men, women, and governments—only when they begin to achieve some economic parity. Increasing financial power makes possible political power—and political power is necessary to advocate for real change in family law, in banishing polygyny, in allowing women to get a divorce and sharing custody of children, and in prosecuting domestic abuse and sexualized violence. And only educated women, who can gain economic power, will be able to challenge flawed interpretations
of religion and culture that prescribe segregation and certain behavior of one gender. It is not just a human rights argument, it is the Warren Buffett argument and the Christine Lagarde argument: Countries that want to develop their economies and standards of living cannot afford to shut out one-half of their population. And it is the Virginia Woolf argument: In order to create, a woman needs money and a room of her own.

Conservatives and extremists in any society are extremely aware of this fact. Those who control life, and the bodies of women, control the money and hold the power. Women who are kept indoors, whether because of references to religion, culture, or honor, cannot make money and will not hold any power. Women who are married off and locked up, and raped by older husbands in order to produce male heirs, will never rule a country or explore its natural resources. Or go to war, for that matter. Women who never receive an education are not likely to demand their rightful inheritance. Women who do not have a say over their own bodies’ reproduction will never be able to challenge men on economic power. Those who hold the power to create life control the universe.

M
EN ARE THE
key to infiltrating and subverting patriarchy.

As the U.S.-led war ends, many will still say that Afghanistan’s treatment of women is due to its culture and religion. That the case for women’s rights in Afghanistan is a hopeless one. That Afghans are simply too conservative and too set in their thousand-year-old ways. But that is not true. I believe most Afghan men, on an individual level, are far from extremist or fundamentalist.

Hope rests with those men, who control what happens to their daughters. Behind every discreetly ambitious young Afghan woman with budding plans to take on the world, there is an interesting father. And in every successful grown woman who has managed to break new ground and do something women usually do not, there is a determined father, who is redefining honor and society by promoting
his daughter. There will always be a small group of elite women with wealthy parents who can choose to go abroad or to take high positions in politics. They will certainly inspire others, but in order for significant numbers of women to take advantage of higher education and participate in the economy on a larger scale, it will take powerful men educating many other men.

Those hundreds of “gender projects” funded by aid money might have been more effective if they had also included
men
. The fact that Westerners often came in intending to promote only women in a country where the majority are unemployed also contributed to the perception that the entire idea of human rights and gender equity was a stand
against men
.

This is why visible young girls and women, supported by fathers, need to be cultivated and stand as indigenous examples of how promoting daughters leads to better economic prosperity. For all. Because she brings in much more as an educated young woman than as a bride, while not making her father any less of a man, but rather one with a bigger house. Through that, the idea of honor can be redefined by men to other men. What is honorable is not to beat a woman, to sell her, or to take another wife; it is to have an educated daughter. Men, too, suffer under the current system of honor, where they alone bear the burden of supporting and protecting their families.

Just as the civil rights moment expanded to include those of any color, and as straight people joined the fight for gay people to marry, it is harder for conservatives to resist when a new economy takes hold and social norms around gender are moved by both women and men.