Our Shared Stories: An Afghan Diary

By Our Shared Stories: An Afghan Diary

One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. A social entrepreneur who founded the first coding school for girls in Afghanistan and won the Google RISE Award. The 2016 Forbes Impact Winner and founder of the first boarding school for girls in Afghanistan. A woman who was shot in the face by her husband. An author who has been publis

• Language: English
• Publisher: Our Shared Stories: An Afghan Diary
• Release date: Aug 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781513614465

Book preview

Edited by Emal Dusst & Jahan Shahryar

Copyright

Copyright, 2016, Emal Dusst & Jahan Shahryar (of the collection)

Copyright of each work belongs to the respective author

Cover photo copyright Dr. William Bill Frederick Podlich

ISBN:978–1–5136–1395–6

www.afghandiary.com

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all of the writers for contributing their personal stories to this anthology.

We would like to also thank Clayton Esterson for providing us the right to use the cover photo taken by Dr. William Bill Frederick Podlich in 1967 in Afghanistan, where he spent a few years while working for UNESCO.

Additionally, we would like to thank Ziauddin Yousafzai, Malala’s father, for personally obtaining Behroz Khan’s permission to include the translated lyrics from his song Bibi Shireena, which was performed live in Oslo, Norway when Malala won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

Jahan Shahryar

To my late father, who taught me that there is no feat too great for an educated woman. To my loving mother, who encourages me to keep an open heart and an open mind. To my thoughtful brother, who shows me unconditional love and friendship. Thank you will never be enough.

Emal Dusst

To my mother, who had an arranged marriage at the age of sixteen, raised two children by herself across different continents and always pushed for us getting the best education. To my sister, Lisa.

Contents

Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Belonging and Home amongst the Afghan Diaspora, Deepali Gaur

Chapter1 & The Departure

Of Sunshine and Ghosts, Shakieb Orgunwall

The Decision, Layma Murtaza

I Forgot My Toys, Jacob Ayubi

The Divine Whole, Rokhshana Daudi

And still, a part of your heart is in this world, Gabrielle Clifford

Chapter 2 & Hyphenated Identity

The Inevitable Experience of Afghan Diaspora: Acculturation, Dr. Nahid Aziz

Fighter, Frishta Bastan

Stuck, Frishta Bastan

The Full Price, Qais Akbar Omar

Afghan–American, Hoda Sana

My Grandfather’s Ghost, Reza Hessabi

Art, Ali Baluch

Chapter 3 & Culture

What’s in a Name?, Joan Kayeum

Sarina: An Afghan Girl, Betsy Thomas Amin–Arsala

I Am a Girl and I am Free, Roia Shefayee

What is Afghan Culture? Suleiman Wali

A Soft, Beautiful Sound, Nawa Arsala

Chapter 4 & Family

Under Your Crescent Moon, Krystle Lialah Ahmadyar

From Coche Ali Reza Khan to the White House, Jahan Shahryar

Jamila, Shakil Nooristani

Chapter 5 & The Motherland

Freedom, Ariana Delawari

Back Home, Dr. Mohammad Ali Aziz–Sultan

Finding the Good, Baktash Ahadi

A Visitor from Hollywood, Masuda Sultan

Inside the President’s Circle, Ajmal Ahmady

Chapter 6 & Innovating for the Future

Educating Girls: The Power to Change a Nation? Shabana Basij–Rasikh

Technology as an Agent of Change for Our Women, Roya Mahboob

Afghan Girls Inspire Future Brilliance, Sophia Swire

Building Afghanistan 2.0 with Afghan Girls Who Code, Fereshteh Forough

The Almighty Tylenol, Ahmad Bassam

The Present Afghanistan Needs Your Attention More Than the Past, Mina Sharif

Chapter 7 & Reflections

Lyrical Devotion for My Rusty A´ina, Sara Wais

Wakhan Adventure, Ambassador Ronald E. Neumann (ret.)

A Dream of the Grand Canyon, Nang Attal

My Adopted Home: A Country in Transition, Lael Mohib

Counting Hope, Yasmeen Gailani

Kilburn to Kabul, Dr. Thomas Wide

Remembering Who You Are & Where You Are Going, Krystle Lialah Ahmadyar

Chapter 8 & The Departure Part II

I Was Shot, Shakeela Zarin

Ravenna, Hyphen Pending, Jasmine Afshar

People of Nowhere: Inside the Refugee Crisis, Freshta Poupal

In Transit, Dr. Shinkai Hakimi

Supporting Girls’ Education

Editors’ Introduction

The stories in this book should leave you with emotions and perspectives that were yet to be developed. This anthology has dozens of personal stories that will shed a new light on both the country of Afghanistan and the individual Afghan experience.

First, this book connects Afghan people around the world. While many of us are displaced from the land of Afghanistan, we are, nonetheless, tied to our rich Afghan culture. Though we may be spread across continents, we are not alone. We hold common traditions, languages, foods, and dance. We have endured similar experiences during the wars or throughout our journeys abroad. We are Afghan, hyphenated or not.

Second, this book is a great opportunity to share our culture outside the Afghan community. It is a chance to show others that we are not so different from them, that we love our new homes, and that we have contributed to our adoptive countries as well as our motherland. You will also find several stories from non–Afghans who relay their own conception of the Afghan people.

Finally, this book supports girls’ education in Afghanistan. All proceeds go to the social enterprises Code to Inspire, School of Leadership–Afghanistan, and Digital Citizen Fund. The founders of all three organizations share their stories in this book. Your contribution directly aids the new generation of girls in Afghanistan who seek empowerment through education.

Belonging and Home amongst the

Afghan Diaspora

By Deepali Gaur

A line of spice jars are a reminder of a city that was once home for an exiled Afghan artist. She uncaps the bottles, not to cook as much as for a reminder of her history and heritage. Another young woman takes hundreds of pictures to capture every moment in the present. She lost all her childhood pictures when they fled home. These pictures are her way of making up for that loss. A father of two

teenage girls remembers his own journey out of Kabul when he was roughly the same age as his older daughter is now. The first night in the new city is spent crying for what he left behind. A woman shares memories of their home in Kabul with her brother only to realize that the longing for that home has made it even larger in her memories over the years than it actually was.

Food, music, photographs, clothes all play an intrinsic part in the notions of home and belonging that the members of a diasporic community construct for themselves. And as people cross one border in to another and continue their journeys, identities are constituted and reconstituted not just by a sense of belonging to an ancestral and lost homeland, but by the very act of traveling itself. As individuals travel, so do their cultures. And a travelling culture means a culture that changes, develops and transforms itself according to all the diverse influences it encounters in different places. This transformation is also a two–way flow as host cultures too, do not remain untouched by migrating groups or cultures, whether the migrants are permanents settlers or merely in transit while they await resettlement.

It is not uncommon to see diasporic groups making food a central part of their ‘essential’ identity as part of their everyday lives, popular discourse/culture. Diaspora populations transfer their food culture and habits to new countries, as an extension of their culture and as a means of creating a new life with resonances of their homeland. And in doing this they also transfer elements of their own culinary culture to the diversity of other culinary cultures.

A diasporic group, as in the case of Afghans in different parts of the world, is often an amalgam of a few to several journeys occurring over different timescales and to different (and sometimes the same) parts of the world. Many young Afghans experienced their first forced migration by virtue of the 1979 war. They moved to various countries and built their identities on the basis of their diverse experiences of dislocation. Some even returned to Afghanistan expecting to rebuild their lives only to have to leave yet again. At other times they would have been forcefully deported not once but several times only to attempt to make the journey yet again to get away from the conflict and violence. As a consequence, for many, a substantial part of their lives has been spent in repeated flight. And it is during the course of these various displacements that they carried the knowledge of both their host communities back to Afghanistan and of their own home communities to the new destinations. What results is an account of two kinds of journeys; two searches for home and spaces of belonging that take place simultaneously. The first is a physical one, across national borders, from Afghanistan to the new home the country of settlement and perhaps back to Afghanistan again. The other kind is a journey through questions of identity, history, cultures, ancestry and belonging. In transnational social fields, the realities of return for some individuals are connected to the possibilities of return for others.

A remembrance of misfortune, genocide or expulsion is what the term diaspora often conjures as the population so described finds itself separated from its national territory even as it continues to harbour hopes, or at least a desire – perceived or real – of returning to their homeland at some point. Thus, diasporas define themselves through relationships and contacts with the homeland, with members of a diasporic group trying to maintain their ethno national identity, through their contacts with other dispersed segments of the same nation and through a host of intricate organizations. And in the last decade or so, the social media and networks have also helped to maintain these contacts by being platforms for shared experiences and a sense of collective memory. All of this is done on the basis of a presumed solidarity to encourage participation in the cultural, political, social and economic life and thereby protect the rights of their members.

While speaking of displacement what is often forgotten is that in almost all traditional cultures and societies such as the Afghan society, almost every woman faces displacement when marriage takes her to her matrimonial home. Marriage uproots her from her ties to family and kin, placing her in an environment that is alien but can also be hostile and it is this new place that she has to start calling home. The dislocation is only intensified further when conflict and violence in the nation necessitate flight from home. The almost constant nature of unsettling and settling of the household, as a consequence of this recurring displacement brought on by unrelenting conflict, severely impacts what is perceived as the uniform meaning of home – a place of safety and security – as it metamorphoses into something less stable and more fragile.

Afghans have continued to be the largest groups that have sought refuge globally. Most migratory movements since the 1980s have been the result of violent armed conflicts, economic dislocation and political repression, or rivalries between countries; and this is very true of the Afghan diaspora as well. Yet, the voluntary nature of some of the resettlement cannot be ignored as well. In fact prior to the Soviet war, many Afghan professionals and intellectuals migrated to various countries following their education in western institutions.

It can very well be that for Afghans residing in other countries, sometimes already for decades, Afghanistan no longer represents ‘home’. New ‘homes’ and new senses of belonging could have been established outside Afghanistan, as the prospect and desire to return both diminish. It is then that many might even re–evaluate their bonds with both Afghanistan as well as with the country that hosts them. Such repeated exile and movement, for some, even result in a loss of nostalgia for a single home. Such movement and such memories are what have often challenged the discourses of fixed origins. Many Afghans describe themselves as located in three places – the city or place connected to the original home, the place of transit which might have served as home for a reasonable time and the final place of resettlement. These experiences manifest how some individuals may have multiple homes throughout their diasporic experience.

The ambiguities between assimilation and the continued sense of longing for the homeland are negotiated daily when a father – a former diplomat – yearns for his country even as he feels his children owe much to the country they are resettled in as it gave them a home at a time they lost one. A musician shares his sense of loss of a home through his music and a lawyer holds on to parts of her culture and her own identity through a fusion of the food habits of the home she left and the new one she found. The fleeting yet pleasant memory of a song heard every night when falling asleep, eating with your fingers as a connection with food habits and cultural affinity, an unresolved fascination for the experiences of an earlier generation all contribute to the shared experiences of people spanning great distances, many decades and even several generations. And each memory carries its own imprint as it passes through these various oral narratives to contribute to yet another set of memories.

[Deepali Gaur is a New Delhi-based author, academic and media practitioner. She completed her doctoral degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi with a specialization on Afghanistan and is the author of the book Drugs Production and Trafficking in Afghanistan (2007). As part of the NTS-Asia Research fellowship (2009), she authored Afghan Women in the Diaspora: Surviving Identity and Alienation. She was also awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Heidelberg for a film project on the Afghan diaspora in Germany.]

Chapter 1

The Departure

Of Sunshine and Ghosts

By Shakieb Orgunwall

There is a ghost in these photographs. Look closely—it lurks quietly within the frames. It’s no ordinary phantom; not some shadowy apparition or a specter in flames. But the imperishable spirit of a nation; of a country that almost was; of an Afghanistan that might have been.

And it now roams, enchained, through the abandoned corridors of my imagination; staring back at me, pleadingly, off the surface of the printed film, from where it has haunted me since my earliest recollections.

As a small boy intrigued, brimming with wonder; as a teen in search of truth; as a grown man trying to reassemble fragments of an identity shattered swiftly in youth.

I peer into images diminished now. Dimmed and dulled through the passage of years. And yet, in some ways impressed eternally upon the pages of my mind. Old pictures from an era bygone, tucked between the covers of my family’s photo albums; aging and fading out of sight and mind.

In truth, for many years I remained conflicted as to whether these pictures warranted my sharing, but at some point I found my ambivalence receding, giving way to a realization that these images no longer belonged to my family alone, but to every Afghan the world over.

Belonging, not as souvenirs collected through our common travels of scattered displacement, but as an inheritance passed down from Afghans of yesteryear to ourselves. Fragile, guarded heirlooms, testaments to the triumphs and travails of our past. For the glimpses afforded us by these portraits and vignettes of long ago, evince an oft–forgotten chapter of our history.

The young men pictured here comprised some of Afghanistan’s sharpest and brightest minds; men who were born not into aristocracy, great wealth, or fame, but who had earned their place amongst the best of their day by sheer virtue of their scholastic achievements.

As members of the common class, their ascent through the echelons of Afghan civil society marked a significant reversal of the status quo. For the first time, notable numbers of young Afghans were granted opportunities to study abroad. Opportunities, no longer owing exclusively to personal connections, but to the merits of their academic accomplishments.

Given that these men had hailed from the rank and file of Afghan society, illustrates the then recent strides in progress that had been made. That despite its many problems, the country was – for the most part – beginning to correct course and steer itself in the right direction. I know this to be true as my own father was one such student amongst many.

Having been awarded a scholarship from USAID, he’d arrived in New York City in the summer of 1965 to enroll in a joint curriculum program between NYU and Columbia University. At the age of fourteen, he had left his home city of Orgun, in Eastern Afghanistan, to live and study in Kabul where his scholastic achievements in school had garnered the attention of faculty.

Being neither politically nor personally connected to any member of the Afghan elite, he knew well his failure or success would rely wholly on his academic performance.

Like my father, each year dozens of young Afghan men and, on occasion, women, arrived in the States. Each bringing with them not only the hope of receiving a world–class education from prestigious and renowned institutions, but of returning home, armed with the knowledge and expertise required to advance their country.

And like him, not a single soul amongst them had any clue of what horrors fate would soon visit upon their land. For in a few short years, the initial signs of a protracted conflict would emerge. A conflict that would, in time, serve to sever the thin threads of tolerance and peace that had long stitched–shut a myriad of historic wounds.

Along with the end of those peaceful, heady days—terms now readily used to describe that final era of King Zahir’s rule—would arrive the end of the hopes and aspirations of these young scholars.

Most would never return to the United States, and the fortunate few who would, arrived under circumstances that vastly differed from those of their previous sojourns: arriving now as refugees in flee of war.

As children of that generation—those of us raised in the States—we were deeply aware of the national tragedies that befell the land of our parents, but we remained largely oblivious to the personal ones. For they did not allow us to peek inside, to glimpse the sadness that sat at the center of their existence.

It was only years later when we learned of all the hurt they’d cloaked in their pride; of the stoicism they’d used to mask their pain; of all the cries they’d turned to lullabies, to spare our small ears the echoes of their grief.

For a while, some held out hope of returning one day, but for most, each successive turn of the wheel of time only made it more painfully clear, that the Afghanistan of their birth was now gone, forever. And the images of her steep peaks and deep gorges—beamed weekly across the oceans and into our homes—seemed only to serve as reminders of the sharp rise and fall of their hopes and their dreams. Dreams, they had abandoned abruptly; hopes that now lay in flames.

Indeed, while our days here were spent at play, in bliss beneath a blazing sun, for these young Afghans and many more, it was a time of internal grief and inconsolable sorrow. A time when the skies above were clear, but it rained in their hearts.

Peering, now, through nostalgia’s rosy lens, I often wonder what would have become of that nation. What kind of Afghanistan could have formed, had that generation been afforded a proper chance to apply their skills toward the good of their people and their land.

And after all these years, I still ask why these calamities befell our beloved land. For whose unpardonable sins had we to atone? For which of our misdeeds had we earned heaven’s curse and God’s unbending wrath?

Today, as the