Personal stories about what Afghan women want the rest of us to know

There is a small but steady wave of recent stories focusing on the plight of women in Afghanistan who have been denied their rights – to work, to education, to choose their wardrobe or to have their hair uncovered in public. to have a voice in their lives in public places and often at home – since US troops left the country and the Taliban regained power last year. The conclusion was made unequivocally in the third paragraph of a story by Bushra Sediq, an Afghan refugee who is an editorial assistant at The Atlantic:

Afghanistan is once again the worst place in the world to be a woman.

Sedik was born in 1999; she was a small child when the US invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Despite all the costs and controversies of America’s 20-year war, Sediq said the overthrow of the Taliban was “the beginning of a happier time” for girls like her. This contrasts with the lives of their mothers and grandmothers, who spent most of their lives in the “unblessed years.”

Sedik’s next sentence:

Now that the time of unblessing has returned, it has become clear that as we grew up, my generation witnessed not the dawn of a new future, but an anomalous moment in our country’s sad history.

When I clicked on the Atlantic story, I expected to do a quick scan and move on. But as the story progressed, my reading slowed down and I paid closer attention. Then I went back for a re-read. It’s not long—just 29 paragraphs, some thick, some single lines. The approach is straightforward and transparent, starting with the headline: WHAT AFGHANISTANS WANT THE REST OF THE WORLD TO KNOW. The backbone of the story is built on interviews Sedik conducted with relatives, friends, former teachers and colleagues back home. The structure is unadorned—a two-column anecdote, a one-sentence story theme, a few self-introduction graphics, then short interview scenes—it was peppered with lines or short clauses that took my breath away:

A 14-year-old girl who loved school now watches out the window as her younger brother boards the school bus every morning. “Are the Taliban at war with women?” she asks Sediq through tears. A 22-year-old woman teaches a secret school in her basement to as many as 80 teenage girls and wants room for more; The 14-year-old dreams of opening a secret school even if it means being caught and beaten by the Taliban. Illiterate women joined university professors at a recent protest in Kabul in which the women demanded BREAD, JOBS, FREEDOM. Sedik’s sister loved colorful clothes, lipstick and eyeliner; all of these now languish in her bedchamber, because women who venture outside the home must wear black from head to toe, “as if the whole nation were in mourning.” Back to ground zero for Afghan women who are ‘so very tired’.

While Seddique uses the first person for credibility and transparency, she relays this story to others. Her sadness is evident but never self-absorbed. It is instructive to read her article about how she and her youngest sister escaped the chaos of the US troop withdrawal a year ago. This story is a pure first-person narrative – the family voting on who stays and who goes, days of tension on a bus with other escapees, wading through a sewage-infested lake, ambivalence about the US, ambivalence about the best ways to fighting for his family and country, the growing realization that he has no real choice:

I was a journalist and a woman stuck in a country now ruled by terrorists who hated journalists and women.

In this story, Sediq makes five quick references to the dangerous decisions she made to keep her laptop even when the Taliban, and then the Americans, had to flee the refugees to dispose of everything else. After months in camps, she and her sister moved in with relatives already in the US, and she got a fellowship with The Atlantic doing work “that the Taliban would never allow women and girls to do.” She concludes her personal travel narrative with a line that should haunt and inspire all journalists:

I smuggled my laptop past the Taliban and across continents to a free country so I could write this story so I could tell you this.

This story was published just a month ago. Now Sediq returns remotely to Afghanistan to face what she left behind. She brings us down to earth in women’s lives and makes us see what she feels. At the end, Sedik provides two graphs of possible policy solutions, including economic and political sanctions and efforts to protect human rights. It’s a careful consideration, as clear and unassuming as the rest of the piece. She doesn’t mention a return to war, but offers more funding for clandestine schools in a plea that’s more a sign than a scream:

Secretly, behind closed doors, Afghanistan is still breathing.

I would suggest we stop the story there. Sediq adds another paragraph, two short parallel sentences, contrasting the despair of a woman still in Afghanistan with her own dim glimmer of hope. But I could be wrong. And as an editor, I believe the tie goes to the writer.