Women in Afghan elections

We in America seldom have any sense of the strangeness of other worlds, and make the mistake of seeing our lives as the norm, as a kind of median standard or average in the world that all other lands should aspire to and would embrace if given the chance. But that is not so: in fact, we have no sense of the strangeness of our world. I like this NY Times article for this very reason. It tackles the strangeness of Afghanistan: now imagine this reversed, and how strange we look from the familiarity of Afghanistan.

Women's Work -- by Elizabeth Rubin

After bumping along five hours of potholes and rock-strewn mountain switchbacks on the main commercial artery from Kabul to Pakistan early last month, I was surprised as we entered the Jalalabad Valley to see an enormous campaign poster, the size of a Times Square billboard, featuring not the boyish face of Hazrat Ali - Jalalabad's most famous ex-warlord and a parliamentary candidate - but that of Safia Siddiqi. It's striking enough that a woman would appear so boldly in such a poster in a city where women still do not appear in public without a burka - more striking still that she was wrapped in a shawl made from the green, black and red of the Afghan flag. These colorful, patriotic images of Siddiqi also loomed over the streets of Jalalabad itself, offering a lush kind of hope for its residents. But Jalalabad is still a place dominated by Pashtunwali, the customary law that regulates life throughout the Pashtun belt (the eastern and southern half of Afghanistan). The Pashtun code is based on the values of honor, sanctuary, solidarity, shame and revenge, and it treats women as property. In such a place, how much difference can a few female politicians really make? Many Afghans question all the fuss over elections, and the $150 million expense, when, after three and a half years of American and international efforts, they still have few roads, unclean water and crumbling schools. And still every 30 minutes an Afghan woman dies in childbirth.

As in any politcal campaign, the stump speech must match the audience. When addressing men, Khogiani steers away from challenging tradition and appeals instead to the pride of Pashtuns.

The image of Afghan women is easily reduced to stereotypes. At one extreme is the hidden, voiceless, blue-burkaed cloud floating through the dusty streets behind her turbaned man. At the other is the endangered young feminist firing off a tirade against warlords. Both exist, but reality is mostly between the extremes. If nothing else, perhaps women in Parliament - by law, 68 seats of 249 are reserved for women - will begin to demolish these caricatures.

In her rebelliousness, Siddiqi reflects a quality of Pashtun women that lives in the poetic memory of eastern and southern Afghanistan and was archived in a small book of women's poetry collected and edited by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, one of Afghanistan's most revered modern poets. A dean of literature at Kabul University, a former governor of Kapisa Province, Majrouh, at age 59 in 1988, was assassinated in Peshawar, Pakistan, where the various mujahedeen factions fighting the Soviet Union were based. Shortly before his murder, Majrouh went through refugee camps in Pakistan to collect landays: simple two-line cries of emotion, usually recited by women to women at the river or the well or at wedding parties. They are physical and brutal, passionate and direct. One that was recited to me on a few occasions last month was almost a threat to the beloved. It shows how embedded is the tribal sense of honor for both men and women: "If you do not have a wound in the center of your chest/I shall remain indifferent, even if your back is riddled like a sieve with holes."

The women who composed and shared these poems, Majrouh wrote, "feel repressed, scorned and thought of as second-rate human beings. From the cradle on, they are received with sadness and shame.. . .The father who learns of such an unwelcome arrival seems to go into mourning, whereas he gives a party and fires off a salvo of gunshots at the birth of a boy. Later, and without ever being consulted, the little girl becomes monetary exchange between families of the same clan." Majrouh, in exile among the hostile mujahedeen, seemed to identify with the anguish of Pashtun women. And he identified with their means of defiance - the landays. They could be cries of despair: "Cruel people, who see how an old man leads me to his bed/And you ask why I weep and tear out my hair!" They could also be bold and desirous: "Give me your hand, my love, and let us go into the fields/So we can love each other or fall together beneath the blows of knives."

Safia Siddiqi has taken the boldness of the landays into both in politics and poetry. At a reading last year in Kandahar, attended more by men than women, she read from a poem of hers called "I Am Telling the Truth." In it the poet addresses her lover, saying she wants to "smother you with kisses/To put you in the swing of my lap/And to cover you/With the wings of my hair."

Siddiqi has always enjoyed the spotlight and ached when it dimmed. Read more here.