By Alma Begum
It was around midday when I read on Facebook that Narges Mohammadi had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I was excited. I was wholeheartedly joyed for a woman I didn’t know. But then a post on X said: “Narges Mohammadi remains unaware of her Nobel win; phones are disconnected in prisons on Fridays.” That sentence took me back to that hellish hut in my dream last night where I struggled to bury a pen and the men were interrogating me. But there was a difference. That night, I was going through the horror of a nightmare while Narges Mohammadi was living it.
The terrifying nightmare had jolted me awake near morning. The clock showed 5:43 a.m. and the dawn had just brightened up. After a few moments, I regathered my senses and said, “I am not in Farah or Ghazni. I am in Kabul.” Of course, I was in Kabul. But in that dream, I was not. There was a lone clay hut in the middle of dry deserts, with no greenery in sight. Two or perhaps three men with menacing demeanours were approaching from a distance. In the dream, I and a few other women were teachers. I might have been the headmaster. We gathered even from afar that the men were coming to arrest us. I was holding a pen that I wanted to bury before they arrived. I had gotten to work but was not making any headways until another woman showed up. I had stopped digging. With a condescending smile on her face that projected power and authority, the old woman was forcing us to answer the men’s questions.
In the dream, I and a few other women were teachers. I might have been the headmaster. We gathered even from afar that the men were coming to arrest us.
I was the first to be interrogated. The man sitting across from me had a blood-soaked tomahawk in his hand as he questioned me. Torn between answering and trying to escape that hellhole, I had woken up and realized that I was at home. Of course, I was at home. But how much of a home this place was, I didn’t know. It used to be a home to which I returned from work, from walking and meeting friends, from shopping, from joining protests, from studying and teaching. Now it was only a house. But then I realized it was all the geography I had, the parameters of my freedom.
Reading about Narges Mohammadi’s Nobel prize, I felt that I know all the women in the Middle East; women who long for life and freedom but are constantly denied by their governments. All these women have gotten is an image of freedom: another woman’s hair in the wind. Perhaps that image isn’t entirely pointless. Women across the Middle East, forced to wrap themselves in long pieces of cloth, don’t get too far in their struggle. Those who make a little headway end up rotting in the government’s prisons.
I read that Narges Mohammadi had not seen her children grow because she was in prison. Such are the sacrifices we make for our voices to be heard. Every day, countless women face oppression, hoping their resilience will nurture the next generation’s pursuit of freedom. In the Kabul of these days, everything we do is an act of dissension. If you see a woman having a coffee in a cafe, rest assured that she is protesting just as a woman with open and messy hair in the Tehran metro. The city is filled with thousands of stories of heartbreak and of hope but we cannot share them publicly. And, if we write, it is often under a pseudonym, hoping that one day we will be able to say “It was me who wrote about our pain, remember?”
In the Kabul of these days, everything we do is an act of dissension.
The government that bars us from a park is the same government that closed the universities’ doors in our faces. The regime that mistreats a 17-year-old girl, sending her to the hospital and then to the cemetery, wants to say “I am not here for you, but at the whims of a few power-hungry men, and I will soon be gone.” Narges Mohammadis from Evin Prison and the woman holding a pen in my dream will make that day come. By winning the Nobel prizes and by holding on to her pen, we are paving the way for the future generation of women in the region, so the foundations of these oppressive autocracies are shaken and fall apart.
Alma Begum is a writer in Kabul. This op-ed is published under a pen name to protect her identity for security reasons.
Fatima Faramarz, a freelance journalist, translated this essay from Farsi for KabulNow.
