Afghan Women Quotes

It's being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission.

When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. It’s not about the burqa. It’s about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their problems.

When I asked Afghans to describe to me the difference between men and women, over the years interesting responses came back. While Afghan men often begin to describe women as more sensitive, caring, and less physically capable than men, Afghan women tend to offer up only one difference, which had never entered my mind before. Want to take a second and guess what that one difference may be? Here is the answer: Regardless of who they are, whether they are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, Afghan women often describe the difference between men and women in just one word: freedom. As in: Men have it, women do not.

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.

(In the Afghan parliament, apparently, they disconnect the mics when they don’t want to hear the women speak).

Tu es ma came, plus mortelle que l'héroïne afghane, plus dangereux que la blanche colombienne, tu es ma solution à mon doux problème.

My grandmother believed that one of the most difficult tasks that the Almighty can assign anyone is being a girl in Afghanistan. As a child, I didn't want to be a girl. I didn't want my dolls to be women.

Regardless of who they are, whether they are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, Afghan women often describe the difference between men and women in just one word: freedom.

I have the impression that our children are much more excited about going to school than children in other countries are. They think of it as a special privilege. Going to school, being with other children, getting books and pencils - all of that is like a dream for them.

Notably, there was no mention of investing in Afghan women’s political participation, perhaps because if Afghan women had political freedom they would prioritize ending the American occupation over anything else.

even if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society (and these are problems quite unlike those presented by similar tenets in other faiths, for reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere and touch on only briefly here). And any way in which I might be biased or blinded by “the religion of the state,” or any other form of cultural indoctrination, has absolutely no relevance to the plight of Shiites who have their mosques, weddings, and funerals bombed by Sunni extremists, or to victims of rape who are beaten, imprisoned, or even killed as “adulteresses” throughout the Muslim world. I hope it goes without saying that the Afghan girls who even now are risking their lives by merely learning to read would not be best compensated for their struggles by being handed copies of Chomsky’s books enumerating the sins of the West

The Taliban emerged from former U.S. allies the mujahideen (“holy warriors”), who were partly funded by the United States in order to counter the Soviet invasion in 1979. There is a Western tendency to view Islamist extremism as intrinsic to Islam and as popular among Muslims, but groups such as the Taliban enjoyed only very minimal support from the Afghan population before the war against the Soviets.

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

For my Afghan friends, the notion that it’s God’s will for men and women to live in love and peace is revolutionary. It’s also a dream buried in their deepest being.

Thank god, I said to myself, that the sun is not someone's property, otherwise I'd have to pay rent for that as well.

I am left with the magic, the name, the heart miraculously touched.

Letters have time, time costs nothing in these parts-let's return to the melons and peaches of Afghanistan.

No one is born with the Warrior Ethos, though many of its tenets appear naturally in young men and women of all cultures. The Warrior Ethos is taught. On the football field in Topeka, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, on the lion-infested plains of Kenya and Tanzania. Courage is modeled for the youth by fathers and older brothers, by mentors and elders. It is inculcated, in almost all cultures, by a regimen of training and discipline. This discipline frequently culminates in an ordeal of initiation. The Spartan youth receives his shield, the paratrooper is awarded his wings, the Afghan boy is handed his AK-47.

I saw houses burned by the Mujahadeen, as well as disfigured bodies of prisoners they’d taken. But I saw other things too: villages destroyed by our shelling and bodies of women, killed by mistake. When you shoot at every rustling in the bushes, there’s no time to think about who’s there. But for an Afghan, it didn’t matter if his wife had been killed intentionally or accidentally. He went into the mountains to see revenge.

Women out in the village don't talk back to their husbands. It's just a law, when men say something, women should just listen. And you should never talk in a loud voice because a man outside might hear. I made that mistake, but I was lucky. In Tarinkot, a man beat his wife with an ax, and she survived, but her head was split open. Husbands who only use their hands or feet are very kind." -Heela (Gopal's female civilian Afghan respondent)

Reshmina was barely listening. All she could do was stare wide-eyed at the translator. All the Afghan women Reshmina knew were mothers, wives, and daughters. None of them had jobs outside the home—and especially not important jobs like translator, where they worked and talked with men outside their families. “Who are you?” Reshmina whispered to the translator. The woman smiled. “My name is Mariam. I’m from Kabul.” Reshmina couldn’t believe it. It was like a whole new path had appeared before her that she hadn’t known was there before. A whole new person she could become.

Of all the names that linger in my memory after a long journey, this one is the dearest to me (Therapia). Perhaps because it sounds so Greek, blithe as a swelling paean to carefree days spent on lovely shores? Perhaps because it came at the beginning and now belongs to a long ago, glorified time-for the journey had just begun.

As I lay in my room, I looked back on the day with all of its colors and surprises- a day when the rich sat with the poor, the Godless with the believers, the foreigners with Afghans, the men with women, and the children with adults. It was how a perfect world might be if people didn't keep strangling one another in rules and laws and fear.

Heroines of American journalism, writing in publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and reporting for major television networks, have all played a similar role of legitimizing America's new imperial project in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Middle East at large, promoting a narrative that violent military incursions are designed to liberate women and deliver better societies. Thus they also underscore their own superior status as white feminists, with their values of rebellion over resilience, risk over caution, and speed over endurance as the ultimate feminist values. Afghan women emerge as no more than prototypes whose wishes always align with what white feminists think they should want, rather than as people with independent political positions and perspectives.

The Taliban’s “extreme actions now have cracked the Pashtuns,” Massoud told her. “An average Pashtun mullah is asking—he knows the history and simply has a question: Why are there no schools? Why is there no education for women? Why are women not allowed to work?” The Taliban’s religious tenets had been imported from Pakistan and applied inflexibly, Massoud said. Traditional Afghan religious leaders at the village level had now begun to challenge these decrees.8

All the progress made for human rights could be wiped out. All the girls, all the women, who went to school, got an education. Got jobs. Became teachers and doctors and lawyers, bus drivers. You know what will happen to them if the Taliban has its way.” “Well, I guess we’ll need a strong, internationally respected Secretary of State to let any Afghan government know that rights must be respected. And that Afghanistan must not once again become home to terrorists.

People knit for their own reasons, but some of the most intense knitters I know are the ones who used it to help them quit smoking. It’s a perfect plan, really; knitting keeps your hands busy, and it is relaxing and repetitive enough to hold off most of the urges to smoke. You get to spend your cigarette money on yarn, a powerful motivator, and two weeks after you quit you have four sweaters, three hats, and several really big afghans. Knitting can be a useful tool for self-improvement.

The women in that ward were simple, ordinary refugee women. They came from villages or very small towns. Even before becoming refugees, they had been poor. They had no education. They had no notion of an outside world where life might be different. They were being treated for various ailments, but in the end, their gender was their ailment. In the first bed, a skinny fourteen-year-old girl lay rolled into her sheets in a state of almost catatonic unresponsiveness, eyes closed, not speaking even in reply to the doctor’s gentle greeting. Her family had brought her to be treated for mental illness, the doctor explained with regret. They had recently married her to a man in his seventies, a wealthy and influential personage by their standards. In their version of things, something had started mysteriously to go wrong with her mind as soon as the marriage was agreed upon – a case of demon possession, her family supposed. When, after repeated beatings, she still failed to cooperate gracefully with her new husband’s sexual demands, he had angrily returned her to her family and ordered them to fix this problem. They had taken the girl to a mullah, who had tried to expel the demon through prayers and by writing Quranic passages on little pieces of paper that had to be dissolved in water and then drunk, but this had brought no improvement, so the mullah had abandoned his diagnosis of demon possession and decided that the girl was sick. The family had brought her to the clinic, to be treated for insanity.

There were good men in Afghanistan, men like those who made up our Afghan force, but most were mired in ancient traditions and their deep-seated ambivalence toward women troubled me. If they didn't have the strength to stand up against the persecution of their own flesh and blood, then how could we expect them to have the strength to support a centralized government? We had already done the heavy lifting by freeing them from the oppression of the Taliban; it was their responsibility to move their country ahead and take advantage of the freedom. I could accept dying trying to free the oppressed of the world, but not one American life was worth sacrificing for people willing to accept tyranny.

Back in America, Donald Trump had, as a candidate, preached the virtues of withdrawal. “We should leave Afghanistan immediately,” he had said. The war was “wasting our money,” “a total and complete disaster.” But, once in office, Donald Trump, and a national security team dominated by generals, pressed for escalation. Richard Holbrooke had spent his final days alarmed at the dominance of generals in Obama’s Afghanistan review, but Trump expanded this phenomenon almost to the point of parody. General Mattis as secretary of defense, General H. R. McMaster as national security advisor, and retired general John F. Kelly formed the backbone of the Trump administration’s Afghanistan review. In front of a room full of servicemen and women at Fort Myer Army Base, in Arlington, Virginia, backed by the flags of the branches of the US military, Trump announced that America would double down in Afghanistan. A month later, General Mattis ordered the first of thousands of new American troops into the country. It was a foregone conclusion: the year before Trump entered office, the military had already begun quietly testing public messaging, informing the public that America would be in Afghanistan for decades, not years. After the announcement, the same language cropped up again, this time from Trump surrogates who compared the commitment not to other counterterrorism operations, but to America’s troop commitments in Korea, Germany, and Japan. “We are with you in this fight,” the top general in Afghanistan, John Nicholson, Jr., told an audience of Afghans. “We will stay with you.

On the night of September 13, Bill O’Reilly had an exchange with Sam Husseini, a former spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, that characterized Fox’s position as it was developing. “Here’s what we’re going to do, and I’ll let you react to it,” O’Reilly said. “We’re going to take out this Osama bin Laden. Now, whether we go in with air power or whether we go in with a Delta force, he’s a dead man walking. He’s through. He should have been through long before this. He’s been wanted for eight years. Now, they’re going to go in and they’re going to get him. If the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power, probably. All right? We will blast them, because …” Husseini told O’Reilly that innocent Afghans would be killed by a protracted air strike. “Doesn’t make any difference,” O’Reilly huffed. “Bill—” “They—it was an act of war.” “No, no. It does make a difference,” Husseini said. “I don’t want more civilians dead. We’ve had civilians dead in New York and now you’re saying maybe it’s okay to have civilians dead in Afghanistan.” “Mr. Husseini, this is war.” “Yeah, exactly. And in war you don’t kill civilians. You don’t kill women and children. Those are your words, Bill.” “Oh, stop it,” O’Reilly said. “You just made the most absurd statement in the world. That means we wouldn’t have bombed the Nazis or the Japanese. We wouldn’t have done any of that, because you don’t want somebody who has declared war on us to be punished. Come on.” “Who declared war on us?” “The terrorist states have declared war, Mr. Husseini!” “Get them. Get the terrorists,” Husseini said. “Cut his mic,” O’Reilly responded, waving his finger across the screen, the lower third of which was covered with Stars and Stripes graphics and a caption that read: “AMERICA UNITES.

Patronising women is another manoeuvre, an infamous example being then British prime minister David Cameron’s ‘Calm down, dear’ to Labour MP Angela Eagle in 2011.48 In the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s (IPU) 2016 global study on sexism, violence and harassment against female politicians, one MP from a European parliament said ‘if a woman speaks loudly in parliament she is “shushed” with a finger to the lips, as one does with children. That never happens when a man speaks loudly’.49 Another noted that she is ‘constantly asked – even by male colleagues in my own party – if what I want to say is very important, if I could refrain from taking the floor.’ Some tactics are more brazen. Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian that male colleagues use intimidation to frighten female MPs into silence – and when that fails, ‘The leadership cuts our microphones off’.50 Highlighting the hidden gender angle of having a single person (most often a man) in charge of speaking time in parliament, one MP from a country in sub-Saharan Africa (the report only specified regions so the women could remain anonymous) told the IPU that the Speaker had pressured one of her female colleagues for sex. Following her refusal, ‘he had never again given her the floor in parliament’. It doesn’t necessarily even take a sexual snub for a Speaker to refuse women the floor: ‘During my first term in parliament, parliamentary authorities always referred to statements by men and gave priority to men when giving the floor to speakers,’ explained one MP from a country in Asia. The IPU report concluded that sexism, harassment and violence against female politicians was a ‘phenomenon that knew no boundaries and exists to different degrees in every country’. The report found that 66% of female parliamentarians were regularly subjected to misogynistic remarks from their male colleagues, ranging from the degrading (‘you would be even better in a porn movie’) to the threatening (‘she needs to be raped so that she knows what foreigners do’).

Nine out of ten Afghan women will experience domestic abuse in some form,

Amanollah Khan had tried to assert rights for women in the 1920s, together with his queen Soraya, who famously cast off her veil in public. The royal couple also began promoting the education of girls, banned the selling of them for marriage, and put restrictions on polygyny. The backlash was severe. To many Afghans, and particularly to the majority who did not live in Kabul, the reforms seemed outrageous: Tribal men would lose future income if daughters could no longer be sold or traded as wives. In 1929, under threat of a coup, the king was forced to abdicate.

Rapid attempts at reforming society and culture were met with great resistance and fury aimed at the government for again issuing decrees to ban child marriage and the lucrative trading of women and girls, and for stating that no women should be sold for marriage, or married against her will. Once more tribal men saw the risk of losing both cash and influence. If women were to be educated and work outside the home, they would “dishonor” their families by being seen in public and potentially develop other, even more subversive ideas. And who would care for the children if women took over the tasks of men? Society would undoubtedly fall apart. Worst of all, another proposed decree would allow women to initiate divorce more easily. Clearly, foreign influence brought decadence and subverted Afghan traditions. The reforms were declared un-Islamic by many religious mullahs.

Following the Soviet invasion, the Communists, to their credit, passed decrees making girls’ education compulsory and abolishing certain oppressive tribal customs—such as the bride-price, a payment to the bride’s family in return for her hand in marriage. However, by massacring thousands of tribal elders, they paved the way for the “commanders” to step in as the new elite. Aided by American and Saudi patronage, extremism flourished. What had once been a social practice confined to areas deep in the hinterlands now became a political practice, which, according to ideologues, applied to the entire country. The modest gains of urban women were erased. “The first time a woman enters her husband’s house," Heela “told me about life in the countryside, “she wears white”—her wedding dress—“and the first time she leaves, she wears white”—the color of the Muslim funeral shroud. The rules of this arrangement were intricate and precise, and, it seemed to Heela, unchanged from time immemorial. In Uruzgan, a woman did not step outside her compound. In an emergency, she required the company of a male blood relative to leave, and then only with her father’s or husband’s permission. Even the sound of her voice carried a hint of subversion, so she was kept out of hearing range of unrelated males. When the man of the house was not present, boys were dispatched to greet visitors. Unrelated males also did not inquire directly about a female member of the house. Asking “How is your wife?” qualified as somewhere between uncomfortably impolite and downright boorish. The markers of a woman’s life—births, anniversaries, funerals, prayers, feasts—existed entirely within the four walls of her home. Gossip, hopscotching from living room to living room, was carried by husbands or sons.

It’s being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission . (If so, will their next stop be America’s military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: in India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices against “untouchables”, against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is that how women won the vote in the U.S? Or how slavery was abolished? Can we win redress for the genocide of the millions of Native Americans upon whose corpses the United States was founded by bombing Santa Fe?

The importance of Saudi Arabia in the rise and return of al-Qaeda is often misunderstood and understated. Saudi Arabia is influential because its oil and vast wealth make it powerful in the Middle East and beyond. But it is not financial resources alone that make it such an important player. Another factor is its propagating of Wahhabism, the fundamentalist, eighteenth-century version of Islam that imposes sharia law, relegates women to the status of second-class citizens, and regards Shia and Sufi Muslims as non-Muslims to be persecuted along with Christians and Jews. This religious intolerance and political authoritarianism, which in its readiness to use violence has many similarities with European fascism in the 1930s, is getting worse rather than better. For example, in recent years, a Saudi who set up a liberal website on which clerics could be criticized was sentenced to a thousand lashes and seven years in prison. The ideology of al-Qaeda and ISIS draws a great deal from Wahhabism. Critics of this new trend in Islam from elsewhere in the Muslim world do not survive long; they are forced to flee or are murdered. Denouncing jihadi leaders in Kabul in 2003, an Afghan editor described them as “holy fascists” who were misusing Islam as “an instrument to take over power.” Unsurprisingly, he was accused of insulting Islam and had to leave the country.

Although Afghans virulently opposed homosexuality, the segregation of the sexes had led to certain practices, especially in the Pashtun areas. Kandahar was known for older men sexually using teenage boys, usually to show off prestige and power. At weddings, at festive occasions, at male-only parties, dancing boys would often perform, wearing eyeliner and swinging their hips suggestively, before pairing off for the night. The practice was known as bacha bazi, or “boy play.” A Pashto proverb maintained that women were for breeding, boys for pleasure, but melons for sheer delight.

For the CSTs, who were busy getting used to their unusual new assignment, the ideal “terp” was a female who understood Pashtun culture; spoke American English as well as they did; grasped how special operations functioned; could relate to and connect with Afghan women and children in a hot moment; embraced the women’s mission; was athletic enough to keep up with the Ranger men while wearing body armor; and could speak most dialects of Pashto. Ashley

Much of the chaos and violence suffered in Afghan villages during the communist era was engineered by a Westernized elite at the head of an active government in Kabul, a city which, with its Persian-speaking population and apparently liberated women, was already alien to most Pashtuns. This may partly explain why the sons of Pashtun peasants and nomads who made up the Taliban imposed the harshest laws upon the women of Kabul soon after driving out the moderate Islamist Tajik commander Ahmed Shah Massoud from this most westernized of Afghan cities in 1996 and forcing him to the north.

These experts sought to promote the idea, which culminated after 9/11 in the War on Terror, that the West was up against enemies of such unfathomable evil that engaging with their causes or motivations was pointless, and that virtually anything the national security state did to combat them, including a dramatic rise in civilian deaths, was justified. To the millions of people whom it impacted - Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and Africans of secular background or various faiths - the terrorism paradigm created a painful double existence. Those who believed that, in many instances, violence committed in their countries of origin stemmed from legitimate grievances - that the violence was not legitimate, but the underlying pathologies and grievances were - felt themselves unable to acknowledge this in public life.

Here is the answer: Regardless of who they are, whether they are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, Afghan women often describe the difference between men and women in just one word: freedom. As in: Men have it, women do not. Shahed says the same thing, when I ask her. “When no one is the boss of your life,” is how she goes on to define it.

The heart of evil beats in Afghanistan. When men hold every advantage, neither wealth, nor beauty, nor intelligence, nor education, nor strength, nor family can compete with gender. Women have only prayer and hope as allies.

Thus, for instance, mainstream feminist groups will support the bombing in Afghanistan to save Afghan women from the Taliban as if US empire actually liberates women. (In addition to the essays in this volume, further analysis of the co-optation of the antiviolence movement can be found in INCITE!’s previous book, Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology [2006]).

The savarnas constructed all sorts of mythologies: of chivalry, of ideals. What was the outcome? A defeated social order in the clutches of hopelessness, poverty, illiteracy, narrow-mindedness, religious inertia, and priestocracy, a social order embroiled in ritualism, which, fragmented, was repeatedly defeated by the Greeks, Shakas, Huns, Afghans, Moghuls, French, and English. Yet in the name of their valor and their greatness, savarnas kept hitting the weak and the helpless. Kept burning homes. Kept insulting women and raping them. To drown in self-praise and turn away from the truth, to not learn from history—what sort of a nation-building are they dreaming of?

Since many donor countries required development projects—from agriculture to politics—to consider specifically how the lives of Afghan women were to be improved, Kabul had turned into a place brimming with “gender experts”—a term encompassing many of the foreign-born aid workers, sociologists, consultants, and researchers with degrees in everything from conflict resolution to feminist theory.

The harem could not be supervised by men because they posed a potential threat to the women’s chastity and the king’s bloodline. These women dressed as men solved the dilemma, indicating that such solutions may have been used historically in the highest echelons of Afghan society as well.

The old Afghan expression zan, zar waa, zamin summarizes the ever-present threat against men’s personal property, which was always the main reason for taking up arms: Women. Gold. And land. In that order.

the gains of women in Afghanistan once again directly contributed to war, as their fate was mixed into the powder keg of tension between reformers and hardliners, between foreigners and Afghans, and between the urban centers and the countryside.

Though analysts differ on the details, they agree that the centuries-old jostling between the Zirak Durranis and their rivals, the Panjpai Durranis and the Ghilzais, fuels the conflict today.4 Many ordinary Afghans of the Zirak Durrani, such as Nazak, would have turned naturally against the Taliban. The Taliban’s tribalism and radical ideology separates it from Karzai’s ethnically mixed government and most of the Afghan people, because banning the education of girls, employment for women, and even music is counter to most of the closely held beliefs of ordinary Afghans.

AMERICA IS DOING OKAY ONCE THESE WHITE RACIST BITCHES WHO ARE DOMESTIC TERRORIST TERRORIZING THE POPULACE THE WORLD THEIR FUCKED HEADS CANT CONTEND WITH ONCE THESE WHITE WOMEN MEN START TO DO SOMETHING SANE THEN YOU KNOW YOURE COMPLETELY FUCKED IN AMERICA UNTIL THEN FIGHT FOR MORE DEMOCRATIC HEALTHIER STANCES. WHEN THEY GO SANE DO AS THE AFGHAN PEOPLE DID AND ITS TIME TO RUN FOR THE EXIT SIGN

I saw it dissolve into a strangely clear horizon-there, a striated pyramid, stood the extinct volcano, a pain filled, deeply moving sight: permanence.

What were the present and future to him, he who did not fear the sandstorm? Did he know what fortune and misfortune mean, and what our tortured hearts called hope?

This sufficed: the overwhelming monument to the man who had not feared the poverty and grandeur of the steppe, so alien to all human measure. I breathed deep and tried, despite all, to salute life...

In the first hour of the new day, in the cold, strong wind that already reaches our native shores, yes, in this one moment of eternally returning regret I realise: what staggers us, over and over again, is the morning splendour of departure!

My dear Marwan, in the long summers of childhood, when I was a boy the age you are now, your uncles and I spread our mattress on the roof of your grandfathers’ farmhouse outside of Hom. We woke in the mornings to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, to the bleating of your grandmother's goat, the clanking of her cooking pots, the air cool and the sun a pale rim of persimmon to the east. We took you there when you were a toddler. I have a sharply etched memory of your mother from that trip. I wish you hadn’t been so young. You wouldn't have forgotten the farmhouse, the soot of its stone walls, the creek where your uncles and I built a thousand boyhood dams. I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan. In its bustling Old City, a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbours, and a grand souk for us all to haggle over gold pendants and fresh produce and bridal dresses. I wish you remembered the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh and the evening walks we took with your mother around Clock Tower Square. But that life, that time, seems like a dream now, even to me, like some long-dissolved rumour. First came the protests. Then the siege. The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials. These are the things you know You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole. You have learned dark blood is better news than bright. You have learned that mothers and sisters and classmates can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams, little patches of sunlit skin shining in the dark. Your mother is here tonight, Marwan, with us, on this cold and moonlit beach, among the crying babies and the women worrying in tongues we don’t speak. Afghans and Somalis and Iraqis and Eritreans and Syrians. All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home. I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere. But I hear your mother's voice, over the tide, and she whispers in my ear, ‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.' In the glow of this three-quarter moon, my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy, closed in guileless sleep. I said to you, ‘Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen.' These are only words. A father's tricks. It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how powerless I am to protect you from it. Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed. Because you, you are precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was. I pray the sea knows this. Inshallah. How I pray the sea knows this.

According to the bullhorns and depending on the year, America’s military campaigns would satisfy justice, displace tyrants, spread democracy, prevent sectarian war, reduce corruption, bolster women’s rights, decrease the international heroin trade, check the influence of extreme religious ideology, create Iraqi and Afghan security forces that would be law-abiding and competent, and finally build nations that might peacefully stand on their own in a global world, all while discouraging other would-be despots and terrorists with evil designs. Little of this turned out as briefed.

Another Western aid group, trying to improve the hygiene and health of Afghan women, issued them bars of soap—nearly causing a riot. In Afghanistan, washing with soap is often associated with post-coital activity, so the group was thought to be implying that the women were promiscuous.

Literature is resilience, a release.