I open Twitter. Photographs of Afghans in a park are being shared. One user writes, “This photograph makes me afraid.” Another shares a picture of a man in traditional clothes and asks: is this Afghan dress or Baluchi?
At moments like this, I think of Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. The story of Afghanistan’s people is a tragedy. But the stories of Afghan women could fill volumes of lament: women who do not choose, but are chosen; women who must fight bullets and tradition at the same time.
For those of us who associate Afghanistan with war and bloodshed, the book offers a chance to hear women who have been fighting for years behind the walls of their homes. It tells of love that can save a person even in the midst of war.
It is a woman’s account of struggling within a war. For an Iranian reader who has ventured even a little beyond Tehran, the book has an added resonance: so many cultural similarities are recognisable. Through women’s lives, we read the history of Afghanistan’s endless wars. It is bitter, but real.
And how painful that, to read Afghanistan’s story today, we seem to have to open the book again at the beginning. I do not understand how history can repeat itself so precisely in the Middle East.