WHEY Just when you start to believe that all people should live like people / They put your hands in irons, your freedom turns into an arrest, it turns into a prison.
This is what a 15-year-old poet writes Fatima from the city of Herat in western Afghanistan. He directs his words to the Taliban regime, which severely restricted the rights of girls and women.
Fatima, like most other Afghan girls and young women over sixth grade, was excluded from school after the Taliban came to power in August 2021. For her, poetry has become an important means of self-expression in a hopeless situation.
– Most of my poems deal with the problems we face in our society, he says in the premises of an organization in the city centre.
Fatima is not the only Afghan girl or woman writing poetry under Taliban rule. A group of young women who have been meeting here regularly for years have gathered in the library room.
does not publish the girls’ and women’s real names or show their faces for security reasons. For the same reason, we also do not name the organization in whose premises the interviews were conducted.
The historical city of Herat is considered the cultural capital of Afghanistan. It is also known as the cradle of artists, Sufi mystics and poets. These women continue the tradition despite the Taliban.
Women don’t dare to write as freely as before
– Our number has increased a lot, because schools and universities are closed, says Farkhunda35, who has been involved in the activities of this poetry association since the beginning, already 15 years.
Farkhunda himself worked at the university as a literature lecturer before the Taliban. Many of his former students have found their way to meetings through their teacher. Around 30 women and girls gather here every week.
Until now, the Taliban has allowed the poets to continue their meetings on the condition that women and men meet separately.
– Even before the Taliban, we discussed the difficult situation of women in Afghanistan in our poetry. We still do this, but not as freely as before, says Farkhunda.
At meetings, women feel somewhat safe, because the Taliban cannot enter the women’s space. Still, the women fear that someone might report them—or, more specifically, their poems.
– The Taliban has arrested some poets because of the topics they covered, Farkhunda says.
The poems now deal more with the social situation
Yaara18, started writing poems after falling in love – that too is already revolutionary in an extremely old-fashioned country where marriages are almost always arranged.
Now that the Taliban has come to power, the themes of Yaara’s poems have completely changed:
I am the daughter of today, a lamb among wolves / I lost myself in this darkness / Oh my mother, now I put on your fatal clothes / I am weary, my mother, as I have been since I was born.
In her poem, Yaara addresses her own mother, who lived her youth in the 1990s under the previous Taliban regime. Now Yaara is facing the same situation herself.
The young girl had many dreams for her future. Yaara would like to return to writing about love.
– I would like to be able to dream again.
But for Yaara, that seems like an impossible thought these days.
– Now I just hope to be able to live like a full-fledged person – unlike what the Taliban want.
Dark subjects tell of a depressing soul landscape
Sufiya, 19, only started writing after the Taliban came to power. The poets’ meetings were the only place for her where she could talk freely with other women outside the home.
The short story written by Sufiya is about two sisters, one of whom is blind.
– A blind girl is in love with a man she would like to marry. But his family does not agree to this.
The role of the family in women’s lives is huge in Afghanistan, and there are enough problems without the Taliban.
– The girl ends up committing suicide in the story, says Sufiya.
Sufiya found inspiration for the story from real life. The story was that of his former classmate, except for the suicide. It was added by Sufiya as a dramatic device.
Writing about difficult topics still gives women hope
20 year old Dunya the short story is very similar.
– It deals with a girl whose family forces her to get married, Dunya says.
In the story, the girl tries everything she can to avoid getting married, but the family doesn’t listen to her. The girl wants to continue her studies, which is usually not possible for Afghan women after marriage.
– So he finally tries to commit suicide, Dunya says.
However, the girl survives in the story and ends up trying her last straw: she tries to file for a divorce. However, it is too late. Afghanistan’s former regime falls and the Taliban comes to power.
– This is my story, Dunya reveals.
Dunya is still married. According to him, the judges of the Taliban regime have not granted him a divorce.
Now writing and weekly meetings are her only source of hope.
However, the space around women is constantly shrinking, and many have only one solution in mind: fleeing the country.