In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate

by SAIMA WAHAB

  “Red is not a color worn by good women,” he said.

  What was he talking about? I didn’t know I was a woman yet. I certainly wasn’t allowed to act like one, or dress like one. I was dressed just like the boys, in baggy, thigh-length T-shirts and khaki pants that were several sizes too big. I was forbidden to wear makeup or jewelry. In fact, anything that drew attention to me was forbidden. I trudged after him in confusion. I guess I was only a woman when it came to wearing a red sweater. Was this the beginning of them letting me get close enough to enjoying personal freedom, only to have it snatched away? For that reason alone, the more I thought about not being allowed to have that sweater, the more I wanted it. Over the years, it came to symbolize everything I would be denied. One of the first purchases I made when I left my uncles’ house was a red wool sweater. Even so, for the longest time, I couldn’t make myself wear it.

  Having been denied the red sweater, I was surprised when the uncles allowed me to get a haircut. The ends of my black hair brushed the small of my back. In Afghanistan, and then in Peshawar, there was no question of my cutting it. Long hair is a Pashtun woman’s pride and symbolizes her husband’s pride once she is married. Every little girl grew her hair, knowing what it represented, and never cut it because it was deeply frowned upon. This was the reason Mamai wanted me to grow my hair, and the reason I wanted to chop it off. I didn’t want to do anything just to avoid upsetting some Afghan man. I wanted to do the opposite, thinking that if I chopped it off, no man would want me, and instead would find some other girl, a nice one with long hair. And I would be left alone to do whatever I wanted.

  The uncles were a different matter, since they had already suggested that I not wear the scarf to school. They thought that high school kids were unforgiving, and it would be better if I attracted the least amount of attention possible. If they allowed me to go without covering my head, could I ask them if I could cut my hair? They said yes! I realize now their reasoning for that, too: If I went without a scarf, my thick, shiny black hair would draw just as much attention. So a short, preferably unflattering haircut would solve that problem.

  That summer at the public library, I had discovered Lady Di, and for me she epitomized a modern, liberated, free woman. In the library I read countless magazine articles about her and found a book about her that I could never borrow because it didn’t fall into any categories we were allowed to check out, but I would look at a few pages every chance I got. It took me many trips to the library to finish it, because I read English very slowly. There was still a little girl inside of me who loved her fairy-tale life, her beautiful clothes and tall husband. But most of all, I loved her stylish short hair. If I could have that haircut, I would be on the road to becoming a true American (I didn’t realize at the time that she was English).

  So Uncle A took me to Supercuts and I told the lady I wanted to look like Lady Di. When I emerged from the barbershop, I felt giddy, liberated. I couldn’t stop myself from running my fingers through my hair. When we got home Najiba looked at me and said, “I’m never getting my hair cut.” I didn’t care. I was modern and free. No one would ever mistake me for a village girl anymore, I thought, looking in the mirror.

  SIX

  The first week of school a girl named Kristen introduced herself to me in the hallway. I couldn’t find my locker. A lady from the office had shown it to me once, and now I couldn’t find my way back to it. There were hundreds of lockers lining identical-looking hallways. How did the other students find theirs? Was there a secret way of telling? I never considered that they would have numbers and letters on them, and that I should have memorized mine. We had nothing like that in our school in Peshawar. We carried everything in backpacks, which weighed a ton.

  Kristen was a pretty, perky, green-eyed blonde, quick to smile and laugh. She was in a few of my classes and was one of the friendliest Americans I’d met. I remember thinking that her parents had done a wonderful job raising her; looking back, I find this an odd thought, given that I was a teenager myself.

  One of the first things she said to me was that she was interested in meeting someone from India.

  “India?”

  “The dot on your forehead.”

  In my excitement over cutting my long hair, I had totally forgotten the tribal tattoo I had been given by my grandmother when I was five, during my stay in the village. Tattooing was a rite of passage for young girls, and it was usually done at the same time we got our ears and nose pierced. I had been given one tattoo on my forehead, a green dot, but it had hurt so much that I begged my grandmother to not do anymore on my face. I did allow her to tattoo my hands. She gave me a tattoo of four dots on my right thumb. (Years later, I found out it is very similar to a California gang tattoo. On several occasions I have had to explain to people that I do not belong to a gang, nor does it mean I have killed four people.)

  I tried to explain all this to Kristen in my limited English. I tried to also tell her that Indian females put red dots on their foreheads after marriage, but the dot between my eyebrows was green, therefore not the same thing. “Not India, Afghanistan” was all I managed.

  “Cool.” She shrugged. Kristen wasn’t the only one curious about the green tribal tattoo between my brows. Some of my fellow students stared; others asked me about being Indian. When I mentioned this one day to the Professor, he pressed his thin lips into a frown.

  “We should get them removed,” he said.

  I looked up and met his gaze. This may have been the first time I looked my uncle in the eyes. They were small and dark, his thick brows a little unkempt. He had a fine, straight nose and a downturned mouth. I don’t know what he saw when he looked into my eyes, perhaps hope, even gratitude. Was he really going to help me take yet another step away from being that girl from the village? Was he going to help me fit in with my peers? I felt the desire rise in my chest.

  “Other students are apparently paying too much attention to this. It’s a distraction from your studies.”

  Najiba also had a green tribal tattoo between her brows, and one day the Professor took us to a doctor to have them removed. I sat on the exam table, the thin paper rustling beneath my trembling legs, while the doctor injected what I was told was a painkiller into my forehead, and then he pinched the skin together, sliced the dot off, and stitched together the wound. The pain roared in my ears, and I became nauseous. It was one of the last physical symbols of my tribal identity, and the removal of it was a pain that even today I vividly remember, burning deep into my being. The pain was so excruciating that, once again, I begged my uncle to not remove the ones on my hand. He gave in, and just the one on my forehead was removed. For the next month Najiba—who for some reason suffered less than I did—and I wore white squares of gauze taped to our foreheads. The uncles weren’t interested in the disfigurement forming beneath our bandages; they gave no thought to moisturizing lotion or vitamin E. When the bandages were finally removed I had—and still have—a noticeable three-quarter-inch-long scar between my eyebrows. People ask about it all the time. They wonder whether I was in a car accident or have some other interesting anecdote about how I got it. I find it hard to explain that this is the only physical scar I carry from a time that left me with so many emotional ones. Sometimes I wish I had kept my tattoo—not that the Professor gave me an option. Once he had decided that it interfered with his plans for me, it had to go.

  KRISTEN SHOWED ME how the lockers were numbered. We walked to her locker, then to mine. She showed me how to turn the dial and work the combination, right-left-right.

  But no matter how helpful she was, she could not help me with my endless embarrassment. In the years before the Professor had sent for us in Peshawar, when I was daydreaming about what it would be like to be free in America, I had never imagined this constant sense of awkward humiliation. I was good at school; in Peshawar I was the best in the class. But in Peshawar I had classes in Islamic studies, not PE—and certainly not sex education.

  I had
no idea it was a required class here in my new country. When I walked into the sex-ed classroom I was just thrilled to have arrived on time at the right place. The sun shone through the big windows. The other students were giggling, poking one another, throwing things. I remember thinking how squirmy Americans were, like kittens, constantly moving. I looked around at the walls. There were drawings of human torsos, with arrows on them pointing to places that I wasn’t supposed to know about. The pictures in the book the teacher passed out were even worse. That night I asked the uncles to write me a note excusing me from sex ed. I told them I was ashamed of sitting in that class with the other students, and that I didn’t understand 80 percent of what the teacher was talking about anyway. I’m sure they were happy for me to remain clueless about sex, as a typical Pashtun woman was meant to be, so they agreed. There were several times over the first few years when the uncles would write us notes to get out of classes and activities I found too shocking to take part in, including dissecting a pig.

  I also asked to be excused from swimming in PE, which I now regret since I realize what a great workout swimming is. But at the time the thought of shimmying into a tight swimsuit in the girls’ locker room, then striding out to the pool was impossible. My mind could not envision such a thing, nor did I want it to. Such an action would bring shame to me and my family. I couldn’t believe that the families of the other girls in class would allow them to walk around in public in what amounted to their underwear.

  “Why don’t you want to take swimming?” Kristen asked. “It’s the most fun part of PE.”

  I looked at her. I understood her but couldn’t begin to explain. “I don’t know how to swim,” I managed in English. This was true.

  “But I can teach you!”

  I wanted to tell her that where I was from women didn’t walk around in their underwear, but I just shook my head.

  I wish I could give a better account of that first year, of how great the cultural shock of just being in America was—let alone of going directly to high school and dealing with the terrifying newness of that environment. I was amazed by everything around me. The way the girls dressed—the short skirts they wore, the plunging necklines and low-rise jeans—was so alien, but especially shocking was the way they behaved. It went against everything I had ever been told about how women should act. The first couple of years of my life in the United States, I truly believed that the parents of these girls must not know how they were carrying on. How could a father be okay allowing his daughter to talk to boys in the hallways, wearing these revealing clothes? Didn’t they know that it was shameful? And where was the tribe? How could they allow the children of one family to embarrass the whole tribe?

  The boys were even more shocking. They weren’t harassing the girls like they should have been, considering how the girls were dressed. In Afghanistan, girls who covered only their head and not their faces were free game for boys to humiliate. Would I ever get used to the way people lived in this new country? It didn’t seem possible, and on those days when it got to be too much, I would desperately wish to be back in Afghanistan, or even Pakistan, where I understood the rules of conduct and knew my place in society.

  The culture shock was mitigated by the fact that I didn’t understand a lot of what was being said around me. I looked at my carefree peers and saw them as alien beings, people with whom I would never have anything in common. I was an observer, watching in order to learn what I should never become. I would see girls in their red sweaters talking and laughing with boys in the hallway and think, My uncles are right. These are not good girls, wearing the color of bad women and talking to boys who are not related to them. I am never going to be so shameless. I vowed I would listen to and obey my uncles. The consequences of doing otherwise were too frightening. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be in America, living such a liberated life. I just didn’t want to be like the girls I saw. And the list of what not to be was growing longer every day I spent in high school.

  Khalid, Aziz, Emal, and I took the bus home right after school. There was no question of participating in after-school sports or theater or even the math or chess club. I was expected to get As, even though at the beginning I had to translate every homework assignment into Urdu, the language of my schooling, then back into English. A worksheet that would take a regular student twenty minutes to complete took me three hours or more, and then I would go back over my work, double-checking and second-guessing myself until I was exhausted. I was terrified that I might get a bad grade, which meant anything less than an A. I was anxious for my uncles to praise me during Sunday meetings and not point to me as the bad example.

  Our school bus stopped in front of the middle school, where we collected Najiba and Jamila. Then we trudged up the hill to our uncles’ house. The leaves of the deciduous trees had turned blood red. The slightest breeze sent them spiraling to the ground. We kicked at the leaves and teased one another. The boys liked to brag about their exploits in the cafeteria.

  “At lunch I got up to get a drink and some kid tried to take my seat and I told him to get lost!” one of them would say.

  “Really,” Khalid would reply. “You told him to get lost?”

  “Yeah, dude. And then I said that if he didn’t get lost soon, I was going to kick his ass.”

  “You were going to kick his ass?”

  “You should have seen the look on his face!”

  “Tell me what you said again,” Khalid would say.

  Aziz or Emal would open his mouth, but before he could utter a word Khalid would add, “How did you say that in English? Because I’m sure the kid who stole your seat doesn’t speak Pashtu.”

  Ha! We’d stumble up the street laughing. We all knew the truth: None of us was able to carry on long conversations in English with anyone. Once we got to our uncles’ house one of us would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and another one would get six glasses out of the cupboard. We had been told that all American children love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and ate them with milk. From the beginning, I liked my PB&J with orange juice, which would make Najiba cross.

  “Americans drink milk with their sandwiches. You have to drink milk,” she would insist. But I preferred orange juice. I realized I would have to accept that I was not like the rest of them. Eventually, I gave up PB&Js altogether, in order to avoid that conversation.

  We had figured out that no one was going to know if we watched a little TV; that there was no alarm at the Professor’s office that would go off if we touched the set while he was at work. So we decided we would watch a single episode of Saved by the Bell every day after school. Emal was skinny, with a long, thin face; we said he looked like Screech Powers, the nerdy kid. Khalid was stocky, with dimples and white teeth. We said he looked like A.C., the jock. Najiba, Jamila, and I, with our dark hair, brown eyes, and baggy dark T-shirts and pants, didn’t look like any teenage American girl on TV.

  We allowed ourselves one show. We didn’t dare watch another, in case the Professor came home and discovered that the TV was still warm. By four-thirty we would be sitting at the dining room table or on the living room sofa doing our homework. When the Professor returned from work around six o’clock it was as if he’d entered a study hall.

  SEVEN

  A year passed, then two. By the second year we spoke English, although I was still too shy to speak up in class. Once, when I was asked a question in chemistry, without thinking I stood up beside my desk, as I had learned to do in Pakistan, and answered in Urdu. Did my classmates snicker? I don’t remember. I do remember that Mr. Ping, the teacher, encouraged me to answer in English next time. I sank back into my seat, turning pink.

  The most difficult part of my life those first few years was that, much as I tried to obey my uncles, I always seemed to be doing something that would cause a stir. My senior year, in AP English, I decided to write my thesis comparing Romeo and Juliet to Laila Majnu, a much older Pashtun folktale of young lovers who are doomed never to be toget
her.

  In Afghanistan the tale is passed down from mother to daughter. Afghan women very rarely read or write, so the story is memorized, and has become part of Pashtun oral history. My aunt Babo used to tell it to us when we lived in Pakistan. We would sit on the veranda and drink tea. I would sit closest to her; I didn’t want to miss a single word. As the eldest daughter in my family, I had the responsibility to learn the tale so that I could pass it on to my daughters, continuing the tradition of my great-great-grandmothers. It could take three or four days to tell one of these tales. She would tell us half an hour’s worth before she would need to stop and prepare tea for the men or make a meal or sweep the floors. The next day she would sit us down and resume right where she’d left off.

  When we read Romeo and Juliet in high school, I was shocked by how similar this story was to Laila Majnu—the young lovers, the family disapproval, the desperation to be together, the tragic ending. One day after class I approached Mrs. Johnson, who was sitting at her desk marking papers.

  “I think Shakespeare stole the story of Romeo and Juliet from my people, and I would like to write my senior thesis on this.”

  “Wow! That is some claim! What makes you think that?” She put her pen down and leaned toward me. She was a tiny, middle-aged lady, kind and enthusiastic.

  I briefly told her the tale, and how it had been around for centuries, and how Babo used to tell it to us between chores. Her eyes brightened as I spoke. When I finished she clapped her hands together. “This is wonderful,” she said. “Work out an outline and let’s have another chat once I look at that. I’d like you to present this to the class.”

  “You mean … stand up in front of the whole class?” Impossible, I thought. Only a few theses were chosen for presentations. It was considered a great honor. It also meant standing in front of the class speaking English for the entire period, fifty minutes.