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

by SAIMA WAHAB

  Mamai was fifty, old by Afghan standards. She had spent most of her life beneath the veil, and since our exodus from Afghanistan to Pakistan when she was just thirty had never exchanged words with a man to whom she was not related. If I showed up with Greg, Mamai would be horrified. She would see him as the greatest dishonor brought upon my father’s name. She would believe, finally, that all the bad things the rest of my family had said about me were indeed true.

  Khalid and I drove to the airport alone to pick up Najiba and Mamai. She followed Najiba as they pressed through the crowd of arriving passengers. I would not have recognized my mother had she not been dressed like a Pashtun woman in baggy black cotton pants, a long forest-green dress, and a big white scarf. I was surprised to see that on her feet she wore a pair of white tennis shoes. I was sure they’d come from Najiba, who’d likely lent them to her for the long trip. I poked Khalid and said, “Look! Our mother is already turning into an Oregonian. She doesn’t care that she’s wearing the wrong shoes with her outfit!”

  Najiba carried both their carry-ons, leading Mamai out of the terminal. Mamai glimpsed Khalid and threw her arms around him, her handsome son, before hugging me nervously. I was stunned by how small she seemed, how shrunken. I was wearing my favorite shoes at the time, a pair of four-inch platform sandals. I loved how tall they made me, but I should never have worn them to pick up Mamai. In Pashtun culture, if a girl is taller than her mother, it is a sign of disrespect to stand beside her. I stood a good six inches above her.

  We drove back to our town house in silence. When inside, she gave the place a quick once-over, then removed her jacket with resignation. In Pakistan her life was wretched, but she had lived in a large compound, with a big garden studded with mulberry and mango trees. Our town house was nice enough for three young adults, but it was less than a couple of miles from downtown, and on a busy street. Streetlights shone in the windows at night.

  “Where is the yard?” she asked.

  We told her there was no yard. But there was a swimming pool and a gym.

  “Why is the kitchen inside the house?” she wanted to know.

  We told her that Americans didn’t have separate kitchen buildings. We directed her downstairs to the master bedroom, which she would share with Najiba, and she looked panic-stricken. There are no basements where we come from. The closest word in Pashtu—and it’s a Farsi word actually—is zarzaminee, literally “under the earth.” A lot of jail-houses are in zarzaminee. As she went down the stairs, I wondered if she viewed the master bedroom as her prison. That is not what I wanted her to feel about her new home in the United States.

  On the third day Greg came over to meet her. Khalid sat on the sofa with Najiba, chatting and watching TV. Mamai perched on the edge of a chair, gazing at the Pres-to-Log in the fireplace, amazed that I was able to light it with a single match. “What will the Americans think of next?” she loved to say during those first few weeks.

  I introduced Greg as a friend. He said hello and couldn’t decide whether he should offer his hand to her. She wrapped her white scarf around the bottom of her face and gazed at the floor. She spoke no English, and he was not one of the men in her family. She wanted nothing to do with him.

  Greg went into the kitchen and filled the teakettle with water. He returned with a tray bearing a silver pot of green tea and three white cups. He sat down next to me and poured me some tea. Mamai sensed what he was to me. I could feel her knowledge of our situation come on like a sudden fever. She abruptly stood up and scuttled downstairs.

  Greg held the teapot in one hand, a cup and saucer in the other. He opened his mouth to say something. I sighed loudly and went after her. Downstairs Mamai was sobbing. I asked her what was going on. As if addressing the frayed ends of her scarf, she told me to send my brother down.

  “There’s no reason you can’t talk to me,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Tell Alak to come here now.” Alak is Pashtu for “boy.” Just as I was always Angelee, Khalid was Alak.

  Back upstairs, Najiba and Khalid were drinking tea with Greg. Someone had put out a bowl of pistachios. I didn’t try to hide my irritation. Mamai would not be here if I had not had the resolve to rescue her from the tyranny of the Pashtun men in her life and to give her the better existence she deserved. I had puzzled out the paperwork, filed it, and kept after it.

  “She wants to talk to her son!” I told Khalid.

  After Khalid ambled downstairs I dropped onto the sofa beside Najiba. “Are you happy now, Greg?” I asked sarcastically.

  “It’s the jet lag,” said Najiba, inspecting the ends of her long black hair. Najiba was the complacent daughter, the good daughter, the peacemaker, the angel. She offered around the bowl of pistachios.

  “Not likely,” I retorted.

  Khalid was laughing as he came upstairs. “Mamai wants me to kick Greg out of the house and beat you up,” he said.

  “You should, according to your cultural duties,” I replied.

  “No, my cultural duty would be to kill both of you.”

  “This is ridiculous,” I said. “She’s going to have to get used to America, and to the fact that her children are grown and might have boyfriends and girlfriends.”

  “What did you tell her?” Greg asked Khalid.

  “That I would go look for a nice bat to beat you two with.”

  But Greg wasn’t discouraged. He went home but called later that evening to say good night, as though nothing had happened. I couldn’t dismiss it so easily. What had I done, bringing this old Pashtun woman to America?

  MAMAI, WHOSE NAME is Gul Pari—meaning “angel of the flower” in Pashtu—had been a pretty, vivacious, and spoiled child. She married my father at the relatively late age of seventeen, because her uncle didn’t think anyone was good enough for her. So many potential suitors had been turned away that families had stopped asking for her hand. My father’s people were from another village, far enough away to have missed the gossip about the girl, now nearly an old maid at seventeen, and the eccentric uncle who cherished her like a daughter. When my grandfather approached Gul Pari’s uncle and father on behalf of my father, for some reason he said, Okay, bring your son here and I’ll see if my niece and I like him. Seeking the prospective bride’s opinion was unheard-of at the time. People thought Mamai’s uncle was crazy to worry about her opinion, that he must be joking. He wasn’t. My father met my mother before their marriage was finalized; I tease my mom that she must have been the first woman in Afghanistan to have gone on a “date” with her future husband, and how scandalous this must have been.

  Although my parents’ marriage was short, it was a happy one. My father had a sense of the world. He had studied abroad and traveled through the great capitals of Europe. He told Mamai that he wanted her to make her own choices. He wasn’t going to bully her, wasn’t going to beat her if she disagreed with him. He wanted her to be a modern woman.

  They did their best to understand each other. My father occasionally visited friends in Beirut and Italy. When he returned from his travels he often brought my mother yards of expensive European fabric. It was the early 1970s. The fabrics were like nothing she had ever seen: swirls of hot pink, lime green, and chocolate-brown paisley polyester, or white voile with giant orange and red flowers. He thought she would be delighted. She found the bright European fabrics hideous. I wouldn’t make drapes out of this! she thought, but thanked him with a gracious and loving smile.

  The wives of his friends wore chic sleeveless A-line shifts and miniskirts. She wore dresses made of yards of heavy silk, royal blue, emerald green, or gold, encrusted with hundreds of tiny mirrors, thousands of pretty beads. Her ensembles were cumbersome and regal. They weighed many pounds. My father wanted my mother to be free to move her arms, to be able to stride through Kabul comfortably, on her way to anywhere she wanted to go. She, on the other hand, preferred her village clothes, weighed down by embellishments. Still, she wanted to please her husband, so she dutifully sewed n
ew dresses and pants—she would never give up wearing pants beneath her dresses—using the hideous European fabric. She would wear her regular traditional clothes while my father was at work. When she heard his VW Bug roaring around the corner at the end of the day, she would quickly change into her new, more modern clothes.

  Even though my mother had enjoyed a short marriage to a freethinker, by the time she moved to Portland she had spent many more years living a traditional Afghan life. Was being dragged to America at her relatively advanced age too much for her? Was she going to be able to cope with the freedoms I wished to give her? I had imagined her making friends and giving dinner parties, going to the park with a picnic on a nice day. I had thought that when she saw how free life could be, she would also appreciate my own struggles and desire to have this independence. I had believed that we could finally develop a modern mother-daughter relationship. Was that no less realistic than thinking she was capable of striding through Kabul in a miniskirt?

  But within the first week she wanted my brother to fulfill his Pashtun duty and perform an honor killing, merely because I had Greg in my life. This was not a good sign.

  Over the next few weeks things improved, but not much. It had taken only a week for her to recover her fierce opinions and compulsion to speak her mind. She never bothered Khalid—as a male, he could do what he wanted. And she never criticized Najiba, who was soft-spoken, slow to anger, and got her way simply by waiting people out.

  But I had Greg, a car, a job, shopping dates with friends, dinners out. This life as an American woman was unspeakable to Mamai. She would badger me; demand answers to impossible questions. She would see me in my jeans and short-sleeved T-shirts and demand to know how I could possibly go out in public wearing that. What kind of message did I think I was sending? I understood why she was having issues with my baring my arms in public. In Pashtun culture, women are the protectors of family shame. A woman’s behavior can ruin the status a family holds in the community. This strong link between women, pride, and shame is one of the primary reasons why women are so furiously protected and controlled. She disapproved of my going out after dark. No women did so in Afghanistan. It was not just shameful, it was dangerous. I would go to meet a friend for dessert after work, and she would demand, “Why are you going out so late? What are you doing out there?” I tried to be patient. I tried to explain that leaving the house at seven-thirty at night was completely safe and normal, but she wasn’t having any of it.

  I drew the line when she told me I needed to drop Greg. When she said that if he ever came to our house, she was leaving, I finally had a sit-down with her. I had no intentions of leaving Greg. He had been with me, unconditionally, during my depression follwing the horrible era of the uncles, when I hadn’t been able to count on anyone else for support. She pointed out that he wasn’t Afghan or Muslim. Yes, I hollered, the exact qualities I love in him. I challenged her to point out a single time he had disrespected me or her. She couldn’t. He had never asked me to choose between him and my family, had never held my bad temper against me, and had always let me be who I was. Why would I kick someone like that out of my life? I hated saying this, but I ended my screaming match with Mamai by telling her that I would send her back to Afghanistan if she continued to do what my uncles had been doing before her. I couldn’t believe that I was becoming just like my uncles, threatening my mother’s rights, when I had only wanted to make her free. It made me doubt my own goodness, to be reminded of how selfish and inflexible I had become.

  Later, at his apartment, I shared my doubts with Greg. “I’m just not sure this is going to work,” I said.

  “It’ll just take her some time,” he said.

  “You don’t know her. She says I get my stubborn streak from my dad, but I get it from her. She just covers it up better.”

  He put his arms around me. “Be patient. In a way, it’s a little refreshing to have someone stand up to you. God knows I’ve fantasized about it many times, but I love you too much to actually do it.” He laughed. I pretended to be upset but also found it funny.

  Now I had two issues to deal with: my tense relationship with Mamai and the inevitable next step in my relationship with Greg. Although the link between the two was not lost on me, knowing they were connected did not make them any easier to reconcile.

  TEN

  Each of my father’s three children dealt with his disappearance in his or her own way. For years we never discussed or talked much about what had happened or the experience of growing up fatherless in a culture in which you are identified only by who your father is. Khalid dealt with it by taking off for years after we emigrated to be alone and away from anything to do with the family. He avoided us all, and it was only years later that we would re-create the tight bond that the three of us share today. Being the youngest, Najiba doesn’t have any memories of our father—what she remembers are the bits and pieces that she has collected through Mamai’s stories of him.

  I have always wished Najiba would face her feelings about growing up without her own memories of our father while hearing so much about him. She confessed that she hated Afghanistan for taking him, and never wanted to go back to try to reconnect with its people. It made my heart ache to hear her say that. I tried to make her see that our father had made a conscious choice to rebel against the Russians; that he saw something in his people worth giving up his life for.

  Unlike Najiba, I wanted to know what that something was. Once I was secure in myself and in the freedoms that I enjoyed in the United States, once I was sure I could defend my rights by myself, I knew I would return to Afghanistan to find out for myself.

  In late 2004, twelve years deep in the freedoms of America and perhaps not yet prepared for the return journey, an opportunity—and a choice—presented itself.

  It was a gloomy wet day and I was sitting on my sofa in the living room. It was a blue-gray Pacific Northwest twilight, no different from most of the other days of the year. I sat with my feet curled beneath me, staring out the front window at an oak tree that was on the verge of losing its last golden leaves. Khalid and Najiba were still at work. Mamai was in her room, listening to BBC radio. I could hear the round tones of Pashtu burbling from her room. My cell phone rang. It was my friend Ahmed, who had just returned from Afghanistan, where he’d been working as a Farsi interpreter.

  “They’re desperate for Pashtu speakers over there,” he said. “Especially females, especially female natives.”

  “I’m sure they have plenty of females who speak Pashtu in Afghanistan,” I teased.

  “Funny. I meant Pashtu-English speakers. As far as I know, they don’t have even one.”

  “I knew what you meant,” I said.

  “You could have a job tomorrow.”

  Ahmed talked about the rush of working as a translator in a war zone, about the sense of doing work that meant something, about the good pay. I let him ramble on. I considered my less-than-thrilling nine-to-five job at a Japanese export firm downtown, and about the house we’d just bought in the drowsy Portland suburb of Beaverton so that my family could finally be all together.

  “Thanks for thinking of me, Ahmed, but this is not a decision that I can make quickly.”

  I had been thinking about returning for a while—just not considering the when or the how. I’d never ever imagined I’d be doing anything connected with the U.S. military. Most Afghans, including my own extended family, considered the Americans to be no different from the Soviets. I was already the black sheep of the family; I couldn’t imagine their response to my returning to Afghanistan as an employee of the invading infidels. I could hear the phone lines buzzing. What on earth is Saima doing now? She’s run off to Afghanistan to revenge her father’s death! She’s going to use her Pashtu to targer insurgents and tell the Americans who to kill! She’s going to use her Pashtu to point out spies to the Americans and tell them who to torture!

  It was out of the question. Or was it? What were my options? I could have visite
d my family in the village in Ghanzi Province for a week or two. While this sounded enticing, it also felt limited. I would spend time only with my relatives. The idea that by taking Ahmed up on his offer I could meet hundreds, if not thousands, of regular Afghans from all walks of life, stirred something inside me. It had been so long since I’d felt anything resembling excitement. My thoughts went round and round. I might be able to find out what inspired my father to give up his life to preserve the way of Pashtuns. Just that thought alone caused me to pick up my phone several times and put it back down.

  Most of my work at the import-export firm was finished by 10:00 A.M., which gave me plenty of time to stare out the window at the Oregon sky and replay the conversation with Ahmed in my head. At lunch, as usual I walked to Banana Republic, where I looked at the same rack of cream-colored linen jackets every day. What would I be giving up as an adult—and what would I learn about what I had given up as a child?

  A few days later I was sitting in a restaurant called Sweet Tomatoes with my friend Seema and her young son, Arsalan, eating a salad when my cell phone rang. I said hello, but the caller answered me in Pashtu. He asked how I was enjoying the weather. I didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Who is this?” I demanded.

  “You don’t know who this is?”

  “Should I?” I could hear the hostility in my voice. Who was this man? The only male I spoke Pashtu with anymore was my brother. How did this random male Pashtu speaker get my number? I felt my inner Pashtun female awaken. Why does this man think he can just address me in this way? It completely violated the code of the culture of the language being spoken.

  He laughed. “Your friend Ahmed gave me your number.”

  “You should have introduced yourself in English and explained the reason for your call,” I responded.

  “I’m sorry; you are right. Ahmed gave me your number and said that I should convince you to come and work for us. There is a great need for female Pashtu speakers, and since you are female, you would be able to dictate the kind of assignment you want and they will do anything to make you happy so you will stay. This is your duty as a female and as an Afghan. We can’t expect the American soldiers to know anything about our culture or language. We have to make sure they know, and you can do that like no one else can.” I knew he was appealing to my sense of pride and also to the protectiveness I would feel for wanting to make sure my people’s interests remained protected. “Now that I know you really do speak Pashtu I’d like to pass your number on to a recruiter who can set up an interview and testing,” he continued.