The Underground Girls of Kabul Page 18

With that, Shukur had been mujahideen-approved as a credible male. The fighters left and never returned. But they were harbingers of darker days ahead. Her parents began thinking it might be impossible for Shukur to stay a man, especially since their relatives constantly complained—they, too, were turning more conservative and scared. Some argued it was inappropriate to have an adolescent girl in the family who passed as a boy. As always, reputation and honor were at stake.

  So when her three-years-older cousin one day blurted out “You are engaged,” Shukur reacted the way she normally did to an insult: She punched him in the face. As he howled, his hands went to his nose. He knew better than to hit back at his cousin.

  And he had told the truth.

  Shukur’s uncle had made the winning argument to her parents: It was now too dangerous for their daughter to carry on living like a man. As the Taliban rode in, instituting full-on gender segregation in Kabul, cross-dressing was officially banned. As a rule, women were not to go outside at all, and if they did, they needed to be completely covered so as to not inspire lust in men and contribute to the downfall of society. The family had to protect Shukur—as well as itself—the uncle had told her parents. The best way was to marry her off. And there was the money, of course, that the husband’s family would provide for getting Shukur as a bride, he reminded them. Why say no to a decent bride price in these uncertain times?

  As Shukur could not speak directly to her father about the issue—that would have been disrespectful and inappropriate—she made her case to her mother: “Please. I am not causing you any trouble. I do not demand anything of you, like other daughters. I never ask for new clothes, even for Eid. I am no burden. I am just trying to help.”

  Shukur’s mother listened to about half of what her daughter tried to say. Then she cut her off. She herself had been married at thirteen. Surely, Shukur could handle it, especially after so many years of roaming around like no other women could. She had had a long run of it, too. Shukur should be grateful. It was possible her future husband would let her continue working at the hospital, but her duties as a wife would take priority. Her tenure as the useful son was over. She could now either comply or lose her entire family. There was no real choice to be had.

  A few days later, Shukria’s aunt brought her a floor-length skirt, a burka, and a pair of impossibly small pointy shoes. Putting on a woman’s dress may feel strange at first, but she would get used to it, the aunt assured Shukria. She remembers thinking her aunt was lying.

  At the engagement party, a small, Taliban-era gathering of seventy-five people, Shukria recognized her husband-to-be as they met for the first time. She had seen him sneaking around the hospital several times, looking directly at her. Staring, even. She had not thought much of it then; the hospital was constantly in various stages of chaos, overflowing with patients and their families. But she remembered his face, observing her as she scurried between operating rooms, always at a distance. He had been there to take a look at her, at the insistence of his family.

  Shukria would make a good wife, he had concluded from observing her. He had been told that under those scrubs she was a woman like all the others. Even better, she already supported her family by working at the hospital. It would provide a safety net for him, too, he figured, if his construction company did not do well. Later, Shukria understood how it all had happened: “Some colleagues knew my female name, and his mother found out I was a woman. She was warned that I was a bacha posh, and that I would probably beat him up if his family dared approach mine for marriage. But he liked my style.”

  The man Shukria married recognized that she was new at being a woman and said he would give her time to adapt. He, too, had a bacha posh in his extended family. In this case, he just happened to be her destiny and the one who would bring her back to proper womanhood.

  As a concession when they first married, he encouraged her to wear trousers at home. He knew it cheered her up.

  IN HER NEW domestic life, the sudden restrictions on movement bothered Shukria—as a newlywed, it took time to grasp the fact that she could not leave the house when she wanted to. Several times, she just walked right out the door on her own, only to be quickly brought back inside and reprimanded. Her husband’s family told her she was a little “silly in the head,” and she agreed something was not right with her. Several times, she promised to listen better and remember things.

  Even more disturbing, to herself and the family, was her inability to perform the most basic female tasks. She was told such skills came naturally to women. But she seemed to lack any innate female gift for creating order, beauty, and peace around her. Yes, something was clearly wrong with her, Shukria concluded. Dinner was served raw or burned. Laundered clothes were not clean, even though her hands itched after soaking in water for hours. When she tried to mend a lapel on her husband’s jacket, her fingers seemed too large, and the needle would escape. When her mother-in-law tried to teach her how to clean floors, Shukria knocked over the buckets of water and created such a mess that she was sent to her room.

  She worked on her exterior, trying to arrange her hair in ways that would look more feminine. With much time and effort in front of a mirror, she found that at least sometimes her curly hair could be flattened and made to behave. As it grew longer, it would hang down her back instead of stand straight out from her head, the way she had always liked it. But when she met other women, they still told her she looked odd.

  But these were her new friends, with whom she was mostly confined to the dark indoors, with curtains drawn and windows painted black. When she did brave Kabul’s thick dust outside, always with the required male escort, she could never go exactly where she wanted. She could hardly see anything through the burka’s small grid, either. Taliban rule was perhaps the worst time to become a woman, and Shukria’s life came to consist of a lot more sitting quietly in dimly lit rooms. But an invitation to take tea with other women in the neighborhood or even her husband’s female relatives always made her extremely nervous.

  Trouble would begin at the greeting.

  The three cheek kisses exchanged between women seemed overly intimate. Shukria had never been that close to another woman and it was strange to feel their skin against hers and to smell them. It made her embarrassed. Their skin was softer, too. Some had offered to share their face cream but Shukria decided she could not stand its sweet smell.

  The all-female gatherings presented more challenges: Proper women sit on their feet, with their legs neatly tucked underneath them, having been taught to do so since childhood. Shukria, who was used to spreading her legs wide as soon as she sat down, tried hard to endure the pain that invariably ensued in the new position. It took time before she mastered the proper mode of speech, too: She was too loud, and her voice too deep for a group of only women. To this day, she sometimes mistakenly answers the phone with her “throat voice,” as she calls it, before quickly correcting herself.

  Worst of all was the socializing itself: She just did not know what to say. The women spoke a language she did not understand, of food, clothing, children, husbands. They exchanged tips and tricks on how to get pregnant with a son. Shukria had no expertise in either area and found it hard to describe most events in her own life with an equally dramatic touch. It seemed she simply could not make friends. The women readily accepted her as someone’s wife, but they did not bother to engage her much, as she was mostly awkward and fell silent when asked a question.

  It took time before she noted one particular way the women seemed to connect: gossip. After swearing herself to secrecy, one woman would pry a small secret, perhaps about a romantic fantasy or something equally forbidden, from another. She would then pass on her friend’s secret, often followed by a degrading remark, as a kind of bait to connect with a third woman. Establishing intimacy based on violating another woman’s secret was a way of socializing for the women, Shukria understood. Accuracy did not count for much—opinions, observations, and suspicions about others were equally
valid currency. Those who had collected the most secrets had the most friends, it seemed.

  Shukria, too, tried to mimic how women played one another, to increase their own influence in isolated groups where information travels only by word of mouth and is easily obscured. But most often she mixed up secrets and instead lost potential acquaintances. After a while she also realized—through trial and error—that women were seldom direct with one another, but preferred to express opinions and ask in roundabout ways for what they wanted. From her band of brothers, Shukria was not used to that approach, but with time, she learned to at least sense an unspoken request or gentle criticism.

  The thing she never quite mastered, however, is what she calls “flirting,” where women giggle and court new friends during what looks like a mating game, flattering each other and expressing joy about one being better or more beautiful than the other. Even with practice, that kind of giggling and charm never quite worked for Shukria. Now, with fifteen years of being a woman under her belt and having borne the requisite number of children, she no longer tries anymore. At times, she even goes as far as to cut gossipers off when she cannot stand to listen anymore.

  Still, she wishes she were more like other women. It gets lonely. Shukria finds it hard to express herself. To her, it seems women tell the same handful of repetitive stories from their lives, often riddled with emotion-laden complaints about their own suffering. Shukria could never imagine sharing the details of her confusing and anxiety-filled male-to-female journey with any of them. She would not want anybody to feel sorry for her—the thought of being seen as a victim makes her cringe. She may not be one anymore, but inside, she likes to think there is a soul of a brave man. To be pitied would be the worst of all fates and ruin one’s honor.

  Slowly, painstakingly, Shukria continued to model her new female persona on the women around her, just as in her life as a bacha posh she took cues from her older brother. Eventually she prided herself on at least getting the makeup almost right. She would tiptoe around in her burka with what she had worked out was a suitably ladylike gait that replaced the way she swung her arms by her sides or put her hands in her pockets while taking long strides and moving along quickly. When a burka was no longer required, she continued walking in her new, more feminine way. Often, she forgot the most important part—to keep her head submissively bent—but she was constantly reminded to do so by those around her. No woman should walk with a straight back and a raised neck, she learned. Instead, she trained herself to hunch over as soon as she stood up, and she is careful to inhabit a far smaller physical space than she used to, by keeping all her extremities close.

  By observing and imitating women’s behavior, Shukria now has arrived at very distinct ideas of the differences in male and female behavior.

  “I had to change my thoughts and everything inside my mind,” is how she puts it.

  She explains the way she became a woman in much the same way American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler has described it. Shukria’s gender—both the male and the female—was experienced as a social and cultural construct, where repetition of certain acts formed her identity on each side. According to Butler, just as little children learn to speak a language by repeating the same words and actions over and over, gender behaviors are learned. A person’s sex is determined at birth, but gender is not: It is trained and adopted through performance.

  But just as learning a new language, with its own sounds and melodies, is often more challenging to an adult, for Shukria to retrain herself to be a woman remains a work in progress and a language in which she may never be entirely fluent. The male side of her “stuck” in a way that she describes as “natural.” It was her first spoken language and her first body language, and boys were her first friends. Everything else—everything female—she has to constantly correct and remind herself of.

  BUT WHAT MADE Shukur? And who is Shukria? Where is Zahra headed, and who or what will Mehran become, depending on how long she remains in the disguise of a boy? It would be hard to argue they were born this way, as each of them was chosen to grow up like a boy. But can nurture alone really be responsible for forming a gender identity in a person?

  Most people would say that men and women are different—that each perhaps has certain behaviors and traits, and maybe even certain preferences, that are specific to that gender. At least we like it to be that way, as we have organized our entire society according to two distinct versions of gender—one male, and one female.

  It helps us perform our own roles, it provides security and comfort, and guides how we should interact with one another. So much revolves around perceived differences between men and women in our daily lives, and without constantly using gender as a touchstone, we may lose our bearings altogether. Gender is one of the ways we try to understand the mystery of being alive. My brother once described his joy at finding out that his partner was pregnant with a girl: “That you have created another human being is incredibly hard to grasp to begin with. When you find out whether it’s a boy or a girl—well, at least then you know that one thing about them.”

  Gender holds beauty, romance, and magic for us. Men and women are “different” because we often enjoy those differences, and because we like to enhance and play with those notions. Gender is an unknown that we are able to explore—although too much experimentation with the binary definition of two distinct genders makes many people uncomfortable.

  But as soon as the conversation turns to how we become different—by nature or nurture—gender becomes less a fact and more a subject of controversy.

  The “nature” line—that we were each born with a certain set of skills, and that any gender-specific behavior or traits are programmed in our DNA—supports the idea that each gender is biologically suitable for different things from birth. That thinking has historically been used to propose that women lack certain traits, are incapable of some tasks, and should therefore not have certain rights. Women and girls have traditionally been described as “naturally” softer, gentler, and overall more domestically talented than men. Following that historical view, any logic, decision making, or even much thinking, was best left to men, whose minds were more sharp and analytical.

  Over time and with varying results, science, medicine, and psychology have all tried to prove these theories, perhaps most notably in research on women by male doctors. For instance, a central argument in nineteenth-century Europe was that a woman’s brain is directly linked to her uterus. The uterus, heavily burdened by menstruating and childbearing, ruled the brain and caused a woman’s innate and erratic behavior. Those same arguments are used by many educated Afghan men and women still today, as a way of justifying the lack of women’s rights. It took a long time for that type of pseudoscience about women’s “naturally” weak brains to be debunked in the Western world, although remnants can still be heard among conservative and religious politicians in lauding the value of the traditional family.

  But where the legacy of determining inherent differences and traits in humans based on skin color has been thoroughly dismissed by now, the idea that baby boys and baby girls are born with entirely different brains that determine behavior as they grow up has dragged far into our time. There is however little scientific validation today for discrimination based on birth sex or gender, as no simple way to separate individuals by gender exists. To strictly group individuals by traditional “male” or “female” traits, skills, or behavior from birth is no longer considered valid or acceptable in many educated societies, as research has shown that two people of the same sex are actually likely to be more different than a random man put next to a random woman.

  The answer to the nature versus nurture question is less controversial than what some may want: What makes a person and a personality is in fact a combination of nature and nurture, in the brain’s development in the womb and life experiences that follow.

  There is also a perfect twist: What is “natural,” in the sense of presumably being
innate, is not the same as what might feel natural. Acts or behavior can feel “natural” to us after many years of performing them, because the brain has physically adjusted or developed in one particular direction.

  In other words: With time, nurture can become nature.

  This is where science meets Shukria’s experience. For her, the male gender stuck to some degree, when her mind and body grew and those experiences formed her personality. She doesn’t need a neurologist or a psychologist to tell her what she already knows: “Becoming a man is simple. The outside is easy to change. Going back is hard. There is a feeling inside that will never change.”

  Where she works, doctors exist for purposes of immediate survival. There are few mental health professionals in the country. Although Afghans commonly confess they suffer from anxiety from living through near-constant war, few have had access to or have sought professional help. That would be shameful, and the few doctors who specialize in matters of the mind are busy taking care of those who have lost theirs entirely. Psychology is associated with run-down asylums where the really crazy people are kept, so they do not pose a danger to others. Just like other adult women with a history of bacha posh that may have gone too far who live as married women silently around Afghanistan, Shukria has so far only had herself to consult on her own psyche.

  Her own opinion is clear: Her parents should never have made her a boy, since she ultimately had to become a woman. As a parent, Shukria takes great care to raise her daughter as a traditional girl and her two sons as boys. She would never allow her own daughter to switch.

  SHUKRIA BELIEVES THE clear rules on exactly what constitutes masculinity and femininity in Afghanistan are the reason it was hard, but not impossible, for her to learn how to become a woman. She offers some of her own observations—none of which has any basis in science but that nonetheless helped her train herself: Men begin to walk with the right foot; women with the left. A man breathes from the abdomen. A woman from the chest. A male voice comes from the throat: “You have to go deeper to the right sound.” A female voice comes from just under the chin, with a lighter breath.