The Underground Girls of Kabul Page 22

  Men may also need to keep war to themselves for other reasons.

  While females endure rites of passage on the way to womanhood, including menstruating and later maybe motherhood, manhood does not automatically occur in such a distinct way. When anthropologist David D. Gilmore researched concepts of masculinity for his 1990 study Manhood in the Making, he found the pressure on men to demonstrate their gender was far greater than that on women in most societies. Going to war to protect the honor of a country and its women was always a certain way for a man to define himself. To then include women in warfare is to threaten one of the most effective ways men prove themselves in society. By cultivating what we may think of as a “natural” aggression in sons from an early age, we are raising future warriors, suggests international relations professor Joshua Goldstein in his book War and Gender.

  Still, women today make up 15 percent of troops on active duty in the U.S. military. They have been shot down, killed, and maimed in the hundreds in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite that, women have not been officially allowed in “combat positions.” A third of positions in the U.S. Marine Corps as well as the army have been closed to women; the Pentagon made a decision to revisit the ban on women only recently, in 2012. The idea of women serving in some specialized units is still expected to be met with great resistance, with the familiar arguments: Women in the field are not as physically or mentally strong as men. It could also be too distracting for men to serve in close proximity to women. The biggest hesitation around allowing women in battle, however, as openly expressed by several male American military officials, may be that it changes the honor narrative of war, in which men are supposed to act as the protectors of women and home. And that may be the most dangerous thing of all to the military—if they cannot explain why we must fight.

  Presenting a convincing threat to loved ones is vital in selling any war, with the underlying idea that war is absolutely necessary to preserve peace. In Western society, and particularly in the American political story, women are still the bearers of honor for their family and their country, and the very reason to defend freedom; the most often cited reason for going to war in our time.

  FREEDOM IS AN interesting concept. When I asked Afghans to describe to me the difference between men and women, over the years interesting responses came back. While Afghan men often begin to describe women as more sensitive, caring, and less physically capable than men, Afghan women tend to offer up only one difference, which had never entered my mind before.

  Want to take a second and guess what that one difference may be?

  Here is the answer: Regardless of who they are, whether they are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, Afghan women often describe the difference between men and women in just one word: freedom.

  As in: Men have it, women do not.

  Shahed says the same thing, when I ask her. “When no one is the boss of your life,” is how she goes on to define it.

  “So in the West, there is less difference between men and women?”

  Shahed and Nader look at each other again and then back at me. They don’t know. Perhaps I am supposed to tell them? But then Nader changes her mind, telling me not to bother. She doesn’t want to hear it. “We are nothing. We would be nothing in the West, too.”

  Shahed is more hopeful, inspired by snippets of information from her American trainers: “I have heard that people don’t care what you are or how you look in the West.”

  Not exactly true. But our definition of “freedom” may be different, and it changes with each generation. The current war in Afghanistan, for instance, is named “Operation Enduring Freedom” to indicate something worth fighting a thirteen-year war over. But freedom as we know it today is yet another evolutionary luxury, American author Robin Morgan says, when I later tell her about Shahed and Nader. “[Birth] sex is a reality; gender and freedom are ideas.”

  And it’s all in how we choose to define those ideas.

  The Afghan women I have met, sometimes with little education but a lifetime of experience of being counted as less than a full human being, have a distinct view of what exactly freedom is. To them, freedom would be to avoid an unwanted marriage and to be able to leave the house. It would be to have some control over one’s own body and to have a choice of when and how to become pregnant. Or to study and have a profession. That’s how they would define freedom.

  As we arrive at Nader’s house on another day, three of her sisters are visiting. Under each of their burkas are Indian-style saris with gold embroidery. A red, a yellow, and a purple sister gather on the floor around us, with their eleven children scattering between the kitchen and the reception room. The toddlers cannot make more than a determined crawl back and forth across the floor where we sit barefoot, our sandals piled up in a corner by the door.

  “I would not be able to stand it,” Nader says, with the abundance of nephews and nieces around her. “I am lucky not to have to be pregnant all the time and to have one after the other. If I were a woman here, that would be my entire life.”

  Nader’s sisters have carefully made-up faces framed by long curly black hair. One sister leans forward as she attempts to explain Nader to me: “Do you understand that it is the wish of every Afghan woman to have been born a man? To be free?”

  The other two agree. If they had had their choice, they would have been born as men. Nader is living that fantasy, and that is why other women turn on her sometimes. She does not play by the rules to which they are all subjected. “Nader wants to be her own government,” one of the sisters explains. “Not like us, with our husbands as the government always.”

  To make me understand why some bacha posh continue to live as men in Afghanistan when they reach adulthood, another sister asks a rhetorical question that is excruciatingly simple to answer: “If you could walk out the door right now as a man or stay in here forever as a woman, which would you choose?”

  She is right. Who would not walk out the door in disguise—if the alternative was to live as a prisoner or slave? Who would really care about long hair or short, pants or skirt, feminine or masculine, if renouncing one’s gender gave one access to the world? So much for the mysteries of gender, or the right to a specific one, with this realization. A great many people in this world would be willing to throw out their gender in a second if it could be traded for freedom.

  The real story of Nader, Shahed, and other women who live as men in Afghanistan is not so much about how they break gender norms or what they have become by doing that. Rather, it is about this: Between gender and freedom, freedom is the bigger and more important idea. In Afghanistan as well as globally. Defining one’s gender becomes a concern only after freedom is achieved. Then a person can begin to fill the word with new meaning.

  FREEDOM IS ALSO what the sisters want to question me on.

  What does a Western woman do with all that supposed freedom they hear about? After they whisper for a bit, one of them turns to me: “You can do anything you want, and you come to Afghanistan?”

  “Is it the dust?” she jokes. “Or the war? We always have war.”

  It’s more of a statement than a question, and the other sisters are with her; it is very strange for a woman to come to Afghanistan, presuming she could choose to be anywhere else in the world. It is also very strange of my father to allow it, they believe.

  Not sure where to begin, I say nothing.

  “This is what you do with your life,” the sister continues, incredulously, at my silence. “Don’t you want a family? To have children?”

  She looks a little concerned.

  “You should not wait too long to get married. You will be too old to have children!”

  Yes. I may be too old already, I say.

  Setareh stares at the floor, mortified. All three sisters look around, before one speaks again, with the question they want an answer to.

  “Then what is the purpose of your life as a woman? What is the meaning?”

  “You might as well have
been born a man,” another fills in. “What is there now to make you a woman?”

  “You have your freedom,” the first sister says again. “You can walk out when you want. But we also feel sad for you.”

  She glances at Nader.

  “We know our sister is sad sometimes, too. It is the sad issue of being a man.”

  Nader looks embarrassed, and perhaps a little irritated. A toddler with three piercings in one ear and a polka-dot jumpsuit has wobbled up to her and maneuvered herself into her lap.

  Nader’s face changes, and she adjusts her position on the floor to hold her niece with both hands. She leans her head down to inhale the scent of the girl’s wispy black hair. She closes her eyes for a moment.

  “I have told them to save one for me,” she says to me, tilting her head at the sisters. “They have so many. We can pretend one of them is mine.”

  Her sisters nod. They can all agree on that.

  WHEN WE MANEUVER through Kabul’s outer neighborhoods on our way home with Nader at the wheel—she insists she is a better and safer driver than any man we might employ for the task—she suddenly has an announcement: “I will take you to my bachas.”

  I press Setareh’s hand so she will just say yes and not inquire further. Of course we want to meet Nader’s boys.

  Setareh catches Nader’s phone, tossed from the front seat. We stick our heads together to see what she wants to show us. There, in the middle of a tiny cell phone shot, is Nader, her arms around the shoulders of two teenagers. Both are dressed in suits, with slicked-back gamine hair. They have young, glowing faces with soft features and those confident, defiant eyes. They are not trying to be cute, nor do they look down. They are all grinning, exposing their teeth.

  Nader turns around to see our reactions. I know better than to ask her to look at the road when she’s driving.

  She tells us they are her protégés. Nader has no children, but she has already begun to build her legacy. They are her bachas, in training to become the next generation of refusers.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE REFUSERS

  Nader’s Boys

  ONLOOKERS ARE HUSHED. The coach shouts Korean fighting terms with an Afghan accent. Her arms shoot out, the hands chop down, and fingers point to the floor.

  Begin!

  The fighters are said to be a girl and a boy. They are in identical white tunics and loose pants, with helmets covering much of their faces, making it impossible to see who is what. All eyes are on the two fighters as they begin their dance in perfect rhythm: Hop, hop, apart. Hop, hop, together. Hop, hop, kick. A leg shoots up, a torso blocks; a head swirls around and dips to the floor. Hit by a surge of adrenaline, they clash for a moment, clinging to each other with guttural sounds coming out. They tear themselves apart again.

  The head-scarved coach interrupts: “No, no, no. Fight with your feet. Not with your hands!”

  Her hand goes down.

  Break.

  A quick, respectful bow, and the two panting fighters tear off their tight-fitting helmets. Under the blue helmet is a fighter with slightly fuller lips. She is taller and maybe a year or two older than red helmet, a lanky teenage boy. Both have short black hair glued to their heads and their foreheads glisten with sweat. Two other young students in pants and tunics quietly stand up from the bench. It’s their turn now. They are eager to take over the helmets and chest pads—the eighteen students share just one set.

  Another girl on the bench has been holding a can of Mountain Dew to her left eye, where she was kicked before. She puts it down and says she is ready for round two. She scored more points than her male opponent in round one, in a system no one here seems to really understand. She was a little faster; her ducking a little smoother.

  Sahel leans against one of the mirrors, cracked by a flying body weeks ago. Hands on thighs, she bends her head down and breathes hard. The Korean martial art, named after “the art of hand and foot,” is her only physical exercise of the week other than the three flights of stairs she runs up and down daily to and from school. It is far more than most Afghan girls get. Nader walks up to her, patting her on the back. Sahel’s mouth curls in a smile. She is Pashtun from Kandahar with three younger sisters. She counts Nader as her mentor and honorary big brother. In her actual family, Sahel is the older brother. At seventeen, she is older than any of her bacha posh friends, some of whom have vanished into marriage by now. But Sahel does not intend to go quietly. She has told Nader several times by now: “I am never going to be anyone’s servant. Never.”

  A crumpled bandana comes out of Sahel’s pocket; she ties it around her short hair with a knot in the back, biker style. The American eagle rests on her head as she shakes it to emphasize her refusal. She will fight for her freedom, and Nader has promised her support. Unlike Zahra, Sahel is not alone, and unlike Shukur in her time, Sahel is not the only bacha posh in a tribe of teenagers approaching adulthood.

  A basement in the Khair Khana neighborhood of Kabul is hosting Nader’s protégés, who meet here once a week to practice tae kwon do. When Afghanistan had a medalist at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, it made this a sport of national pride, on par with football and cricket. Five overgrown bacha posh immerse themselves in ritualistic, intense, and explosive close-contact fighting—not at all as a hobby, but because they all aspire to become champions. And in this small underground space, Nader coaches both tae kwon do and her own brand of organized resistance.

  Every situation is addressed during downtime on the bench.

  How to make yourself useful at home. How to argue for an education and a future income for the family rather than marriage. How to make contingency plans for the day your older brothers decide to put a stop to it all. How to ignore what they say about you in school.

  It’s better to live outside of society than to be enslaved, Nader preaches to her apprentices. And if she could do it, if she could resist becoming a woman for this long, it will be possible for them, too. They have cleared the biggest hurdles already and are almost grown-ups. Soon, if they have any luck, no one will want to marry them anyway, Nader tells them. In the meantime, if they can just finish their educations and find a profession, they will be of far more value to their parents than they would be as brides for other families.

  To Nader, her coaching is not political, or part of any philosophy she has studied. She keeps it practical to her bachas: If they resist becoming girls for long enough, both their minds and bodies will grow invincible. They will reach a point of no return, when the male traits take hold. The physical training helps build mental resolve, too, along the lines of what Nader’s warrior friend Shahed has prescribed.

  “Why do you think the conservatives do not allow women to play sports?” Nader asks, by way of explanation.

  “Because you touch each other?” I suggest.

  Yes, that’s part of it, Nader agrees. This type of coed practice would be highly controversial above ground.

  “But it is also because when we use our bodies, we do not feel weak anymore. When a girl feels the strength of her body, she knows she can do other things, too.”

  Nader is not the first to make the connection between mind and body here. To the intense irritation of many Afghan conservatives, a discreet cadre of sports coaches have spent the last post-Taliban decade working with female teams. I tagged along once with Afghanistan’s only girls’ cycling team, where athletic women in head scarves and bulky tracksuits navigated muddy backstreets on practice runs, inviting the jeers of men and burka-clad women alike. Young women on bikes are an open provocation and an obscenity on Kabul’s streets and they usually avoid inner-city practice. Instead, the coach drives them to a mountain where they can ride in peace. Several boxing clubs also allow young women to practice, sometimes in the company of young men.

  Nader coaches soccer, too. Most players are regular girls in head scarves, but several Kabul teams have one or two bacha posh in various stages of puberty, too, as evidenced by the Facebook and cell phone ph
otos she directs me to. The team’s bacha posh usually wears a bandana, or nothing at all on her head, looking defiantly into the camera as she poses lined up next to the others.

  WOMEN AND SPORTS are a classic conflict in a culture of honor, similar to that of war. The point of athletic events was to have women admiring male competitors from the sidelines, and later presenting the winner with his reward. The more segregated and conservative the society, the harsher the restrictions on women’s sports.

  More than a hundred years after the Olympics were revived, Saudi Arabia dispatched its first two female athletes to the 2012 Games in London. Afghanistan sent one—a female runner. In a measured concession, Brunei and Qatar also allowed a few women to participate for the first time. In those countries, women in sports are still a sensitive cultural issue, with a lot of detractors. The same tired historical arguments are still made, often with references to religion or invalid science: Too much physical exercise could be dangerous for women. Men who watch them could get too excited by catching glimpses of female bodies in motion. And the (more important) male athletes may become too distracted to engage in competitive sports at all if women were on the field. And what might be the point of winning, or even playing honorably, if women are not cooing on the sidelines?

  The real reasons for those governments’ reluctance to have women practicing sports are, of course, exactly what Nader has figured out: A woman who feels her own physical strength may be inspired to think she is capable of other things. And when an entire society is built on gender segregation, such ideas could cause problems for those who would like to hold on to wealth and power.