She dressed as a man. On her head, she sported a Pashtun-style turban and a white shilwar kameez. I sat in the first row of the David Koch Theater in New York City to listen to the fierce words of Afghanistan’s elected official.
“Fight for your land! Stand up on your own! Don’t depend on others to defend Afghanistan,” she said in Pashto, her native tongue
Her name is Bibi Hokmina.
On stage, she held only a microphone and delivered a powerful message that was translated into English by a young Afghan female interpreter. In her homeland of Afghanistan, she is armed. She carries her weapon, her prize possession.
Bibi Hokmina is a woman of passion and poise. Strong and smart. Wise and witty. At the Women in the World Summit in March, Bibi Hokmina represented all Afghan women’s dreams. Women deserve a life of honor and dignity.
“Women in Afghanistan want to be respected,” she said. At home, Bibi Hokmina helps the poor and the oppressed. She builds schools, clinics and gardens. She is Afghanistan’s face of change.
Few Afghan women are elected officials. Bibi Hokmina is a member of the Provincial Council in eastern Afghanistan. In recent years, there have been other notable female leaders in the Wolesi Jirga or the lower house of Parliament. I had learned about these women from a team of Afghan instructors, with whom I teach and train U.S. government analysts and warfighters.
But I had never seen an Afghan female leader dressed as a man. With her black turban, she could be mistaken for a Pashtun male. At the Summit, she told listeners that it is her choice to dress as a man. “My father had me dress as a boy to protect the family during the Soviet invasion,” she said.
Then, world-famous-journalist Christiane Amanpour asked Bibi Hokmina the oft-repeated question (that I believe has been asked of every Afghan):
“Do you want the US forces to leave Afghanistan? And do you fear the return of the Taliban?”
Bibi Hokmina responded, “If the situation arises that the U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, then the Taliban will come to power. And women will become slaves in their homes. There will be no more schools for girls. The Taliban will not allow women to speak their mind.”
With a raised fist, Bibi Hokmina shouted, “I will fight to my death to save Afghanistan! I will never let the Taliban rule me!”
Like many Afghans I’ve met in the past three years, Bibi Hokmina believed the U.S. government and its military troops had a duty to fulfill. A mission to accomplish.
“The United States should not abandon us now,” she said. “We need a stable Afghanistan. The U.S. can help us achieve this goal for all Afghans.”
Hokmina with U.S. Dept of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
what a most compelling and informative story about deep tenacity and conviction of mind-Afghanistan most certainly needs the support of the US-my hope is that we flood this most sacred land with education-electricity-art-song-compassion and an awakening so powerful that the taliban beat their swords into plowshares and we all study war no more-thank you bibi and farhana for sharing your sublime hearts…
fight and die for their pride and freedom.freedom is the state of mind which if ceoibnmd with wisdom can result in the making of great nations and if not then slave mindsets like ours lead by american pets like musharraf and zardari.@ ammarits not about iftikhar ( he got importance coz he represents the office of cjp).its the principle that how can army in order to safeguard the interest of foreign powers can topple the prime national institution and the judges(if we dont stop it now it will happen again and again).
While I never met Bibi Hokmina or anyone quite like her, I’ve met many brave women in Afghanistan. I’ve been there several times as a journalist, and wherever I went, I was struck by the courage of ‘ordinary’ women, trying to help their community as well as their families. Whether they were teachers or members of civic society or candidates for a seat in parliament never held by a woman before, all had a sense of mission and conviction that outpaced the will of most of their countrymen and even of their government to open those doors to them.
Back in the early days, I talked to a group of women from all over Afghanistan that was quietly meeting in Kandahar to draft a document outlining women’s rights that they wanted included in the new Constitution. Then there was the enthusiasm of village women staffing a polling station, and the one who welcomed me proudly in English with, “What can I help for you, my sister?” This was the first open presidential election in Afghanistan’s history, and they had high hopes. Even in burqas, Afghan women have voices, and they want to be heard. In 2009, I was interviewing women in a Kabul park who had come to hear a female candidate for the presidency (not a chance in heck, but undeterred). I pinned the microphone on one woman’s burqa, and after she had said a few sentences, the woman beside her snatched away the mic, pinned it on her own burqa and gave us a piece of her mind too.
I think there is a tendency by many in the West to see Afghan women as a whole as victims of circumstances beyond their control, and there is plenty that is wrong. But this generalizing often negates the fierce courage and determination by so many Afghan women to improve their lot over the past 10 years. The women who want a seat at the table that will determine Afghanistan’s future are not victims. They have come a long way by their own courage and hard work, and that’s why they should be at that table.
Just a PS: Photographer Paula Lerner portrayed women in Afghanistan with great respect and affection, and she created a beautiful memorial to one who was murdered for her advocacy for women. Paula has just died of breast cancer. Please take a look at her beautiful work at http://www.lernerphoto.com/
Siri
I’ll stop now, I promise, but here’s the voice from a new generation:
Ten things I love about being an Afghan woman
Monday, 12 March 2012
by Noorjahan Akbar
There are a lot of negative ways in which we treat women in this country. Child marriage, forced marriages, violence against women, preventing women from education, women’s harassment in public and at work, lack of women’s access to services, etc. All this makes life very dim and difficult for women in Afghanistan. I have written ten things that make me happy about our life with the hope that the list will grow and we will only have positive things to say about our lives as women some day. This list does not mean we have it easy; we have it really hard and things seem to be getting worse for women, but it is just a reminder of the fact that even in the hardest times, there are rays of hope if you search for them.
1. I love our physical and emotional strength and resilience of spirit. I have met Afghan women who work all day on the fields, pushing and pulling cows and weeding the land. They never complain about how heavy the work is and how hot the sun is. I have met women who have given birth to seven children and are looking forward to their eighth. Don’t you dare tell me women are physically weak, because I will believe that when I see a man push seven babies out and go work on the field next week. I know an Afghan woman who has lost her husband and her son but has been a champion at raising her daughter as a single mother. She has never given up on the education and wellbeing of her daughter and her resilience has never allowed her to believe that she should stop fighting because she is a woman.
2. I love our sense of humor. I know an Afghan woman who is able to make misogyny, violence, and heart break funny to not lose hope and to allow others to see the light at the end of the long dark tunnel. I love all the funny songs about forced marriages and being married to older men that serve both as advocacy and humor and point to the resilience of Afghan women.
3. I love our stories! Unlike Snow White or Cinderella, where the princess is saved by some magical prince, the stories that my grandma told us about those of powerful witches and queens. We have hundreds of stories about how women chose their husbands through having several conditions for the men and how the smart princess throws off an entire kingdom by marrying a shopkeeper that she picks.
4. I love our dolls. Growing up we made our dolls with cloth, instead of buying plastic Barbie dolls that are so thin that they look like they are on the verge of collapsing. We would spend days and days building these dolls from the old cloth that our mothers would throw away and the pieces of stick that we found laying around the street. We used pencils to draw eyes and eyebrows; they were not skinny, blue-eyed and blond, but creative and soft with dark black eyes drawn with color pencil.
5. I love that our beauty is not measured by our pounds/kilos. Weight has never been our unit for beauty and elegance; in fact we are always taught that a few kilos of fat here and there make you beautiful and healthy. We actually use the word “healthy” about women who are not thin or skinny.
6. I love our songs! Women’s Pashtu Landay, Uzbeki, Hazaragi and Persian Dubaiti, and the long story-songs in Badakhshan, are all so powerful. These songs focus on our lives as women and bring out our voices. They empower our little girls and keep our old grandmothers busy. They are written in the notebooks of every girl who can read and write and they will remain the feminist side of our history.
7. I love our history. While there are dark pages in the history of women in Afghanistan, the numbers of women (and some men) who have risked everything for us to be able to live a better life are living inspirations in our hearts. From Rabia Balkhi, who was killed for her poetry, to Anahita Ratebzada, who proved that women can be excellent ministers, to Mahmood Tarzi, who prioritized the education of her daughter, to Meena, who advocated for a free Afghanistan, to King Amanullah Khan, who started women’s freedom from his own family, to Setara Achakzai, who fought peacefully for women’s empowerment to her last breath, and Safia Ahmedjan, who never gave up no matter how much they threatened her, these women and men will remain with us forever reminding us of the risky journey that one must take for the worthy cause of freedom.
8. I love our sense of unity. I have talked often with my friends about how women in Afghanistan are much more likely to make friends with women of different ethnicities that most men are. There is a growing sense of solidarity that no matter where you are from and what you look like, if you are a woman; you should support other women- now there are exceptions to this, sadly. As a wise woman once said, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t support each other,” and I think most of us, Afghan women, understand that.
9. I love our diversity. Just traveling to a few provinces in Afghanistan you will witness how diverse women’s cultures are. Our stories, songs, gatherings, ceremonies, and clothing are so diverse and stunning. Walking through Kabul you will see another face of diversity. Women wear different things, talk in different accents, work in different places, believe in different ways of struggling for their rights, eat different things, but at the end of the day, they are all women.
10. I love our Afghan dresses. The colorful and embroidered dresses- short and long- are probably my favorite style of clothing. There are hundreds of kinds of dresses, from the long /hazaragi dress to the Kochai dress to the more modernized dresses that you can wear with leggings or tights and high-heeled boots and the long dresses that you can wear to a dance and shine like nobody’s business- they are all so beautiful! I am on a mission of getting one from every area of the country, so if you have one for sale, let me know! And if you don’t have one, you are missing out on elegance and beauty. Go, get one.
http://youngwomenforchange.org/blog/3700-Ten-things-I-love-about-being-an-Afghan-woman
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hope our so called lereads(mush,zardari,nawaz,altaf,fazl,qazi ) would have played mind games with foreign forces willing to destroy us BUT they opt to play games with the future of our country and nation for their personal agenda and lust of power and now country is facing fight within(we don’t need enemies now we have plenty within our own).our army feels proud in conquering our own land,institutions and killing people and declares victory over nothing instead of defending the homeland.i m not saying to straight away fight a war but to stand for the pride and freedom of our nation(and if things go worse then instead of surrender fight is a better option).we need to have short and long term strategies for that which i dont know how u can expect from a traitor like musharraf.who betrayed the oath,who compromised the sovereignty of nation, who himself propagates that the biggest problem we have is extremism(y he doesnt say roti coz us ki khud ki roti aur power iss war against terrorism say judi hai) and how can u forget the role of his most trusted shaukat aziz in the economic disaster of our country.
The developing media natrarive is, as expected, generally hostile toward this soldier. Without question, this is a sad situation and, however this issue is addressed, it must be within the domain of the U.S. Military and creedence must be paid to the unfortunate reality that this soldier has spent considerable time in what seem best described as hostile toward American hell holes.Hopefully, reason and objectivity trump any emotional rush to judgement.
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fight and die for their pride and freedom. but fiasal time has changed, you dont fight physically but kill ur enemy mentally and politically but wid ur evil ideas, if any one is playin wid us the mind game we should reply back the same way n thats was what musharraf doing.and judges arent to b political, n wen thay hav decided to go political for their interest very sorry to say they arent judges any more, if ex-cjp just wanted to protect the office from future govts then he wouldnt have gone political. judges arent the ones to gain sympathy because they have a high place in the society and if they are working for a noble cause they dont need to gain sympathy. and to your knowledge it just need one ammendment in the constitution to topple the existing judge, no matter it can b done by army or even a civilian head of the state.
Matlab ab ye naubat aa gayi hai kay ye namak haram kazrai hamein dhamkaaye ga? was the remark of a person I spoke to about this statement of his.Indeed, it is a matter of shame for us that instead of replying back in the strongest possible terms and ceremonially laying the martyrs to rest, our leadership not only brushed up the ACTUAL number of casualties, but also refuted the fact that afghan forces crossed into our territory! Shame on them, shame on our so-called leadership!
The bravery and courage of Bibi Hokima is truly admirable, but one has to wonder if she has an advantage over other Afghan women by portraying herself as a man. Not all the time, but often enough, women are seen as second-class citizens in Afghanistan. By acting and dressing as a man typically would, she therefore has greater political clout – or so it would seem. This is the part that makes me frustrated, since it just reinforces classic gender stereotypes as well as makes it seem as if the only way a woman can find success and gain power in Afghanistan is by “being” a man. While Bibi Hokima represents a growing number of Afghan women coming up in the ranks (albeit slowly) I wish it was that women in Afghanistan represented the same social, economic, and political prestige as men do… hopefully one day this will be the case.
Farhana, thank you for these pieces. They are moving and informative. I look forward to staying tuned and spreading the word about your blog. More people should be aware of these issues. Again, many thanks!
Nice article, but let me ask if everyone has something in mind to add..
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no matter what you call it, it has now becmoe an eye-sore even for some of the initial die-hard supporters of this movement! Do you think Justice Iftikhar will ever be able unbiased now? After all the support he has been given by certain elements? Not even Aitzaz will be able to handle true justice!So it is better to focus on core issues you are an engineer and optimum solution is what you should too be focusing on. We have to avoid an economic collapse here which is pretty much written on the wall and we have ABSOLUTELY NOBODY to lead us out. Time is running out of our hands and such expensive movements are only straining our economy further.
Being locked into a ccnoratt doesn’t mean you must allow yourself to become an occupier in someone else’s neighborhood, with all the potential for killing innocents. There is always an alternative. Leonard Read wrote a moving piece during the Korean War called “Conscience on the Battlefield” where he made just this point. It’s .
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I wish him luck and a speedy and safe retrun.Totally un connected to Your son’s posting there:I think leave the Afghans well alone at home. The brighter, more ambitious and more independent minded ones will leave.The process will be something like that between the former east and west halves of Germany. The successful were either dispossessed and got the hell out to the West (or landed in mass graves), resulting in about a 10 point difference in average IQ between the two halves developing in a period of around 40 years. Collapse of the commie system was inevitable, and it could never have sustained a long conflict against anyone – as shown by their adventures into afghanistan.I’m guessing that the huge Afghan diaspora from the time the commies were in there has already raised the average iq’s of neighbouring Iran and Pakistan (currently estimated at around 80 to 85 points), and significantly dropped the Afghan average below that level(85 is borderline for going into the the remedial – special needs class).Leave them to themselves, the carriers of the genes and memes for higher intelligence will all gradually leave behind the country and its remaining residue of indigenous inhabitants will be too poor (too thick) and too mal nourished to represent a realistic threat to anyone.I’m seriously doubting whether democracy can work for us in the west. I don’t think it is even worth trying in Afghanistan.
Sheldon,Doesn’t saying “the Americans could have rfesued to go to Iraq. They might have gone to the brig as a result of their choice–life’s a bitch sometimes…The Iraqis had little choice in the matter. The U.S. invaded them. (Many have fled their country, but that’s a big step to take)” present a double standard? Granted, American troops have more resources than most Afghans and Iraqis and can withstand forced service overseas easier than the civilian populations withstand invasion. Yet still these service people are essentially locked into slavery contracts (as Rothbard observed in For A New Liberty) that require them to do immoral actions. The may have entered these contracts voluntarily, but that is not an excuse for making light of their current plight in their inability to escape these contracts that they are partial responsible for. Empathy for the plight of American troops is not out of the question, while one recognizes the greater plight of the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan (the larger point of your entry which I applaud).Cheers,Bob