It was the book My Pen is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women that led us to Untold Stories, an organisation that works towards giving writers who are ‘marginalised by community or conflict’, a safe space to express themselves. Their two current projects are Write Assam and Write Afghanistan and out of the latter has emerged 18 strong female voices whose fiction throws light on the lived experiences of women in the land.
While there is no information available on the 18 writers except their names, six have immigrated from their countries in August 2021 to settle down in USA, Germany, Italy, Iran, Sweden and Tajikistan, post the Taliban takeover. An open call to women writing prose in Dari or Pashto, the two official languages of the land, led to the first draft of this collection of short stories. In early 2021, a second call was issued to the more isolated parts of the country. Entries included handwritten pages photographed and sent via WhatsApp. What three years of intense labour from a stellar team of journalists, translators, editors can achieve is the book we have today, My Pen is the Wing of a Bird (Hachette India; Rs 599).
The stories are vignettes from lives that couldn’t be more different from each other. In Daughter Number Eight by Freshta Ghani, translated from Pashto by Zarghuna Kargar, two women face each other –– a patient who needs to know the gender of her baby born a few hours prior and a doctor who is appalled to hear that the former has kept fasts hoping to finally birth a male child. While all the stories are fictitious, they present a slice of lived experience that no other experience can substitute. In the story The Most Beautiful Lips in the World, Elahe Hosseini draws from the real events of August 2019 bombings in Dubai City Wedding Hall in Kabul. Her haunting descriptions of wedding clothes with blood spills on them lying strewn on the floor of the place, stays with you long after the book is over. In Fatema Khavari’s Ajah, translated from Dari by Zubair Popalzai, she writes about a feminist village led by the local grandmother where the women join hands to till the land and create a channel to divert water and save it from the floods.
The stories are really short yet immersive, written in simple language to communicate a sense of urgency. The prose isn’t flowery because the emotions are raw and require the punchiness of crisp and short sentences. The wide range of stories –– from urban elite to the poorest and most deprived lot of the society –– the book is a treasure trove, allowing readers an elusive peek into lives that have been spoken about often but rarely by the right people. In the introduction penned by journalist Lyse Doucet, she writes, “For most of these writers, even finding the space and peace of mind to write is a daily struggle. Literature is resilience, a release.”
In her introduction, Ducet also asks the very pertinent question –– who speaks for Afghan women? The narratives have mostly been shaped by White people whose saviour complex rules their decision to comment. However, there are fights being fought by women daily whose stories are as different as the women themselves are.
My Pen is the Wing of a Bird is a seminal piece of literature born from the goodness of heart and mind that created a space that was safe enough to let writers flourish. Untold Stories is founded by Lucy Hannah, a visiting research fellow at King’s College London and the director of the BOCAS Lit fest in Trinidad.