Before the fall of Afghanistan, my daughter Elham, with long and unfinished dreams, would send poems and articles to several newspapers. Her dream was to be a writer. But after the Taliban came to power, her behaviour changed. When I consider it, I understand that the only reason for such a change in behaviour is due to the restrictions imposed by the Taliban group on women and girls.
My daughter and all the girls in my country were first deprived of going to school and education; then, they closed the gates of the universities on them, and in the third stage, all the educational centres, language courses, and fundamental sciences were completely banned for girls.
My daughter, Elham, has a good talent in writing. She showed good skills in the second and third grades when she was in Afghanistan. She used to write beautiful articles, which were admired and praised by her schoolteachers.
Elham, along with her mother and both of her brothers, went to Iran in 2015 and stayed there for four years. My daughter attended school there, where she completed her 4th to 7th grades. She studied with passion and enthusiasm until the 7th grade, when a writing competition was organized by the school, and she won first place. However, because she was not Iranian, they apologised and did not give her the prize she had earned.
In 2020, I brought my family back to Afghanistan, where I enrolled Elham and her two brothers in “Pegah” private school. Life was going well, and we were happy; my children were busy studying, and me and my wife, Masouma Amiri, were busy working.
In the spring of 2021, doctors found out that I had brain cancer, so I went to Pakistan for treatment. I was on the hospital bed when the republican government fell and the Taliban took control of all affairs. They implemented their programmes based on the ideology of Islamism-Afghanism step by step.
When girls’ schools were closed and girls above the sixth grade were deprived of education, my daughter turned to writing. She narrated her own perceptions of social issues, the pain and sorrow of her peers, the problems of poor and needy families, and so on in her youthful language for publications and news agencies. She took language courses and followed her dreams seriously until the gates of tutoring centres were also closed for girls.
This time, with the encouragement of her mother, who is a hairdresser, Elham went to sewing school to start a career for herself, but her unclear future made her unmotivated towards writing, reading, and sewing, and such issues every day lead her towards despair and depression.
No matter how much we encourage her and give her false hope, it doesn’t work. Especially now that she has seen that her father does not have a proper job and her mother has also been banned from working,
Now, she is left with thousands of unanswered questions. She is left with a dark destiny. She is left with a land where women and girls no longer have the right to live and work.
Unfortunately, we can’t do anything either. We have become helpless; we have remained ashamed. We don’t know what to do. We don’t know how long we must watch the destruction of our children, how long we must watch the burning of our children and remain silent with a thorn in our eyes and a bone in our throat, or how long we must follow the news of girls taking their lives from all corners of the country because of depression, forced marriage, and the poverty of families. We hear and do not sigh from our hearts. How long must we wait for international powers and false human rights organisations to raise their sleeves to save us and our beloved children?
Are we alive? I do not know the difference between living and dead.
Mohammad Reza Mahboub
