By Khalid Qaderi
Note: Khalid Qaderi, poet, writer, and journalist was born in 1994 in Herat city. Before the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, he was the host of cultural programs of Nawruz Radio and performed many programs with Afghan and Iranian poets. His first poetic work is Darakhti Dar Awakher-e-Payez, A Tree in Late Autumn. In March 2022, Khaled Qaderi was arrested and imprisoned by Taliban intelligence in Herat; His charges included writing articles in newspapers and magazines, cultural activities, and media work. The Taliban sentenced him to one-year imprisonment in a military court. He is the first journalist who was sentenced by a military court in Afghanistan.
After spending eleven months of imprisonment in Herat prison, because he and his family were under surveillance by the Taliban, he went to Iran and then immigrated to France. His preoccupation and concern these days are telling the facts and events in the Taliban prison, he says. He wrote this note for Rukhshana Media.
In our geography, being a woman is equivalent to suffering. A woman in every form has woven her web of grief. Being a mother, however, multiplies every pain. A woman who becomes a mother, along with other female sorrows, also suffers the pain of motherhood.
Many motherhoods have been abused in this land. Many children have been kidnapped from their mothers’ breasts. Few mothers have gone to the battlefield, but all mothers have bloody and injured breasts after the war. The history of women is captivity and deprivation.
During imprisonment, concepts found a new meaning for me. Based on the experience of prison and living with a group of prisoners who each had their own story and narrative, I got to know different lives and witnessed the story of suffering mixed with the patience of many women. Women who had a man in prison!
Every woman who has a loved one in prison is herself a prisoner day and night. In a country and a city where it is customary for a man to be the breadwinner of the family, a woman alone is unable to do something. When their husband is in prison, Afghan women must deal with two serious concerns: the grief of bread and the grief of the breadwinner.
In Herat prison, women’s visits were on Thursdays. Mothers, wives, daughters and sisters, lined up behind the prison door before sunrise; my mother stood in the same line for a year with pieces of bread, food containers, fruit, a pair of clothes, etc. Every time, she put a few books in her bag and brought them to me so that I wouldn’t be without a book, although the prison was full of unread and untold stories.
A young woman stood in line every Thursday. Every week, she brought two boiled eggs in a container. My mother was standing next to this woman during the inspection of the items by the prison guard. One day my mother noticed that the woman brought eggs that were not boiled but cooked with oil; “Why didn’t you boil the eggs this week,” my mother asked her.
“In the morning, the egg fell from my hand and broke; I could not boil. I could not buy another one,” she replied. “There was no money. I could not come empty-handed. We had a spoon of oil, I put the egg in the oil.”
When my mother met me, there were tears in her eyes. “She picked up the broken egg from the ground,” my mother told me. “She doesn’t have the money for another egg, poor woman!”
Afghan women have always been behind Afghan men; It is difficult but acceptable and believable that their whole lives are in the hands of men. In the absence of a man, they feel useless and empty. Their life stories lose their color; They forget. They do not find a definition in their own form.
We had a friend in prison named Zainuddin. He had a meeting every week. One week his mother, one week his wife. Every week his mother came, she tried to bring something; one week a kilo of fruit, another week half a kilo, a few… Once she brought five apples and gave them to her son. Zainuddin was her only son; She had raised him with a heart full of dreams and ideals. Zainuddin was a teenager when his mother sent him to the army to join the military. His mother had devoted all her life so that Zainuddin would become a great army officer and build a life.
He became a great officer; he made a life but the life did him no favor. When the regime changed, Zainuddin’s mother had to endure her son’s imprisonment. Because she had made her son a soldier in the previous regime. In this regime she was saddened by her son’s imprisonment and had to find a way to take care of Zainuddin’s children as well. Children who were left without a guardian in Zainuddin’s absence. A mother who had the sorrow of a child in her youth. In her old age, the sorrow of several children rested on her chest.
Motherhood in this country is full of sad stories; The soil and water of these stories and sorrows mostly originate from the child; whether a child faces a storm, or whether a breeze blows; dust is not washed from the eyes of mothers.
The most irreplaceable stories of this land are rooted in the hearts of the women of this land; stories that show heroism despite grief. Being a hero is not just shielding your chest and galloping on the battlefield; the heroism of the women of this country is mostly due to sacrifice.
Femininity in this country is defined by actuality; raising a child makes a woman a mother. Accepting an independent female identity is a difficult task for women themselves; “Woman” is used to suffering instead of children, husband and parents, but does not reveal her own suffering. Every Afghan woman’s chest is a prison of a thousand dreams and aspirations. A thousand stories, a thousand sorrows.
