Written on the Body
What I carried with me when I left Afghanistan
Dec 09, 2011
Foreign Policy
BY ANNA BADKHEN
DECEMBER 2, 2011
The journey between Jalalabad and Mazar-e-Sharif follows the ancient sashays of the great Silk Road: through crepuscular gorges, over vertiginous mountain passes, ticking with land mines and bristling with ambushes. Right outside Jalalabad, on a narrow and interminably congested two-lane highway where brigands have waylaid travelers for centuries, Taliban gunmen fire rockets at tankers carrying oil from Pakistan. Their charred exoskeletons watch over the road like the mutilated sentries of a vanquished nation. This road is no place for a little girl. This road is no place for anyone.
Kamrana's hejiras are limited to daily walks to school. She is in first grade. Each morning, she strolls through her family compound's gates of sheet metal painted pale blue to ward off jinxes; past a bazaar that sells hubcaps, soap, and fruit; around a fetid trash heap that spills out of a concrete enclosure tagged, in English, "DONATED BY UNHCR."
Is she safe? Taliban fighters and Hezb-e-Islami guerrillas of the megalomaniac warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar skulk on the barren mountain slopes that cascade in streaks of lavender and ocher to Jalalabad's terraced oasis. Will they punish a girl for attending school, a woman for not covering her face, a man for looking too Western? "You never know who is who here," Kamrana's uncle told me over dinner of okra and rice. He has been growing out his silvery beard, just in case.
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Dec 09, 2011
Foreign Policy
BY ANNA BADKHEN
DECEMBER 2, 2011
The journey between Jalalabad and Mazar-e-Sharif follows the ancient sashays of the great Silk Road: through crepuscular gorges, over vertiginous mountain passes, ticking with land mines and bristling with ambushes. Right outside Jalalabad, on a narrow and interminably congested two-lane highway where brigands have waylaid travelers for centuries, Taliban gunmen fire rockets at tankers carrying oil from Pakistan. Their charred exoskeletons watch over the road like the mutilated sentries of a vanquished nation. This road is no place for a little girl. This road is no place for anyone.
Kamrana's hejiras are limited to daily walks to school. She is in first grade. Each morning, she strolls through her family compound's gates of sheet metal painted pale blue to ward off jinxes; past a bazaar that sells hubcaps, soap, and fruit; around a fetid trash heap that spills out of a concrete enclosure tagged, in English, "DONATED BY UNHCR."
Is she safe? Taliban fighters and Hezb-e-Islami guerrillas of the megalomaniac warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar skulk on the barren mountain slopes that cascade in streaks of lavender and ocher to Jalalabad's terraced oasis. Will they punish a girl for attending school, a woman for not covering her face, a man for looking too Western? "You never know who is who here," Kamrana's uncle told me over dinner of okra and rice. He has been growing out his silvery beard, just in case.
Read More