In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate Read online

  “But you must. This is such a unique angle. I know you can do it.”

  “I wish I had the same faith in myself,” I replied.

  That day on the bus I leaned my head against the window and fretted. Khalid had graduated and was now in college. Najiba and Jamila were in high school now, along with Aziz, Emal, and me. They chattered with one another in Pashtu. They should be speaking English, I thought. We passed a video store and suddenly I had an idea. Indians had made a Bollywood movie of this folklore, called Laila Majnu. I would ask Uncle A to rent it for me, and then I could show clips to the class. The clips would take up most of the fifty minutes. I would only have to talk for twenty minutes, thirty max. The fewer minutes I imagined myself talking in front of the class, the happier I felt. The next day after class I told Ms. Johnson about my movie-rental idea. She thought it was brilliant.

  That night, when he came home from work, I told Uncle A about Romeo and Juliet and how I was convinced Shakespeare had stolen the idea from the Afghans and how Ms. Johnson thought my idea was genius and how I was only one of a few students who’d been asked to present my thesis to the class, and how I wanted to round out my speech with clips from the Indian movie of Laila Majnu and could he please rent the movie for me so that I could start writing?

  Uncle A nodded as he listened, then said he would discuss it with the Professor. Uncle A was a master at the inscrutable Pashtun expression. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I assumed he would say yes, because this was for an important school paper. Hadn’t he told us eight thousand times since the day we arrived that he and the Professor expected us to excel at school? Wasn’t that the entire reason we left our mothers and home in Afghanistan and came to America?

  A few days passed, and neither the Professor nor Uncle A said anything to me. I thought perhaps they had forgotten about it, and so I tried to work up the courage to ask them again. Then it was Sunday, and we sat down for our usual, much dreaded Sunday meeting. Before I’d fully settled into my chair, the Professor demanded, “Why are you obsessed with this love story?”

  He looked directly at me. Usually the Professor addressed all of us.

  “It’s part of my presentation for English class. My thesis,” I explained. “Ms. Johnson asked me, and I—”

  “Why did you choose a love story?”

  “We are reading Romeo and Juliet in class,” I said. Najiba and the others looked at me, wide-eyed. What had I done to be singled out this way again?

  “Is there a boy in your class that you like? Is that what this is about?”

  “It was a class assignment.”

  “Who is this boy that you love?”

  “There is no boy. I just wanted to share my culture,” I said quietly, mortified.

  “You know I didn’t bring you here so you could fall in love with a boy in your class and watch Indian movies together. I didn’t bring you to America so you could hanky-panky.” I felt hot shame burning my face. I had no idea what hanky-panky meant, but from the disgust on his face, I knew it was not anything a good Pashtun woman should ever be accused of.

  There was nothing I could say. The Professor and Uncle A leaned forward on their forearms. They thought I was lying. Everything that came out of my mouth sounded feeble, ridiculous. Uncle A asked whether I was going to marry this boy. The Professor threatened to send me back to the village to get me married, to control my going wild, and told me how shameful it would be to waste the chance of a lifetime this way.

  I returned to Ms. Johnson in tears. I told her I couldn’t do the presentation because it was not going to be possible to rent the movie.

  “What do you mean not possible? Did you try all the video stores? Maybe Movie Madness has it. They have a lot of older foreign films.”

  “No, no, it’s not that.” I started to cry. “It’s just not possible.”

  “But why, Saima? What’s happened?”

  I felt the tears in my eyes. It would shame my family to tell her anything about what went on at home. I couldn’t possibly share with her my uncles’ disapproval, or try to describe the shame I felt at being singled out in the Sunday meeting. “My uncles forbid it,” I said.

  “Would you like me to talk to them about it?” asked Ms. Johnson.

  “No!” I cried.

  “Or I could write them a note and tell them that you’re renting the movie for your thesis.”

  “That won’t work either,” I said. If they knew I was talking to an outsider about this, they would be even more furious.

  In the end, Ms. Johnson rented Laila Majnu for me. English was the final period of the day, and I was the last one to present. I stood up in my loose T-shirt and pants, with my scar between my eyebrows, and told the class about the similarities between Romeo and Juliet and Laila Majnu, about Afghan women and the tales they memorize, about Babo and her gift for recitation. About how there were no libraries where I grew up, except the human ones, and how stories were passed to the next generation through memorization. The bell rang, but no one moved. They sat and listened, and when it was over a boy whose name I can no longer recall, the smartest boy in the class and the one whom I always thought of as my competition, came up to me as I was putting my papers back into my notebook. He was tall, with glasses and long brown hair. “Saima,” he said, “that was one of the most interesting and arresting presentations I’ve ever seen. You did an amazing job.” I didn’t understand his use of “arresting presentation” at the time, but I understood his tone and was very happy to hear it. Later I would realize that that was probably the first time most of my classmates had heard about a culture and people where it was still the norm to pass on cultural history and wisdom verbally and through folklore songs.

  IN THOSE FIRST years, I constantly forgave my uncles. It must have been easier for them when we first arrived, when we must have seemed like children. I had been fifteen—old enough to be married with a couple of kids in Afghanistan—but I was small, quiet, and had an amazing ability to fold into myself physically, to become almost unnoticeable. After a few years of eating healthy American food, we had grown a lot. We were all true teenagers now, with pimples and bad moods. What were they to do? I imagine they were afraid that we’d become too hard to control, and that by being even stricter they would be preventing us from becoming too Americanized and forgetting our life mission.

  I might have continued making excuses for them, but then, at another Sunday meeting, the Professor announced that the worst thing imaginable had happened, and that he was shamed beyond repair. He glared at me. His fists were on the table. The others bent their heads reflexively.

  “A boy called for you,” he said.

  For a split second I thought they had conspired against me by making up something so insane. I thought they wanted to teach the others a lesson and to use me as an example. I honestly didn’t believe anyone had rung—we weren’t even allowed to answer the phone.

  “A boy called this house and asked for Saima. Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  “I knew you could not be trusted with all the freedoms we gave you by bringing you here. You have become exactly what I was afraid you would become.”

  “I swear I don’t know any boys,” I pleaded.

  “You can no longer be trusted. I don’t see any reasons at all why I shouldn’t send you back to the village. Let them handle you the way you are meant to be handled.” The Professor had a way of saying exactly what would cut the deepest.

  Shame and dread rose in me like a poisonous cloud, a familiar feeling. He had to know that I lived in constant terror of being sent back to what I perceived to be the cursed life of an Afghan woman. I had believed that once I came to America, that fear would leave me and I could relax enough to find my destiny in my new home—but it had not been that easy, especially with my uncles constantly threatening to take away my newfound liberties. I thought, I will never regain their trust. I should ask them just to send me back to Afghanistan immediately. I sho
uld just get it over with and leave here right now. But then another feeling rose in me, an alien one. I didn’t know any boys who would have called me. But even if I had, why did my uncles insist on making such a harmless thing seem so dishonorable and dirty? Knowing how important virtue is for a Pashtun woman, why did they always attack mine for no reason? Having done nothing wrong, I let myself be furious at my uncles for the first time. The anger was liberating and scary at the same time.

  While I sat through yet another Sunday meeting, something amazing and life-altering was happening inside of me. We Pashtuns are famous for our temper and destructive anger. When we feel slighted or insulted, we take revenge, even if it means our own death—if we think it is necessary, we will gladly give our lives in the name of avenging whatever or whoever offended us. My uncles had truly insulted me, and for the first time I saw their offensive mind-set clearly. For a second, I am sure, murder passed through my eyes. But then something miraculous occurred: The American in me rose up to the Pashtun in me and saw the challenge in my uncles’ treatment of me. Instead of being angry at their implications that I was a woman of low morals who could not be trusted with freedoms, I decided that I would make it one of my life’s goals to prove them wrong—to show them that I was capable of more than they had ever allowed me to envision for my future. The goal has fueled me time and time again. But little did I know then that I was embarking on a journey toward a destiny so far removed from the fate any Pashtun woman is born into.

  At school the next day I told Kristen what had happened. I asked her if she knew who had called me.

  “Probably Jason,” she said. We were walking to the bus after class. “He told me he missed math and needed to get the homework assignment from you.”

  “But how did he get my number?”

  “I gave it to him,” she said.

  “My uncles are so mad,” I said. “They’re totally … pissed off.”

  For a moment I thought she was going to comment on me saying “pissed off”—something I had never said before. She laughed and clapped her hands together. She was always on the lookout for evidence that I was becoming a real American teenager.

  “Did you tell them Jason is a football player?” she said. “He’s, like, the most popular guy in our class.” I realized how confusing it must have been for the Americans around me to learn that what their parents might consider a good thing would send my uncles through the roof.

  EIGHT

  I had decided to ask my uncles to send me back to the village.

  The Professor and Uncle A had been more than generous in bringing us to Portland and arranging for our education, but after I enrolled at the Professor’s college, I became increasingly aware of the hypocrisy in their behavior. When it came to our learning, they treated the boys and girls equally, but outside of the classroom they expected the girls to behave like traditional Pashtun females and the boys to behave, well, like boys. It is something I have realized over and over again throughout the years: Our uncles offered us a magnificent education, but they never counted on us applying what we learned to our own lives.

  I’d made some friends of my own, other Muslim girls, but I wasn’t allowed to go to their homes for dinner unless they ate really early. I had a 9:00 P.M. curfew—in college. But my brother and male cousins had no curfew. Uncle A had even bought another house into which he moved the boys. So now the girls lived in one house with the uncles and the boys lived in the other house by themselves. One of my girlfriends once told me that the boys were famous on campus for their parties. At family barbecues I would look at the American girls the boys invited, fuming inside that we weren’t even allowed to have any guys call us, while their girlfriends were welcomed and fed at our family dinner table.

  The injustice and inequality got under my skin. I was living in America, receiving an American education, and taking courses in human rights and women’s studies, while the Professor and Uncle A treated me no differently than if I had stayed in the village in Afghanistan. Actually, it would have been easier to live with this hypocrisy in the village, where I wouldn’t have known any better. I expected to be treated like a second-class citizen in Afghanistan, but it was hard to stomach it in Portland. So we fought, loudly. I cried and screamed at them. Every word out of my mouth would have earned me a stoning in Afghanistan; I’m sure my uncles would have been happy to do the honors. Conflicts were still handled at Sunday meetings. For years at those meetings I was the subject: my strong-willed nature, my refusal to be thankful to them for having given me the education to know the freedoms I had only dreamed of in Pakistan. Their plan had been simple: to educate us, make us citizens, and then send us back to marry some son of distant or not-so-distant cousins and bring him to America, where he could find a job, make money, and send it back home so that the whole tribe could benefit and prosper. I was expected to sacrifice my personal happiness for the good of the community—a true Pashtun sentiment. To this day, the memories of those Sunday nights make me feel sick to my stomach. Oh, how I envied the boys for being able to drive off to their home after those meetings!

  I GRADUATED WITH a bachelor’s degree in political science and was hired at a language agency. I was only allowed to take this job because the agency was run by an old lady who operated it out of her house. The Professor came to the interview with me to question the owner and made sure her answers were satisfactory before he allowed me to work there. I was expected to drive straight to her home in the morning, then straight home after work. I was the office manager, supervising a staff of four people who fielded calls for interpreters.

  One Friday afternoon just as we were getting ready to leave for the day, one of our clients called for a Russian interpreter, whom they would need the very next morning at seven o’clock. Our usual Russian interpreter was Vasily, a textbook Russian. He was enormous, at six feet five and heavily muscled, a stern-faced, blue-eyed blond. He seemed to have made it a practice never to smile and was famous among the staff for being difficult. No one wanted to contact him so late for such an early appointment. They spent forty-five minutes trying to find alternatives and arguing over who should make the call, but I didn’t have time for that nonsense and was anxious to get on the road. My uncles knew what time I got off work. More than once when the traffic had been bad and I’d return home late the Professor would be waiting, ready to pounce. “Where have you been? You get off at six o’clock and now it is six-thirty and it’s a fifteen-minute drive home!”

  I called and told Vasily we would need him at 7:00 A.M. and were sorry for the late notice. He laughed. Was I out of my mind? It was Friday night and he required a few days’ notice before weekend appointments. But he said he’d take it, as long as I agreed to have dinner with him. Was he out of his mind? I told him not that night, but one day, when hell froze over, or when my uncles allowed me to date a Russian. The odds of hell freezing over were significantly better. Even though at first I didn’t give in to his repeated invitations to dinner, he took the appointment.

  Surprisingly, Vasily turned out to be charming and kind, and we began a strange relationship. I was almost twenty-three, but I had no concept of what it meant to have a boyfriend. He could only call me at work and we could only meet for lunch—and even then, he would bring me lunch and we would eat at my office. We watched one movie, Disney’s Tarzan, during which I wept noisily. I tried to explain between hiccups that it was something about the music—Phil Collins singing about two worlds and one family. Vasily was baffled. Here he was, this menacing Slav, watching a matinee of an animated movie with a sobbing Afghan woman who wouldn’t even let him try to comfort her by putting his arms around her.

  Sex was out of the question, as was kissing and hugging. When I had known him for almost six months, I let him hold my hand once as we were leaving a restaurant, but I made him promise that he wouldn’t take that to mean that it would go any further. Vasily believed it must be true love. “If any of my ex-girlfriends had ever said no to sex,” he said, “my
immediate question would have been ‘Then why am I buying you dinner?’ ”

  “You don’t need to buy me dinner,” I said, surprised. “I can buy my own dinner.”

  He was the first man to buy me jewelry: a necklace with a gold Red Wing charm, in honor of his favorite hockey team. He even told his mother, who lived in Ukraine, that he was going to marry me. He reported with some satisfaction that she was hysterical with fear that the men in my family were going to track him down and kill him.

  I was never emotional about my relationship with Vasily, which I think is what made it so easy for me to draw boundaries. I was logical in my decision to see him, and never held what the Russian army had done to my people against him. For one thing, I knew that the Soviet government at the time of the invasion was not a democracy, elected by the people, and therefore did not represent a national consent to invade. For another thing, even if the public of the Soviet Union had been asked to vote on the matter, Vasily would have been too young to even remember the decision. How could I fault him for what he was never a part of? But my uncles indeed would have killed Vasily in a heartbeat, if they had been in a country that allowed honor killing. Luckily for me they were in America, not Afghanistan, when they eventually found out about him.

  I think Vasily was the first person to whom I could express what I really wanted to say to my uncles. He would let me fume, and I knew he would never judge or tell anyone how ungrateful I was being toward my uncles. I did appreciate what they did for my life, but, ultimately, they asked me to give up the one thing I had wanted to have in America: a chance to find my destiny, uncontrolled.

  So before they ended my dream of a life here, I decided, I was going to take control one last time, by asking them to send me back to the village. I could not handle living in America with the constant feeling that my days of freedom were numbered. I didn’t want to be forced to return to marry. I was not going to let them win by getting me citizenship only to bring over a boy of their choice to replace them as the man meant to control me.