If 2020 was a year of unremitting bad news, a faint light may have been missed by many in mid-September – the start of historic Afghan peace talks aimed at ending a decades-long war. It sparked a stream of statements and Zoom sessions, starring impressive native women and their allies, with clarion calls to protect women’s rights if the Taliban return to power.
A reminder, if one were needed, of their herculean task comes in a page-turning account of the lives of Afghan women from cradle to grave – whether or not the Taliban are in charge, they live in a deeply conservative society.
Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son is Homeira Qaderi’s seventh book. But like news of Afghan peace talks, this work by an Afghan professor of Persian literature may have passed you by since not all of her writing has been translated (and so elegantly by Zaman Stanizai).
At the heart of this moving memoir is an aching sadness. Qaderi’s story is punctuated by letters to her son, Siawash, “snatched out of my arms” at only 19 months old. As the book’s subtitle attests, this is her desperate bid to tell Siawash their story and how she’s been “live-buried” by those around him.
“Losing you was the most severe pain I have ever suffered and I know you must be very, very angry,” she writes in one letter, referring to her Sophie’s choice, the details of which I won’t spell out here. “I always have and always will want to be a mother for you, but I also need to be Homeira for myself.”
It’s the heart-wrenching denouement of a story marked by rebellion. “A girl should have fear in her eyes,” Qaderi’s grandmother, “Nana-jan”, used to scold her. As a young woman, the author spends time in front of the hallway mirror “examining my eyes to discover where the fear was hiding”. Through lyrical imagery – striking and shocking – she takes us inside the small world of a child “too young and energetic to understand fear”. But invisible bullets and very visible Russian tanks hint at the big bad world beyond in the decade after the Soviet invasion that sparked the 40-years-and-counting war.
How can a youngster understand why Soviet soldiers are called the Red Army? An answer emerges when Qaderi sees them clapping and shouting, their faces growing red with laughter. There’s another crimson-cheeked moment when she spots the buttocks of a Russian soldier as he tries to force himself on a neighbour’s daughter.
But Afghanistan’s contorted past takes a back seat to the gripping story of a girl growing up. A bit more history wouldn’t have gone amiss, though. For example, we seem to move seamlessly from Taliban to post-Taliban rule after the 9/11 attacks that brought them down. But perhaps this cements one of her central points. It doesn’t matter who is in power - women’s lives don’t change much.
A young Qaderi is chided: “Why aren’t you like other village girls?” when she tries to play in the fields like the boys or asks for a share of meat equal to her brother’s at dinner. A grownup Professor Qaderi, at odds with her husband, is lectured that “these traditions are the pillars of this land”.
Her life as a bright, brave teenager underscores the Taliban’s exceptionally harsh rule, including their infamous ban on education for women and girls. Qaderi wants nothing more than education. With her mother as a co-conspirator – along with her brother, father and grandfather – she finds a way to secretly hold classes for keen children on her street. It’s an escape, for her as much for them.
There are good men in her life who help her survive bad days and patriarchal ways, chief among them her bibliophile father, who reads Russian literature even as he fights the Red Army and then buries his library under a mulberry tree for safekeeping when the Taliban come to power. When his determined daughter starts showing talent, he digs up his books because “the girl who writes must read stories”.
It’s a dangerous but defining pact that helps set Qaderi on a course that continues to this day: a commitment to storytelling and a quest to improve Afghan women’s lives, whatever the cost.
Lyse Doucet is the BBC’s chief international correspondent