The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg

Imagine a girl being raised as a boy because of societal pressure. Imagine after years of living under this guise, a person having to readjust into a woman in their adulthood because the same society requires them to get married for purposes of reproduction. To be more precise, reproduce a male child. Imagine the psychological effect of this and imagine that this is real and happened as recently as 2011.

The author of this book is a Swedish investigative journalist who goes to Afghanistan hoping to understand the issues affecting women parliamentarians. What she stumbles upon is even more telling than what she’d set out to find. The story is told through the actual lives and experiences of five women. The author visits Azita to interview her on her experience as a woman parliamentarian in the post-Taliban government. It is here that she makes a rather unexpected discovery that Azita is raising one of her four girls as a boy. Fate has not looked favourably upon her (at least according to her society) and she has had the bad luck of giving birth to girls only.

Raising one of her girls as a boy is not deemed unusual in her society and apparently reflects a path taken by many others before her in various cultures across the world to correct the “defect”. Her society actually lauds this effort believing that raising one of your daughters as a boy brings good luck and increases a mother’s chance of conceiving a real boy next time. You see…..in her culture, it is better to be anything but a woman. Having a son, even a made up one, brings her honour in the society and raises her profile more so now that she’s a representative of the people.

In her travails, the author discovers that the practice is commonplace in Kabul. The different lives and circumstances of these girls bring out various themes. It becomes apparent to her that an afghan woman is predestined to get married and reproduce. She is a commodity that men trade at the time of marriage and her value is determined by her physical beauty, virginity and reputation. She is to bear as many children as her husband desires. She is to submit to her father’s will and must at all times during her entire life be under the protection of a man. Should she want to leave her house, she must be accompanied by a male; the absurdity of a seventy-year old woman being “protected” by a 7 year old boy notwithstanding.

One of the girls raised as a boy (bacha posh) her entire life has reached puberty and is expected to make the switch from being a boy into womanhood. Any lingering on her part and continued association with boys could tarnish her reputation and damage her chances of finding a good husband. In Afghanistan “reputation is more than symbolic; it is a commodity that is hard to restore once it has been damaged”. She resists this transition expected of her and argues that she is a boy! She insists on this despite numerous talks with her mother who is desperate to convince her to ditch her boyish ways and accept her femininity.

This then poses the question as to whether gender is inborn or a matter of nurturing. How can a child who has been raised as a boy be expected to switch back to womanhood and be a wife and be a mother? She plans to escape this new “reality” by either running away to her relatives in America or undergoing surgery in Iran to become a boy and cement her freedom.

Another former bacha posh, now married, admits to various struggles in her married life and questions that constantly plague her mind. How does a man sleep with another man? When questioned as to whether she’d prefer to be with a woman, she replies in the negative…..she views women as weak. How is a boy expected to be a mother? She is a wife and a mother and she still questions her identity. In the story she ends up been given talaq (divorce) and wonders if it had something to do with the fact that she was a boy who turned into a woman. To an afghan woman, divorce means losing everything, she has to return to her father because a woman must be under a male at all times and as a result loses her children because the man “makes” the children (note this double standard: while trying to conceive, a woman with no sons is accused of not being capable of making a boy child).

The bottom line of the story and the struggles of a bacha posh are all centred on the main difference between a girl and a boy in this patriarchal society which is freedom. The boys have it, the girls do not. Azita was also a bacha posh in her youth and tries to explain to the author why the non-governmental organisations churning billions into programmes geared toward empowerment of women have miserably failed. She notes how these organizations are terribly misguided about the afghan woman’s situation by thinking that their problems can be solved by discarding the burka. She muses that she’d gladly wear two burkas for the promise of freedom to choose whatever is good for her. According to her “a great many people in this world would be willing to throw their gender in a second if it could be traded for freedom”.

Closer home, ours is also a patriarchal society. I must concede that women have made considerable gains in recent times.However, the effects of patriarchy still linger and some practices are still deeply rooted. I remember having a discussion with one of my friends (my mothers’ age) who had the rotten luck of only “making” girls. She recounted how she had endured pregnancies and labour (women who’ve undergone labour can relate) trying to get a boy. Despite three failed attempts to her name, she was determined to do it a fourth “lucky” time. She endured yet another difficult pregnancy and long labour and finally brought another being into the world. These were the days where there was no way of telling the sex of the baby before delivery, one had to wait patiently until the baby’s arrival.

Weak from fatigue and about to see how well she’d done (because you know… it’s a test of womanhood), the nurse held the baby up for her asking cheerfully “what sex is it?”  In her frail state all she could manage was a scream!! It was that of desperation. Another failed attempt!!!

Research indicates that with the advancement in technology which has enabled women to know the sex of the child as early as nineteen weeks into the pregnancy, millions of female foetuses have been aborted throughout the world. The rejection of girls by society is not only manifest from the millions of abortions of female foetuses. Women have claimed their space in politics, corporates and other professions. Here, is where the real ugliness and true rejection of the woman in our modern day society takes place. A woman who dares to excel more than permitted by the society is shunned not only by men but mostly by fellow women. As the author notes “No group can be truly suppressed until its members are trained and convinced to suppress one another”.

In the corporate world an unhealthy competition is created between women who are set up as each other’s competition often to their detriment. In the political world a woman is often shamed as immoral and (oddly so) “unwomanly” for working late hours with men. In the book, this is one of the potent weapons used by Azita’s husband to extort money from her. He threatens to accuse her of being a common whore who sleeps with her male colleagues, confident that this would hasten her fall from grace.

This culture of shaming women is evident in our society where it is considered so unfathomable that a woman could be good at her job and that her ascent to the top must have been aided by a series of trysts with her superiors! This is the means by which women are being robbed of their power, because to accept that a woman can be as efficient as a man would be acknowledging that she is not the weaker sex.

So the real question is how free are we as women?!

The book will challenge all you think you know about gender, identity and some of the societal contradictions that we are forced to grapple with on a daily basis. It leaves you with a feeling of hope for the women of Afghanistan and also a dark feeling of despair. On a personal level, it greatly disturbed me that women have to go through this in modern day world. I’m still coming to terms with the feelings it evoked. That’s why you should read it.