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Trauma, Mourning and Resistance in Spozhmai Zaryab's Short Stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Faridullah Bezhan
Faridullah Bezhan*
Affiliation:
Monash Asia Institute
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Abstract

The war in Afghanistan (1978 to the present) is one of the longest and bloodiest wars in modern history. From the early 1980s war intensified between the Leftist regime and the opposition Mujahideen and touched the life of every citizen. Bombardments, rockets and landmines killed and injured hundreds of thousands of civilians and caused massive displacement. Women were the direct and indirect targets of the war; some women lost members of their immediate family, others were displaced and emigrated, some were raped, and others were enslaved and sold. Thus trauma and mourning mark the lives of the majority of Afghanistani women. Given the political nature of the conflict—with superpowers and regional powers behind the warring sides—and the nature of socio-cultural bonds that required women to keep silent, how did women deal with these traumas? One of the areas in which this can best be seen is in women's literature—most notably narrative works. These works, in which the authors were themselves either victims or witnesses, voice women's resistance to the war and portray war and its consequences for ordinary women's everyday lives. In the narrative works of Spozhmai Zaryab (the pioneer of the anti-war fiction in Afghanistan), women and trauma are multi-dimensional. In some of her short stories women mourn publicly; in others, women cope with war and resist it by whatever means available to them. In others, women visualize war, invasion and destruction of all socio-cultural bonds. Women are transformed by a profound change, including in their perception of gender relations.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , July 2011 , pp. 521 - 540
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2011

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References

1 Internationally, the term “Afghan” has more currency than “Afghanistani”. However, Afghan is synonymous with the Pashtun ethnic group. The political strength of the Pashtuns allowed them to use the word Afghan to describe all ethnic groups in Afghanistan, beginning with the 1964 Constitution. This usage is resented by the many other ethnic groups in Afghanistan. The term Afghanistani is widely used inside Afghanistan. I have chosen to use the word Afghanistani when referring in general to the inhabitants of the multi-ethnic modern nation-state called Afghanistan.

2 It was not until the late 1990s that the Mujahideen's abduction, rape and indiscriminate killing of Afghanistani women became the focus of the international community's criticism, arousing interest from Amnesty International and other human rights organizations. Zulfacar, Maliha, “The Pendulum of Gender Politics in Afghanistan,” Central Asian Survey, 25, nos. 1–2 (2006): 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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