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PROLOGUE

“If Only You Were Born a Boy”

“As I grew up, my mother constantly repeated to me: ‘if only you were born a boy.’ So I eventually became one.” This is the pragmatic way in which eighteen-year-old Zahra explains how she became Zia. Zahra rents a small room in a family house located next to Kabul Polytechnic University. When, a couple of years ago, her parents divorced and remarried, none of them wanted her around anymore. Mistreated by her stepfather, neglected by her mother, and with no relatives to take care of her, she set out to take her future into her own hands and not to rely on anyone. Because of the fact that as a girl she could not enjoy this level of autonomy, she cut her hair short, purchased boys’ clothes, changed her gender identity, and found herself a job in a small cultural organization. With her big hazel eyes, her confident appearance, and her direct way of staring at people, Zahra—who becomes Zia as soon as she steps outside the house—easily passes herself off as a handsome young man.

I met Zahra through my friend Fawzia who boards at the National Women’s Dormitory. Fawzia befriended Zahra at the self-defense class they both attend once a week at Bagh-e Zanana, the women’s park. The walls of Zahra’s bedroom are covered with posters of Jackie Chan and Bollywood movie stars. As she casually lights up a cigarette, tipping her head back to blow away large clouds of blue smoke, she comments: “Now, I can do whatever I want. I can ride a bike, do the shopping, go to work. I can even be mahram [an unmanageable kinsman; a woman must be accompanied by such an escort outside her house] for my girlfriends! I will never go back!”

“You see, Julie, she is a bacha posh [girl dressed like a boy]! She even thinks like a boy! Deep inside, she is a boy and a beautiful one!” says Fawzia, and then she leans forward to whisper in my ear: “I love Zahra! Zahra is my boyfriend!” and she bursts into laughter.

Figure 1. Man showing his muscles in a body-building club in Kabul. Photo by Mélanie De Segundo.

Before I met Zahra, Fawzia had told me about her new friendship with great excitement, recounting in a highly colorful manner how Zahra sometimes engaged in fights with boys and the respect with which her colleagues at work treated her. Since they had met, Fawzia and Zahra had started to call and send text messages to each other several times a day, exchanging sweet words and pieces of poetry like lovers sometimes do. On that day, Fawzia had brought Zahra a nazarband (lucky charm), a necklace meant to protect her against cheshme bad (the evil eye).

Zahra immediately captured my attention. I wondered if bacha posh in Afghanistan enjoyed some kind of social recognition as do the “third gender” hijras of India and Pakistan. It was apparently not the case and Zahra took great risks masquerading as a boy in the streets of Kabul. If she was discovered she could be beaten up or even arrested by the police. Raised as a girl, she had had to train herself hard to adopt the manners of a boy. “Now, I cannot be shy anymore! I have to be tough, tough like a boy!” she said, rolling up her sleeves to show me her muscular but rather thin arm. “I am lucky, I don’t have much here,” she said pointing at her flat breasts.

When I asked friends around me if they knew some bacha posh, I was surprised to discover that many of them knew families who had turned one of their daughters into a boy. The cross-dressing of little girls is an option sometimes chosen by parents to cope with the social pressure to have a boy and the economic need to have a child able to work outside of the house. Parents who fail to produce a son sometimes decide to make one up, usually by cutting the hair of a daughter and dressing her in typical Afghan men’s clothing. There is no law, religious or otherwise, prohibiting the practice even though it remains a taboo and families tend to keep their secret well hidden. In most cases, young women return to womanhood once they reach puberty.

Some prominent Afghan women politicians have once been bacha posh. This is, for instance, the case of Azita Rafaat, a member of the Afghan parliament, who returned to her original gender when she reached the age of marriage and was compelled to become the second wife of her cousin. After several failed attempts at producing boys, which provoked constant disputes between her and her in-laws, she decided to turn one of her daughters, Mehran, into a boy too. She considered her own experience as a bacha posh a positive one: it had increased her self-confidence and made her able to better understand the situation of women in the country. She is now a fervent advocate for women’s rights at the Afghan National Assembly. Another famous case is Bibi Hakmeena, a councillor from Khost Province who dresses only like a man. Unlike other women, she wears a loose peran tomban (knee-length shirt and large trousers) and a black turban. Dressed in such a manner she is barely distinguishable from the men with whom she mixes. Bibi Hakmeena became a man at the age of ten when the Red Army invaded Afghanistan. With her one brother sent to study in Kabul and her younger brother too young to take up arms, the family lacked masculine protection. To get around the problem her father dressed her up as a boy and made her responsible for protecting her mother and younger siblings. He also took her to pol itical meetings and made her participate in the armed struggle against the Russians. Now in her forties, she never returned to womanhood when she reached puberty. Bibi Hakmeena, who never goes out without a Kalashnikov, explains that she never “felt like a woman.” A highly respected figure within her constituency, she is nicknamed “king of the women” because of her sensitivity to women’s conditions (Hasrat-Nazimi 2011).

In contrast to these stories, Zahra had not been made a boy by her parents but had decided by herself to become one. When most bacha posh of her age would switch to womanhood and would consequently struggle to relearn the attitudes, manners, skills, and duties of a girl, disciplining their bodies to close down and express shyness, Zahra was tutoring hers in the opposite direction. From the confined feminine space of the home, Zahra’s horizons had opened in unexpected new ways, allowing her to be drawn to the allures of the outside world, reserved for males. In a corner of her room, a battery of weights was on display. These were the instruments she used to develop a more muscular and therefore more masculine body. I asked her if she was not scared of getting caught like Osama, the little girl dressed as a boy to get around the interdictions imposed on women by the Taliban, in the movie Osama, written and directed by Siddiq Barmak. I wondered how she envisaged the future and if she sometimes hoped she could be accepted as a woman with the type of life she led. But Zahra had no intention to return to her previous life as a woman and seemed rather happy with her newly gained freedom. If she continuously feared being discovered, she insisted: “There is nothing that compares with a man’s life!”

Zahra’s story is of course revealing of the powerful gender ideology around which Afghan society is organized. But it also illustrates the formidable coping strategies Afghans in general, and Afghan women in particular, have developed in order to deal with norms that decades of war, destitution, and displacement have made more rigid with every passing year. Zahra bears witness to the double-edged dynamics of gender ideologies, reinforcing norms while simultaneously pushing the creativity of individuals to devise ways to get around them. This book pays homage to the extreme resourcefulness of Afghan women whose lives have been marked by unmet promises of “liberation” and continuous war. It is my humble attempt to share what I have learned from them, what I have understood and what I have not. This book does not intend to draw a complete picture or to produce a metanarrative about the condition of women in Afghanistan. Plenty of such books have been published in recent years with more or less convincing results. The “true” picture that I hope will come out of it will flit by “as an image that flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (Benjamin 1969, 255).