of them not as mere signs of despair but rather as nondiscursive communicative acts that are part of women’s broad repertoire of emotional performances. I highlight the ambiguous symbolic power of suicide and its anchorage in the subversive imaginary universe of women’s poetic expression.
PART I
Phantom State Building
CHAPTER 1
Queen Soraya’s Portrait
In December 2001, a few days after the Afghan interim government was officially appointed, the Ministry of Information and Culture opened on its ground floor a hall for press conferences. On the large walls of the conference room, paintings of the different kings of Afghanistan—Timur Shah, Abdur Khaman, Habibullah, Amanullah, Nadir Shah, and Zahir Shah—were displayed in chronological order. Only in one painting did the king appear with his wife. The painting was a replica of a famous photograph of King Amanullah and Queen Soraya Tarzi. However, the Afghan authorities had modified the original picture of the royal couple. A very large veil had been painted over Soraya in the manner of traditional wedding veils, which hung down to the floor, a veil that did not appear on the original photograph.
The addition of such a garment to the portrait of a queen is more than a simple anecdote. By adding it the authorities had deliberately rewritten one of the most symbolically significant pages of Afghan history. In her wedding veil, Soraya’s status as the Muslim wife of the king was reemphasized while her eminent political role in the modernization effort undertaken during his rule in the 1920s became a secondary historical fact. Her solitary feminine presence in a portrait gallery dominated by men was nevertheless a powerful reminder that women had once played their part in Afghan politics.
In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the ruling party has a slogan: “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.” The way history is written, transmitted, and told influences the way we envision the future. Historical distortions always serve political purposes. In the aftermath of September 11 and the nation-building process that soon thereafter followed, the veiling of Soraya symbolically inscribed on her body the continuity of shared religious values and the contested position women would come to occupy in the new Islamic republic.
Figure 2. Official portrait of Queen Soraya Tarzi published in the Illustrated London News, March 17, 1928. Source: http://www.phototheca-afghanica.ch.
This constant reinvention of gender norms through the rewriting and reinterpretation of Afghan history “hints both at the precariousness of cultural homogeneity within the national community and at the centrality of gender in articulating and perpetuating a sense of national belonging. Somebody has to invoke and perform the rituals that reinforce these norms and to inculcate them into the next generation in order to ensure historical continuity. This ‘somebody’ is woman-as-mother-of-the-nation” (Peterson 1994, cited in Einhorn 2006, 197). Her body is a site of political struggle over collective identity.
In the portrait gallery of the Ministry of Information and Culture, history pays homage to the great Afghan leaders who have led soldiers to the battlefield against foreign invaders or carried out national development projects to modernize their country. However, little is said about their fellow women and the ways in which they have experienced the various social transformations initiated by the political regimes that have succeeded one another. Yet, “to speak about the ‘situation of Afghan women’ is to generalize unconstructively. Women’s roles and status in society and the division of productive activity between men and women vary according to region and ethnic group” (Centlivres-Demont 1994, 334). With 80 percent of the population living in rural areas, and limited development outside major cities, changes in gender relations initiated in Kabul have continuously been perceived with suspicion, as threats to Islam and tradition or as proof of the elite’s moral corruption.
In this chapter, I explore four key periods of Afghan history when the issue of “women” emerged in the political agenda: the modern monarchies (1920–73), the Communist regime (1979–92), the civil war (1992–96), and the Taliban regime (1996–2001). I look at these periods from the standpoint of the political category “women” in order to underline the ways in which the different political regimes have used women’s issues in order to articulate ideas about national identity and develop a vision for their respective societies. Gender politics, expressed in political discourses around the necessity of “remaking women” (Abu-Lughod 1998), were at the center of each of these respective historical moments.
I also relate the “woman question” to the geopolitical context of the wider region, to the process of nation building, and to the complex relationships between tribal, religious, and central institutions of power. I argue that political interest in the condition of women was triggered by the intensification throughout the twentieth century of Afghanistan’s relationships with the rest of the world, in particular with Turkey, Iran, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Far from creating consensus, the status of women has been (and continues to be) a highly contested issue that opposed conservatives and reformists. Hence, debates over the future of the country are never only debates about the model of economic development to follow. The model of gender relations to promote remains a core feature of such disputes because interventions in this domain always indicate a civilizational shift with changes in lifestyles, clothing habits, and ways of being in public (Göle 1996).
Since women’s emancipation has been from the outset enmeshed within unequal power relations between Afghanistan and the various powers trying to assert their dominance over the region, attempts at reforming the status of women have traditionally been perceived as alien to Afghan culture. Now as before, orthodox readings of women’s role in Islam should not be read as reflections of an essentially traditionalist culture but rather as symbolic attempts at preserving sovereignty in a context where imperial domination triggers moral panics over national identity.
Starting with the controversial portrait of Queen Soraya, the chapter builds on archive images of women collected in various official documents. These images bear witness to the centrality of “women” in promoting narratives of progress for the outside world. Their disappearance from the public domain during the civil war and the Taliban regime can be interpreted as a direct reaction to foreign-sponsored emancipation programs. It is because this “swing of the pendulum” (Zulfacar 2006) has shaped Afghan women’s memories and subjectivities in powerful ways that this history needs to be recounted. The present moment, far from representing a radical rupture with the past, is rooted in a long history of imperial interventions justified by feminist arguments anchored in the colonial tradition: what Gayatri Spivak (1988, 296) has identified as the white man’s burden of “saving brown women from brown men.”
Brief Background
The creation of a modern state in Afghanistan is largely the product of competing imperial influences in the region, providing financial subsidies and arms to the ruling elite in Kabul in an attempt at asserting their own control over the country while providing the state with the means to impose its will on the tribes (Dorronsoro 2005). It is unlikely that a centralized state governing a unified territory would have been able to impose itself without external financial and military aid. However, the state always remained rather peripheral in the political life of the country: threatened by frequent tribal uprisings and the growing influence of the ulema, its survival depended on external aid for the financing of its administration, heavy policing techniques to contain rebellions, and the co-optation of the tribes and the religious class to ensure its legitimacy.
During the nineteenth century, Afghanistan was under the influence of two imperial powers: Russia to the north and England in the Indian subcontinent. It was the threat of the