To Be an Afghan Today: The Imagination of Peace Amidst the Violence
By Samina Ansari
Upon my return to Afghanistan after decades of being a member of the Afghan diaspora in Europe, I met professor Michael Barry. Professor Barry is a history professor and we both share an interest in Afghan youth, and he agreed to share his account in regard to Afghan youth today and Afghan history.
Kabul, the historic city known by its legendary rose gardens and ancient architecture still remains, but the city is bruised after four decades of war. Today, Kabul has 6 million inhabitants and the mountains around the city are filled with colorful houses. The otherwise blue sky is covered with pollution during the winter season and the streets trafficked with cars.
In Professor Barry’s view, Afghanistan has become a misrerabilist subject. The few people he observed were interested in academic study of Afghanistan are social anthropologists studying timeless nomad and farmer lifestyles, pre-Islamic archaeologists, and political scientists studying the current government. Combined, such works might limit Afghanistan to static pastoralism and the current context of civil strife and fragile reconstruction. “This narrative about Afghanistan, is horrifying as it disregards the dignity of the Afghan people.” Centuries of Afghan history, in his view, is gathering dust, ignored to the detriment of the people who are supposed to inherit it.
Professor Barry remains one of the few people from the West to speak with Afghan youth about the Afghanistan of the 1960’s and 1970’s. “When I first came to Afghanistan nearly five decades ago, I talked with Afghan nomads, farmers, and members of the Afghan royal family, and I understood what magnificent things Afghans have given to humanity.” At the university, Professor Barry, has covered the halls with 15th and 16th century Herat and Kabul paintings. Not a single original piece remains in Afghanistan today. “These great manifestations of Afghanistan’s cultural past are a glory everyone should see.”
The way he writes and talks about them, the symbolic language used in these art pieces have contributed to the heritage of all humans. Professor Barry effortlessly connects the journey of Afghanistan’s art to Andalusia and Japan-colors of fairy tales. The ambitions of depicted rulers living out fantasies of being older conquerors and legendary characters. Far from the view of Afghanistan as a backwater state, here was a region at the center of creation for Islamic art worldwide and the future of Persian-influenced societies. Here was something Professor Barry believed would instill pride and dignity in Afghans.
Few from my generation have ever witnessed the wonders the country offered our parents and their parents before that. Misery has affected Afghans psychologically in a way that has led most Afghans to feel they don’t belong to the human family. Afghanistan is psychologically disconnected from any past it can be proud of, a feedback loop of negative self-imagery constantly fed by global media which for decades has rarely deviated from a focus on Afghanistan in conflict, turmoil, and disintegration. But the global media can’t be faulted for understandably covering the most pressing issues.
Muqadessa Yourish is the director of the communications company Lapis in Kabul, she is well educated, active in the peace process and a former Deputy Minister."There is a completely different type of fear in the capital due to targeted killings," says Muqadessa. "Several of my friends have left the city, and these were people I never thought were going to leave Afghanistan." A staggering 40 people have been killed so far this year, with eight people killed in targeted attacks. Last week, two female judges were shot in the middle of the day two blocks up from where I was recently staying. I ask Muqadessa if she is considering leaving the country for a period of time herself. "I have a moral responsibility to stay - but it's not easy for my parents who are afraid of not seeing their daughter again every time I leave home." What she refers to as moral responsibility are the individuals with whom she has built bonds of solidarity, but the attacks whittle away at such bonds for many activists like her.
Shaharzad Akbar, head of the Human Rights Commission, says: "The peace process itself has so far failed to change things for the better in terms of violence, so there is anger and hopelessness when the violence continues, and especially when it harms civilians." The continued violence, the uncertainty about the future of the conversation, and the targeted killings take an enormous toll on the general public and young people. It is difficult for educated young people to see a future for themselves in the peace process when prominent activists are targeted and killed regularly. Many of them are thinking of leaving Afghanistan.
Other activists still hope for a better future. However, these people are now exhausted and many are completely burned out by the increase in violence. Young people in general are limiting their movement and are desperately looking to the authorities for protection.
My family left Afghanistan in 1995 and I don’t have much memory of the civil war. However, my relationship to Afghanistan is mainly developed by the stories of my parent’s past from the old days Afghanistan. An Afghanistan known as a traditional land with rich craftsmanship, hospitality, and connectivity through the old Silk Road. I returned to learn more about the Afghanistan of today, and since 2015, I have been trying to understand the complexities of a nation at war for the last four decades. I stayed until now, and what kept me there despite the recent increase in violence is the Afghan youth and their imagination for peace. In many ways, I felt connected to them. Because we all believe in an Afghanistan none of us have experienced and hope that a future generation will one day experience.
However, the failure of the talks and the continued disintegration of society have pushed many of us across a threshold we hoped never to cross. We were building atop a void over the past with a quiet desperation that we could at least build a future. Now a void has appeared over that future, and everything we thought we were building appears to be floating towards that abyss.
It takes a certain crisis in history for a generation to consider diaspora and to consider exile. Read the memoirs of so many world leaders and activists and being “on the ground,” being “on the soil of the country,” and “close to the people” is so near and dear to them. It can feel like meager consolation to say the heritage is within the people when the relics of the forgotten past and the relics of the attempted future are at the mercy of occupation, obscurantism, and militarism.
Professor Barry, in his discussions with me, proposed that a start would be to change the way popular media talks about Afghanistan. After all, Europe too was a center of culture and yet at the height of carnage and destruction in the 30s and 40s, no one stopped writing about its contributions to culture. No one wrote about Europe as though all it had to offer was a past and future carousel of violence. To reestablish the Afghan people as one that has art and literature, science, and architecture yet to contribute to human heritage would be progress even if such a resurrection of an Afghan cultural spirit could only take place within a diaspora in the near future.
I understand, I am a very specific kind of Afghan. I might never again be a full member of the Afghan family in Afghanistan, because I have the privilege to leave to my other home if and when violence breaks out. Even though I can see a lot of myself in them, they might not see themselves in me. But what I can do, from anywhere in the world is join Professor Barry’s efforts in rebuilding the Afghan dignity and insert pride in Afghan youth so that Afghans can feel like a member of the human family once again.
Photo taken by Mortaza Rezaiy.
Samina Ansari is the founder and CEO of Ayvanna Diplomacy, a public consulting company in Afghanistan. She has an academic background in law from the University of Oslo and Maastricht Law School, as well as a degree in public administration and management with a focus on diplomacy from Sciences Po Paris. She has been working on Afghanistan's transition to peace since 2014 through the United Nations, NATO, the Aga Khan Foundation, and a number of professional and research organizations in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is by R9 Studios FL and is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
