Writer: Nazanin Najah
Now it’s been 12 months, 52 weeks, or 365 days that we are living with people in the same geography and under their rule who have no sense of humanity and no understanding of being civilized. It’s been 12 months that I have lost the path to reach my hopes and dreams, they are like fog and dust that surround my path and don’t let me see which way I should go, they are like the same black cloud that is standing right above the path of my hopes, It keeps raining so I can not see the path.
It’s been 52 weeks since the girls of my country have been so limited that they don’t even have the right to decide what to wear. The mandatory hijab is an insult to me and the girls of my country, it means, we ourselves do not have enough reason, logic, intelligence, and understanding to know how to dress up and how to decide for the smallest part of our life, here I feel that I have no personality left, all my personality is hidden under the black dress and black veil. I feel nothing, I feel empty, I feel like the same crumpled paper in the corner of the room that has no advantage except to burn.
It has been 365 days that the fathers of my country return home at night embarrassed because they take no bread home, but no one in this regime is responsible for the jobless fathers, it has been 365 days that the youth of my country are searching a way to flee the country because they are afraid of their future. Here now the writings have nothing but pain in them. Little by little, they are taking away our girlish passions and tastes, they are taking away our freedoms and limiting us more, all these girls are struggling, they are fighting. for their most basic rights, but even for a moment they get tired of fighting, resisting, or waiting, here the issue is neither waiting nor resistance, here is the issue of fear, fear of their reputation, and the reputation of their family. They have made us suffer from the phobia of their existence, that whenever we see them, our bodies tremble with fear. It is not the regulation, the more they restricted us, the more we had to resist, there were no mental diseases in this regulation.
This is Afghanistan, the land of mine and my ancestors, the same land whose history has always witnessed its civil conflicts, I think all the people of this world have a strong heart interest in the special place where they were born. But my compatriots and I are looking for a place to relax, for us, a homeland is a place where we can relax, laugh, and when we die, be happy that we lived.
Translated by: Ali Rezaei