The Taliban wages war on women, but their voices roar on the page. Here are 5 essential books by Afghan women writers
- Written by Ayesha Jehangir, Lecturer, Journalism and Communication, UNSW Sydney
There is something profoundly defiant, almost incendiary, about Afghan women writers. When the Taliban regained control of Kabul in August 2021, images of women protesting in the streets and girls being barred from classrooms circulated around the world.
Since then, regressive laws have been introduced as part of the systemic suppression of women’s public life in Afghanistan, including banning women from speaking in public. Recently, 140 titles authored by women were blacklisted as “anti-Sharia” by the Taliban’s educational authorities.
Amid this institutionalised erasure, writing becomes an act of resistance. Recent Afghan women’s literature challenges this erasure. It is a way of reclaiming agency.
Afghanistan frequently reaches Australian readers through the hard grammar of war reporting and the procedural language of policy debate. Literature offers a different vantage point. Here are five essential books by contemporary Afghan women writers.
My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group
My Dear Kabul (2024) is not a traditional memoir told in a single voice, but a cartography of lived experience. It contains the voices of 21 Afghan women writers who ran a clandestine digital writing group as the Taliban consolidated power.
Drawn from WhatsApp exchanges that have been downloaded, translated and compiled into a collective diary, the book is a visceral account of life as a political system collapses.
The book foregrounds women’s agency in shaping narratives of resistance, belonging and intellectual continuity.
The story of Razia Barakzai, a former official who worked in Afghanistan’s presidential office, stands out. Barakzai describes how she and other young women organised demonstrations in Kabul, even as the risks became immediate and personal. They carried placards in Dari, Pashto and English, declaring that Afghan women still existed and demanded their rights.
Her reflections capture the moral clarity driving these protests. Her story illustrates how Afghan women’s resistance often emerges through collective courage — transforming fear into solidarity and refusing both erasure and pity.
“To be silent,” she writes, “would mean we were accepting and surrendering to the Taliban’s power.”
Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son
Although Homeira Qaderi’s memoir Dancing in the Mosque (2021) predates the fall of Kabul, it gained renewed urgency in the post-2021 landscape. It is written as a letter to Qaderi’s son, whom she was forced to relinquish after divorcing her abusive husband. Afghan custody laws and social norms overwhelmingly favour fathers after divorce.
The book’s title comes from a formative childhood memory. As a young girl, Qaderi accompanies her grandmother to a mosque where women gather to pray and mourn. At one point, carried away by a moment of joy, she begins to spin and dance. The reaction is immediate. The women around her reprimand her sharply, reminding her such movement is “inappropriate in a sacred space”.
The moment becomes emblematic. The mosque, which should be a place of spiritual refuge, becomes a site where a girl first learns the boundaries placed on her body and voice. Yet the image of the girl dancing also signals a stubborn impulse toward freedom that persists even within those confines.
The book moves associatively, drifting between childhood memories, reflections on motherhood, moments from Qaderi’s marriage, and the act of writing to her absent son. The narrative often circles back on itself, lingering on small sensory details: a room, a conversation, a fleeting moment of joy or grief.
The fragmented structure mirrors the turbulence that shapes Qaderi’s life: the dislocations of war, the contradictions of love and loss, and the unresolved ache of separation from her child. The memoir is an intimate act of remembering, where memories surface unevenly, guided by feeling rather than the orderly progression of events.
The looping, pausing and returning evokes the turbulence Afghan women have navigated. In a context where women’s education itself has been criminalised, Qaderi’s text stands as an enduring testament to the interior life as a site of resistance.
The Pearl that Broke Its Shell
“I knew nothing about pearls and shells either,” Nadia Hashimi writes in The Pearl that Broke Its Shell (2014), “except that one had to free itself from the other.”
The novel explores the quiet ingenuity with which Afghan women navigate restrictive gender norms. At its centre is Rahima, a young girl in Kabul who becomes a bacha posh (a girl temporarily raised in boys’ clothes so she can move freely in public and support her family).
The transformation allows Rahima to experience freedoms otherwise denied to her, such as attending school, running errands, even riding a bicycle through the city streets. Yet this fragile autonomy is always temporary. As Rahima reflects, “To be a bacha posh is to borrow a boy’s freedom until you are old enough to give it back.”
Across the 69 chapters of her novel, Hashimi interweaves Rahima’s story with that of her great-great-grandmother Shekiba – “born at the turn of the twentieth century, in an Afghanistan eyed lasciviously by Russia and Britain” – who also survived by inhabiting roles typically reserved for men.
Through these parallel narratives, The Pearl that Broke Its Shell reveals how Afghan women have long devised creative strategies for survival within patriarchal systems. The result is a moving portrait of resilience, one that suggests that beneath the constraints placed on them, Afghan women have courage and aspirations that persist across generations.
Authors: Ayesha Jehangir, Lecturer, Journalism and Communication, UNSW Sydney
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