Only one clip of speaking flickering, faded, just a few minutes long — survives today, and it sounds like a prophecy in a pale blue turtleneck and a dark blue dotted pinafore, her wavy hair cropped short. Just delivered a speech in Valence, where she was invited by the new French Socialist government to represent the Afghan resistance movement at a party congress. Her speech so angered the Soviet delegation — the USSR had invaded Afghanistan two years earlier, and she spoke forcefully against the occupation — that they stalked out, glowering, as she raised a victory sign in the air.
In the clip, a snippet from an interview with a Belgian news channel, she predicts — calmly, somberly, pen in hand — the victory of anti-Soviet forces. But she also warns of its cost: that the anti-democratic, misogynistic factions of the mujahideen being valorized by the West in their fight against the Soviets would, in turn, devour Afghanistan.
Amid the clumsy binaries of war, Deena was treading a tricky path.
Fixated on the inferior status of women in the final decades of Mohammed Zahid Shah’s reign. The modernist king had nudged along a number of firsts for women: female voices on Afghan radio, voluntary abolition of the Hadar, and ratification of the constituted.
She attended one of Kabul’s best schools named after a beloved folk heroine who rallied flailing Afghan forces, but in her middle-class home, she saw her father periodically beat her two mothers.
Uncommonly alert to injustice — her relatives’ casual mistreatment of Hazer servants, of the educational disparities between her architect father and her unlettered mother — teenage Deena became increasingly fixated on the inferior status of women.
How men saw women and how women saw themselves — as individuals with their own hopes and dreams, rather than in perpetual service to the family, the tribe, and the nation — would not be transformed by state mandates alone. These roles would have to be renegotiated by Afghan women themselves, from within the most fundamental unit of society, abul University, where Deena is now studying law, is a microcosm of the forces buffeting Afghanistan: Marxists and Maoists, monarchists and Islamic revivalists. The only man her family could find who fit her criteria: no bride price, no second wife, no objection to school or work. Deena also leans left, but she is not interested in being relegated to the women’s wing of a political outfit. She seeks an organization that centers the liberation of Afghan women. It is called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Once, when they did meet, they sat in a room partitioned by curtains, so they could hear the rest but could not see more than three others. Years before the Taliban first took over Afghanistan, at a time when women had the right to education, were such extraordinary measures necessary?
RAW A was not plotting the downfall of the state. At first, it was organizing adult literacy classes, a preliminary step — towards helping women from strict patriarchal families develop a sense of self. But in a stubbornly gendered society, where the only women with any real power tended to be mothers-in-law, the organizers knew their work would be perceived as a threat, a fist in the mouth — of patriarchy. The government began rolling out reforms across Afghanistan. Land was redistributed, the tricolor flag turned a solid communist red, bride prices reduced, and marriage before the age of 18 outlawed. Afghan society bristled at these changes — particularly, scholars have since noted, the changes concerning women. The fight for their rights became associated with imperial power, it was Afghan women who would bear the brunt of the backlash. And so, it expanded its mandate, becoming, “an organization of women struggling for the liberation of Afghanistan and of women”. Political prisoners in Afghan jails — tribal leaders, clergy, public intellectuals, students — tripled within six months. Executions were a daily occurrence. Many others vanished into thin air. Deena began visiting the families of the jailed and the disappeared, asking after them.
This is how many women joined RAW A. They were struck by the fact that Deena cared. Bereft of male protection — but also male authority — for the first time, they heeded her call to channel their rage and despair into a disciplined resistance.
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