We, children of the village, when the sun shone brighter than ever over the garden and the field, set down our spades and sickles and came to the city in groups; with hands that still smelled of grass, we sat in classrooms and stared at the blackboard with blank minds. The teacher praised our enthusiasm, and we, budding adolescents, harvested algebra and geometry as though they were a wheat field.
Our fathers pledged to cover the cost of our pens and paper with money earned from wheat and apples. Some owned land; others did not. Some mortgaged their orchards; others mortgaged themselves. I know many fathers who left their homes and homeland to fund their children’s education, went to Iran, and through hard labor, earned enough to pay for their sons’ and daughters’ schooling; fathers who were old and weary, yet driven by one clear purpose: illiteracy must end.
I know brothers who took turns studying. One would go to Iran, work in construction, sweep the streets, and cover his brother’s or sister’s education expenses. Once that one graduated, it would be the next brother’s turn to begin his studies. The monster of poverty was defeated by the will of the village’s fathers and brothers, and we, with half-empty stomachs, fed our minds and continued our education.
Our friends went to university, graduated, and earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. One became a professor, another a consultant, and another a government employee. We were busy building associations and shaping political and cultural movements. The dream of migration had vanished from our minds, life was flowing, and our rebellious spirits were gradually settling, until the night arrived.
The sun suddenly set. In the darkness, we lost one another. We, children of the village, rushed toward the airport in groups. We did not know where we were going, why we were going, or how we were going. I saw my neighbors running faster than me; it was as if Kabul had turned into an unknown island overnight, and everyone was clinging to the wings of planes to escape their own graves. This was the open beginning of the humiliation of a generation that had dreamed, that had hoped, and that never believed the black army would arrive and assassinate the aspirations of an entire generation in a single stroke.
We were scattered and torn apart. Half of us went to the United States, the other half to Europe and Canada, and a great many entrusted themselves to the streets and back alleys of Iran and Pakistan. Thousands, collectively, became homeless and stateless. Literate and illiterate alike, with closed eyes, first entrusted themselves to border police and then to employers. Generals and officers were humiliated. Poets and writers were humiliated. Professors and researchers were humiliated. They did work they did not know how to do, and this itself led to humiliation and anxiety.
Neighboring countries took the lead in humiliating us. Young people forgot their academic credentials and job titles, and instead spoke with a Tehrani accent and wore Pakistani clothes in the streets to win the approval of their employers and masters, to prove they were more Tehrani than the Tehranis themselves. But it was not long before frustration and despair revealed themselves under the weight of these humiliations. Those who had sought refuge from the monster in the lap of their neighbors began, one by one, to return.
These are the young people whose deaths we hear about these days; one is beheaded in Daykundi, another in Herat, one takes his own life, and another is buried under a mountain in the gold mines of Badakhshan because of the struggle to earn a living. Like my friend and brother, Naji Bigzad, whose world was darkened forever when the mountain collapsed on him. Naji was the one who, when his employer in Iran told him, “This dog of ours is your leader,” turned ashen with humiliation, packed up his belongings, and returned with his four young children to the Taliban’s hell.
Those who came to the West are also humiliated in the European style. Those who introduce themselves as university professors, researchers, doctors, or teachers appear at first with excitement, with photographs and romantic displays, but six months or a year later, one by one, they lose their jobs or abandon them, and with disappointment, they realize that they have been humiliated in a civilized manner, and they come to despise their work. Your stature is never enough; the name of your homeland speaks before you do. Your colleague asks with a smile, “Do you have an email address?” not out of curiosity, but with such astonishment as if you had come down from a mountain, as if you belonged to a prehistoric generation, and as if you were encountering the word “email” for the very first time.
Someone who, after three or four years, introduces himself as German or French, changes his name, alters his accent, and feels that he has become Western; yet his middle-aged neighbor, on a summer evening, while sipping her cold beer, asks, “Where are you from?” You reply with a smile, “I’m from Frankfurt.” But she asks again, “No, no, where are you really from?” And you swallow hard, wishing to disappear from before that woman who, in that moment, seems both deeply civilized and deeply repulsive.
You are humiliated in various forms, in the classroom, in the workplace. When you become emotional and a little downcast, you cannot express yourself in your second language; you cannot reveal what passes within you. You stammer, you press the tip of your pen, press it harder, until blood drips from your fingers, and you feel completely foolish, like someone who cannot even utter a single sentence.
News arrives that your friend in the north of Holland has taken his own life; another friend, in Berlin. You are shocked at how happy and successful people take their own lives; someone who, only yesterday, had posted beautiful photographs of a quiet beach. You live in shock, and it stays etched in your memory that some are killed by bullets, some by cancer, and some by humiliation. It is then that you understand people do not always need to be sick to die.
And we, the humiliated, take our own lives in different ways; one throws himself under a train in Germany, another hangs himself in Bamyan, and another lies down, lies down for so long, holding his grief-stricken heart in the palm of his hand, until the mountain trembles; until the mountain truly collapses and takes his life forever.
We were humiliated so much. I never believed that we would flee our homeland in groups, be humiliated collectively, and then, one by one, return and die.
You can read the Persian version of this article here:
