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In this interview, Tamanna Easar discusses her recently published book “Rahim-e Para” (Torn Womb). This multi-layered narrative explores the lived experiences of women and communities in Afghanistan.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: Who is Tamanna Easar?
Easar: A woman in exile, passionate about literature and writing. A dreamer in every sense of the word, and of course, curious and eager to know herself, her femininity, and to understand the secrets within and the existence around her. According to my biography, I was born in Kabul, the beating but wounded heart of the homeland, but I came to know nature and its beauties in the grape vineyards of the north and the redness of pomegranates bursting on the mud walls of Parwan (the ancestral land). For this reason, I consider myself a villager. I spent twenty-eight years of my life in the homeland, and now it has been nearly four years since I have been living in London. But still, I have not been able to become familiar with its alleys and streets. For survival and financing life, I work with one of the British non-profit organizations that works for women writers from Afghanistan; I am responsible for part of this organization’s monthly newsletter. Along with that, I performed duties with immigrants at one of the government schools in London. And in this way, dealing with words, women writers from my homeland, and immigrants, I am giving exile a different color.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: What motivation made you decide to write “Rahim-e Para”? Was this decision sudden or the result of years of thought and concern?
Easar: The seed of “Rahim-e Para” was formed from short pieces under the name “Exile writing.” Exactly one month after the Taliban’s arrival and the handover of my homeland, when I was condemned to exile, I began writing these pieces. With the motivation to narrate the difficulty, pain, suffering, grief, and the compulsion of releasing and being released by a human being who leaves the homeland. Gradually, these narratives continued until, suddenly, the motivation to turn these pieces into a book sparked in me. And this turning point for me occurred exactly two to three months after coming to England. And of course, gradually during the process of writing this book over nearly four years, this narrative became multi-layered and emerged from one-dimensionality to reach pain, lived experience, and collective memory.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: Why “Rahim-e Para”, which means torn womb? The book’s title, “Rahim-e Para,” is very bold and metaphorical. How did you arrive at this title, and what semantic burden does it carry for you?
Easar: From my perspective, in Afghanistan, mentioning the woman’s body and even the slightest reference to her body has always been a deep-rooted and heavy taboo. For this reason, I wanted the book’s title, by itself, to stand against one of these taboos and challenge it. And also, “Rahim-e Para” for me is not merely a biological term; rather, it is a metaphor for distance, ethnic, linguistic, and gender boundaries; invisible walls, pain, defeat, prejudice, and discrimination that have cast shadows over women’s lives and humans in general and have separated them from each other. Just as in medical science, birth from a torn womb is considered an exceptional and dangerous event; rebirth, flourishing, standing, and the prosperity of the homeland and compatriots, especially women, in a land where patriarchal traditions and customs have always suppressed women, is equally difficult, challenging, but undoubtedly possible. And the people of Afghanistan have proven this not once but repeatedly through struggle, resistance, and continuation.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: You have said that in this book, you “narrated living in a broken world.” When you say “broken world,” what exactly are you referring to?
Easar: When I say “broken world,” I mean a world that has collapsed both outside and inside the characters. This “brokenness” has both individual and collective aspects; externally, it comes from the heart of war, forced migration, exile, violence, gender cleansing, and injustice, and internally from the experience of wounds and sufferings that have crushed the bodies and souls of the women and men of this land.
In “Rahim-e Para,” this “broken world” is the same world where homes and cities and relationships and trust have been torn apart, where even language and narrative must be constructed from fragments. In fact, by breaking I don’t mean only destruction, but our life reality; a life that, with all its cracks and wounds, continues, and sometimes amazingly, voice and meaning arise from those very breakages.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: How much of the narratives in this book are drawn from your personal experience, and how much comes from observations of your surroundings?
Easar: For me, determining a clear boundary between lived experience and external observations is almost impossible. The narratives of this book are so intertwined like warp and weft that if you want to separate one from the other, the narrative falls apart. Every scene and every image, whether arising from the depth of my personal experience or heard narratives, or seen experiences, has been engraved in my soul and mind with the same intensity. Moreover, for me, heard stories and oral narratives are as real as seen ones, and on the other hand, personal experience has become as internalized in me as I have touched the experiences of others. Perhaps the reason is that living in conditions where violence, migration, discrimination, or loss flows erases the boundary between “me” and “the other”; pain becomes a collective matter, and so does joy. For this reason, all these narratives – whether they arise from my own life or the lives of others – have been equally tangible, bitter, deep, and influential for me, and ultimately in this book, they have given life to each other.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: One of the sentences in the book’s introduction that you said is that the fall of a country is not just a news headline. Open this sentence more for us. In your view, how is Afghanistan’s fall connected to women’s bodies, psyche, and memory?
Easar: First, I believe that Afghanistan did not fall; It was handed over. A handover that was a news headline called “fall” for the world, but for nearly forty million people of Afghanistan, it was like a prison sentence and mass execution. And women were those who, after this handover in the worst possible way, paid the price for this vicious cycle of political give-and-take by politicians and leaders. Women were those whose physical lifeworld was limited to the four walls of home under Taliban rule… and in this way, it has been four full years that the Taliban have built a wall between their objective world and their lived world. And with this imprisonment of the body, the spirit and psyche are also undoubtedly prevented from flight and gradually wear down between the firm grip of pain, deprivation, and condemnation, and today we witness that this wearing down leads to suicides, self-immolations, and disgust with self and life. But despite this, we have also witnessed that women have not bowed their heads in surrender to the Taliban, and contrary to what the Taliban thinks, women become more rebellious with each passing day and raise their flag of resistance and struggle higher. And this shows that women’s collective memory has been freed from that freezing and cliché, and they try to connect their experience to history and collective memory by creating a narrative lifeworld.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: In the book’s text, you have referred to the silence and systematic elimination of women. How does this silence form? Is it always forced or sometimes voluntary and unwanted?
Easar: Silence is never voluntary. And in Afghanistan, the reasons for women’s silence are the collapse of family stability, harm to children, an increase in family hostilities, being rejected by family or society, and divorce. And perhaps for this reason, some women have become oppression-accepting. And now, given the ideological hostility of the Taliban and patriarchal social traditions in Afghanistan, for the Taliban, condemning women to silence for elimination, gender cleansing, and marginalizing women from social, economic, cultural, and political spheres is the best way and strategy. Therefore, depriving women of their civil and cultural rights, such as the right to education, study, and work, can severely affect their empowerment, standing, and struggle for their lost rights; what ultimately causes a generation of completely dependent and vulnerable women to emerge who accept oppression, remain silent, and accept discrimination. And this means the systematic elimination of women from all spheres in Afghanistan.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: You mentioned that “Rahim-e Para” is not only about women, but it has a prominently feminine voice. What image of the woman of Afghanistan did you want to register in the reader’s mind?
Easar: To write honestly, in “Rahim-e Para,” my effort was not merely to be a narrator of a feminine suffering, but I wanted to tell the human experience through a feminine body and voice. Women in Afghanistan, especially in the context of war, poverty, and social restrictions, always walk between survival and destruction. The image of a woman I wanted to remain in the reader’s mind is a woman who, despite deep physical and spiritual wounds, is standing; a woman whose body carries a history of violence and discrimination, but in her voice, there is still a trace of hope, resistance, and desire for life. For this reason, in this book, I wanted to show to the extent possible that the woman of Afghanistan is not merely a victim, but a witness and narrator of history.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: “Rahim-e Para” oscillates between confession and testimony, between literature and documentation. Why did you choose such a multi-layered form?
Easar: In truth, when I began writing “Rahim-e Para,” I had no predetermined format or form in mind. The only thing that mattered to me was staying faithful and honest to the raw and unmediated flow of my mind and heart. I allowed whatever arose from the heart of my lived experiences – both individual and collective – to surface and determine the path and shape of the narrative itself. These experiences, which are soaked with pain, anger, hope, and the search for truth, naturally gave the work a form between confession and testimony, and perhaps between literature and documentation. For this reason, “Rahim-e Para” is not the product of a structural decision beforehand, but the result of an internal and honest writing process that springs from my real life and that of my contemporaries.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: In the book’s introduction, you wrote that immigrant mothers to young students can see themselves in this book. How has migration shaped your identity, both as a writer and as a woman?
Easar: First of all, I want to clarify that my shoulders still cannot bear this valuable and great title (being a writer). Regarding migration, I must say that these past years of living in between-ness, and an experience that carries within itself the narrative of disconnection and connection, placed me in a position where my migratory identity was formed; a dual identity suspended between two cultures and two languages, but still, I had to build a new social identity for myself and my survival. And truly, this experience is accompanied by cultural sorrow and the mourning of silence, because a new language in a new land can never make the internal conditions, pain, and suffering of an immigrant completely translatable. For this reason, living in this transitional situation is very painful. And for me today, the only way to make meaningful and easier what I experience is writing. Writing that I continue not as a choice, but as a need. To be a refuge and a bridge through which I pass from “being in myself” to “being for myself.”
Identity, in my opinion, can never be fixed. It is always changing and transforming. For this reason, confronting the new world and fresh language, the experience of living between cultures, and connecting with other women who had similar stories to mine added another dimension to my identity. Meanwhile, as a woman of Afghanistan, at the intersection of past and present, between memories and restrictions of the society from which I arose and the opportunities and freedoms of the world I stepped into, I have not been without effect. This identity is one that neither seeks separation from past desires nor closes itself indifferent to current desires and values of the new world; it is an identity in movement, in discovery and reconstruction of itself, neither prisoner of the past nor surrendered to the totality of the new.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: Was writing this book a kind of healing for you or a reopening of wounds?
Easar: For me, writing this book was a combination of resistance and treatment. And of course, we must not forget that writing is not always liberating. Sometimes it picks at wounds again and again and reopens them, to the point where you feel deadly bitterness and defeats with all flesh and skin and bone. However, in this complex and turbulent world, everyone seeks a way for liberation and fulfilling their mission; and for me, that way was and is writing.
During these four years, there were days when my troubled mind and psyche, caught up in worries and psychological problems, were not ready to accompany me on the path of writing, but I wrote. The driving force that compelled me to continue was a mission I considered obligatory upon myself: narrating what I and millions of other humans have experienced. Just so that history would not be silently buried again, I tried to write. Those who read this book will clearly feel the depth of this existence-breaking experience, with all its bitterness and truth, in the book’s layers.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: You said this book is for all those who believe in the power of narrative and storytelling. From your perspective, what duty does women’s storytelling have during times of oppression?
Easar: For me, women’s storytelling during times of oppression is not only a literary act, but a form of resistance and survival, and even a form and political struggle. Throughout history in the world, there have been many social and political transformations that literature, narrative, and writing have enriched and transformed from within. When power structures like the Taliban try to silence women’s voices, storytelling becomes a tool for reclaiming voice, recording experience, and preserving collective memory. In Afghanistan’s current situation, where women are deprived of their most basic rights, storytelling is not a luxury choice but a historical necessity. This work is a form of bearing witness against forgetting and distortion; a narrative that can transfer truth to future generations through a thousand and one deprivations, condemnations, and decrees, and light a small but continuous lamp against darkness. Perhaps these narratives cannot bring about drastic change in the short term, but I believe they create a new discourse, a discourse that remains in literature and reminds the world and future generations that no voice can be erased forever.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: What feedback have you received from readers? Do you feel that “Rahim-e Para” has managed to be “a voice for the voiceless”?
Easar: Although the book has just recently been published, and I think we should wait for more readers to read it and share their criticism and opinions, even in this short time, I have had readers who have traveled with me in the course of reading the book. Some, after reading every one or two chapters, would contact me and speak of the shared pain and pleasure they experienced despite all the bitterness and heaviness of the narrative; they would share with me the pleasant and unpleasant moments of the book. Honestly, this is pleasant for me, because a newly born book grows only by being read and criticized.
But regarding whether “Rahim-e Para” can be “a voice for the voiceless,” I must say frankly that I cannot make such a grand claim that yes, one hundred percent I have been able to be the voice of everyone, because compatriots in the most remote areas of the country like Wakhan in Badakhshan might have different experiences that we are unaware of due to insecurity and lack of communication. But still, I imagine that many people can find themselves, their voice, and their unspoken words in the pages of the book.
The Hasht-e Subh Daily: If a main message should be drawn from the heart of this book for the outside world, what would that message be?
Easar: The resistance, standing, struggle, non-surrender, and hope of the people of Afghanistan in the heart of war, pain, grief, and even the presence of the Taliban, who have forbidden breathing to everyone.
You can read the Persian version of this interview here:
گفتوگو با تمنا ایثار؛ رحمپاره، روایتی از مقاومت و جهان شکسته
