I think about the days when the Taliban had not yet returned; although the war was ongoing and the fear of explosions could occasionally be felt in different parts of the city, life continued. Girls went to school; boys made plans for their futures; families still had moments of warmth despite the news of war. The city still felt alive and crowded. As soon as the sun rose, the smell of fresh bread filled the streets. Bookstores were open and thriving. Laughter spread across the faces of girls. There was a desire to learn, and young people were learning how to rise from the ashes of hardship.
I think about the days when the Taliban had not yet succeeded in turning the futures of thousands of girls’ gray; days when dreams still existed, effort came first, reading and writing were valued, and books, notebooks and pens had a place in every home. I think about the days when the Taliban had not yet cast a shadow over the skies of girls’ dreams or imposed darkness on their lives. I think about the days when flowers seemed to smile in their vases as girls studied.
I think about the days when girls searched for their futures not from behind windows, but along the roads to school, with dusty shoes, books whose corners had worn out from being read so many times, and eyes that did not yet know that one day the world could close its doors to them. The days when girls never imagined that going to school, holding a pen, seeing the schoolyard, sitting on a chair and looking at the blackboard would one day become things they could only long for.
I think about the days when no one had told a 12-year-old girl that growing up might one day mean being separated from everything she loved; that her book might gather dust in the corner of her room while she woke up to silence every morning and saw that the school gates were closed and the fate of girls remained confined.
I think about those days and the girls who grew up overnight; girls who should still have been learning the alphabet, singing and dancing, but were forced to practice silence. Girls who should have been worried about tomorrow’s exam instead became worried about a tomorrow they no longer knew how to imagine. Girls who once dreamed of becoming doctors but today are not even allowed to talk about their dreams. Girls who wanted to become teachers but now teach their books to their younger sisters, as if trying to pass on to the next generation at least what was taken away from them.
Sometimes I think the Taliban did not only close the school gates. They also left part of the girls’ voices behind those same gates, voices that laughed, asked questions, protested, recited poetry and spoke about the future. I think they left the spirits of thousands of girls behind those closed gates, in classrooms empty of teachers and pens. I think thousands of cries remain trapped behind those closed gates, and thousands of unwritten words remain in notebooks.
But despite all of this, the girls have not surrendered. There are girls who secretly read and write, express their pain through words, weave their suffering into sentences, and speak louder than hundreds of voices. Sometimes, the same pen moving across a page in the darkness becomes a declaration against forgetting and silence.
Through all of this, I still think about the morning when the girls of my country will once again sling their backpacks over their shoulders; the morning when the streets will once again hear the footsteps of girls who have waited for years. Perhaps some of those girls will be older by then. Perhaps some will have gray hair beneath their white scarves, and perhaps some dreams will no longer be the dreams they had as children. But when they open their books, they will realize that something of that little girl is still alive within them, the same girl who once wrote in a child’s handwriting: “When I grow up, I want to…” and left the sentence unfinished.
Perhaps one day she will return and finish that sentence. Perhaps she will write: “When I grow up, I want to determine my own destiny.”
And perhaps on that day, Afghanistan will begin to move away from being a “land of silence,” because no land is ever completely silent as long as its girls still dream.
