WOMEN CHURCH WORLD

* Letter
“You have no face, no eyes, no body, you are forced to hide them. I am writing to you even though you can no longer read anything because your chance to study has also been taken away”

To you afghan girl

 A te ragazza afghana  DCM-003
04 March 2023

To you. To you who have lost everything that could be lost and do not know if you will ever get anything back. To you who have no face, no eyes, no body because you are forced to hide them behind a dress that makes you look like a ghost. To you for whom being a woman is a burden instead of a blessing. To you who have no name because you are not free. To you who hope that the life that grows in your belly is a male baby, because to think of the child as female seems to be an evil spell to you.

I want to write to you even if you cannot read what I have written, as you can no longer read because your studies have been taken away from you. To you who went to university in the morning holding on to that kind of normality like the castaway holds on to the last piece of flotsom from a shipwreck. Moreover, who took classes because you liked studying and liked to think that as long as your mind was capable of learning your future was not entirely closed and you were still growing. I am writing to you because you are the only one I want to read me. You and your comrades, too, those who decided to protest with you so that the university doors would open again for their friends, their sisters, their sweethearts.

Every day, another piece was taken from you, until the worst day, the most difficult one, when you arrived, early in the morning, in front of the faculty door and found it closed. Closed only for you, for those like you, with your long sky-blue dress and your eyes hidden behind a veil.

I am writing to you, to whom one day they pointed their guns at you and ordered you to leave, because the place where you went to study, the place where you were preparing to imagine a future different from that of your mother and grandmother, was no longer your place. I am writing to you because there should not be a single country in the world where someone thinks they know what a woman's place should be; and there should not be anyone who can tell us where to stay and draw a perimeter of barbed wire around us. No Country should be like that, not even the one where I live, where women do not wear burkas, have free access to university but are murdered for saying no to those who say they love them but kill them instead.

I am writing to you to who have been betrayed many times and by many different people but for the same reasons, whether that be indifference, selfishness, or blindness. You have been taught that a woman is worth less than a man, that she must bow her head to get his consent, that in the street she must crawl against a wall, that there is no point in crying or shouting, that her voice is like a harp at the bottom of the ocean. They taught you how to dress, how to behave, the words to say, the thoughts to think, the conveniences and inconveniences of a life already set on tracks you did not choose. They lied to you, and you know it, but all you could do was say yes and move on.

Every day another piece was taken from you, until the worst day, the most difficult one, when you arrived, early in the morning, in front of your faculty door and found it closed. Closed only for you, for those like you, with your long sky-blue dress and your eyes hidden behind a veil.

I am writing to you, who one day had guns pointed at you and then was ordered to leave, because the place where you went to study, the place where you were preparing to imagine a future different from that of your mother and grandmother, was no longer your place. I am writing to you because there should not be a single country in the world where someone thinks they know what a woman's place should be; and there should not be anyone who can tell us where to stay and draw a perimeter of barbed wire around us. No country should be like that, not even the one where I live, where women do not wear burkas, have free access to university but are murdered for saying no to those who say they love them and instead kill them.

I write to you, girl with amber skin and beautiful eyes, to apologize on behalf of the West that promised to save you and then left you alone, in the same hands of those we claimed to combat. When it no longer suited us to wage war against them, we let them take back their territory, their laws, their politics, their religion and you.

I write to you because you were born under the shelter of the NATO flag and then found yourself a woman in the dark shadow of the Taliban regime. They had taught you to hold a pen and then they took it away from you, they had taught you to read and then they confiscated your books, they had taught you to think and then they believed that it did not suit them, because thinking is unnecessary when you should serve and obey.

I write to you but I know that my words will not reach you, so what is the point of writing? It serves to understand, it serves to tell those who do not know, it serves to plant a seed in the black earth and wait for something to come forth, because something always sprouts.

If that seed is the seed of revolt, then it will give birth to a plant that is impossible to cut down, as is happening in Iran. However, to be strong one must not be alone, and this is also why I write to you, the Afghan girl, because I am close to you, in solidarity and sisterhood. Because I too have heard, at least once in my life, the expression, “not you, because you are a woman”.

I am writing to you because you, more than any of us, know what it means to have the present ripped from your hands, to watch helplessly as the future vanishes because someone has decided that, “no, because you are a woman”.

This is precisely why I am writing to you, because you are woman. Today, more than ever, revolution is a woman’s doing: woman is mutation, woman is life, woman is freedom. So many words, each one of them feminine and singular [in Italian], like you. I write to you because you are unique but you are like so many, you are synecdoche of injustice, metonymy of the evil that often blinds the world, metaphor of a life that is only half-alive.

May these words fly to you, may they be wind that lifts the veil, may they be water that quenches your thirst for justice, may they be the key that opens all doors for you, may they be fire that burns the laws of those men who do not know what humanity is.

by VIOLA ARDONE