We Are Still Here

July 4, 2022
In this moving interview collection, filmmaker Shahalimi gathers the firsthand testimony of 13 Afghan women who experienced the rise, fall, and resurgence of the Taliban. “Between 1996 and 2001,” Shahalimi notes, “the Taliban terrorized Afghanistan and made no secret of its disregard for women.” Female education was banned and the government sanctioned violence against women, with public executions of accused adulterers, and attacks for being unchaperoned or not completely covered in public reaching all-time highs. With the fall of the Taliban in 2001, “hope for a new beginning” arose, as younger women pursued education, started new businesses, and even gained positions of political power and influence. But the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021 and return of the Taliban threatens to reverse all those gains. Through interviews with influential women including Hosna Jalil, who was appointed deputy minister of interior affairs at age 26; Fereshteh Forough, who created the first coding school for women so they can work from home; and world-famous singer Aryana Sayeed, who regularly receives death threats, the collection insists that women in Afghanistan “will not be silent.” The result is an inspiring portrait of perseverance in the face of cruelty and injustice.

July 15, 2022
Profiles of Afghan women who are fighting against repression. Human rights activist, filmmaker, and artist Shahalimi (b. 1973) fled from Afghanistan with her widowed mother and three siblings in 1985, first to Pakistan and then to Canada. Over four years, beginning in 2014, she made several trips back, interviewing women for her first book, Where Courage Carries the Soul (2017). Banned from the country after its publication in Germany, Shahalimi defiantly continued her project, and in less than two months, she conducted, transcribed, edited, and translated the interviews that comprise this moving collection. The 13 women she profiles share outrage at the Taliban, which brutally restricts women's lives. As Margaret Atwood notes in her introduction, that puritanical theocracy informed her creation of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale. Like Shahalimi, many women left as refugees. "My education almost certainly would have ended in 1996, in the fourth grade, with the invasion of the Taliban," writes Hila Limar, if she had not grown up in Germany. Now she is an architect and activist affiliated with Visions for Children, an organization that has built seven schools in Afghanistan. Many activists have risked their lives. For example, Razia Barakzai, who initiated the first women's protests after the fall of Kabul, has received "unequivocal death threats from the Taliban." When singer Aryana Sayeed made an unveiled performance on The Voice in 2013, "a group of cler-ics issued a fatwa against her on TV, promising entry into heaven to whoever could decapitate her." All of these women are devoted to empowerment. Fereshteh Forough founded the first computer-coding school for girls; Mariam Safi founded a Kabul-based institute for community development; Manizha Wafeq's Peace Through Business program has trained and mentored more than 600 women entrepreneurs. "When people ask me if the Taliban has changed," Wafeq notes, "I tell them it has not. It is our women who have changed." As artist Rada Akbar puts it, "I know that in every home in Afghanistan there lives...a superwoman." Impassioned testimony to women's determination.

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