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We Are Still Here

Afghan Women on Courage, Freedom, and the Fight to Be Heard

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A collection of first-hand accounts from courageous Afghan women who refuse to be silenced in the face of the Taliban.

After decades of significant progress, the prospects of women and girls in Afghanistan are once again dependent on radical Islamists who reject gender equality. When the United States announced the end of their twenty-year occupation and the Taliban seized control of the country on August 15, 2021, a steep regression of social, political, and economic freedoms for women in the country began.
 
But just because a brutal regime has taken over doesn't mean Afghan women will stand by while their rights are stripped away. In We Are Still Here, artist and activist Nahid Shahalimi compiles the voices of thirteen powerful, insightful, and influential Afghan women who have worked as politicians, journalists, scientists, filmmakers, artists, coders, musicians, and more. As they reflect on their country's past, stories of their own upbringing and the ways they have been able to empower girls and women over the past two decades emerge. They report on the fear and pain caused by the impending loss of their homeland, but, above all, on what many girls and women in Afghanistan have already lost: freedom, self-determination, and joy.
 
The result is an arresting book that issues an appeal to remember Afghan girls and women and to show solidarity with them. Like us, they have a right to freedom and dignity, and together we must fight for their place in the free world because Afghanistan is only geographically distant. Extremist ideas know no limits.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

    • Kirkus

      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.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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