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| | • | D’août 2005 à février 2006, le Haut-Commissariat aux Réfugiés des Nations Unies a aidé près de 34 280 réfugiés afghans à rentrer de la République islamique d’Iran, et 235 600 du Pakistan. | | | • | La Commission indépendante des Droits de l’Homme en Afghanistan a instauré des unités de droits des femmes dans tout le pays. Cinq abris ou maisons de sécurité ont été installés pour les femmes dans Kaboul et en province. | |
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NOTE DE REDACTEUR
Copyright © 2006 by Masuda Sultan. Reprinted by permission. Excerpted from the book My War At Home by Masuda Sultan published by Washington Square Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. (Available at
www.simonsays.com)
To buy the book My War Home by Masuda Sultan cut and paste this url:
http://www.amazon.com/
My-War-Home-Masuda-Sultan/dp/0743480473/
sr=1-1/qid=1164912790/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-
4424542-0137636?ie=UTF8&s=books
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I looked down at my sandaled feet, which were powdered by the dust that was raining down from Ground Zero. It was just like the dust that had powdered my feet in Afghanistan on dirt roads and desert paths, and amid the rubble of clay homes.
Arguing with myself, and all the while afraid I’d get caught, I walked up to a corner where a row of tables had been set up, packed with protective masks, sandwiches, water bottles, and a few bright yellow emergency battery packs for cell phones. I asked a blond-haired woman with blue eyes and a baseball cap if I could help. She looked at me for a second and said, “Sure, I’m exhausted. You can take over if you like.”
When I was much younger, I had once watched a bus fail to stop for my mother and me because she was wearing a hijab. Now there was a tangible proof that people had good reason to fear Muslims. I feared misdirected anger toward my Muslim-American community.
But the woman just said, “You can take over if you like.”
Now I was the person behind the volunteer stand – the last point to which any civilians could go. As I handed a peanut butter sandwich to a man in an orange hard hat whose face was powdered with white dust, he smiled, and it felt strange having him accept me. I fought the impulse to confess that I was an Afghan. Part of me felt that I could not say who I was and part of me wanted to say, “Here is a Muslim woman, an Afghan woman who feels this pain too.” But I said nothing.
Even though it was difficult, I had always believed I could balance my sometimes competing Afghan and American selves and reconcile my two halves, my two worlds, and my two homes. Just as I had gone into Afghanistan knowing I must not be American, even if I wanted to, because it would endanger those traveling with me, I walked down the streets of Manhattan thinking, today I must not be Afghan, or Muslim. Standing on the edge of that street corner, I knew in the deepest part of me that the white flakes of soot raining on Manhattan were asking me to choose. Would I be able to maintain the balance? And, I wondered, how and how soon could I return to Kandahar?
The next few days were spent in a haze, watching the news, thinking about our family back home. Muslim leaders, under pressure to show their respect for American lives, issued statements condemning the attacks, explaining that the hijackers had in fact hijacked Islam. Islam was a religion of peace. Jihad meant struggle within yourself, not killing innocent “people of the book,” referring to the Islamic term that scholars argue means Muslims, Jews, and Christians – not just Muslims. Mostly the people that came forward were men from Arab countries.
But I did not hear of or know of many Afghans who were condemning the attacks. Instead, they appeared to go into hiding. I learned that parents were afraid to send their children to school, fearing the backlash. Many of my cousins remained at home for days after 9/11. An older cousin, who had recently come from Pakistan and always wore ethnic clothes at home and in public, was terrified. She feared being targeted for being Afghan, and because her father was conservative, she wouldn’t dare wear American clothes. But she had a plan for distinguishing herself. She said, “You know, if I run into someone who thinks I’m Afghan, I’ll tell them I’m Pakistani.” I don’t know that anyone would have bothered to ask, but she trusted that in America people would know the difference. A few other young Afghans I knew changed their names in school, asking their friends to call them by more inconspicuous names. Tahir became Tony, Yacoub became Jacob, and Mikhail became Michael.
Driving up 149th street in Flushing after I’d dropped off a relative who my parents were afraid to let walk home in ethnic clothes, I passed the mosque. Something felt off. I made a U-turn and as I drove back I realized the sign had been taken down – the one that read SYED JAMALLUDIN MOSQUE. Could it be that they too had caved in to the fear? First I felt sorry for them, and then I got angry. They were a symbol of our community, and while that made them a target, it also gave them an opportunity to send a message of tolerance, a place from which to proclaim our unity with the rest of America. Instead, like the Afghans that worshipped there, the mosque had hoped to go unnoticed. A police car was parked on the corner. Were they investigating the mosque or protecting them from the threat of backlash? The cops wouldn’t speak.
Meanwhile, flags were unfurled across the city. Some were taken out of dusty attics; others were bought for the first time. Agha pasted a big flag on his SUV. “What are you doing?” I asked, somewhat condescendingly. The man who had told me growing up that I was not American, that I should not pretend to be American, suddenly had a big American flag on his SUV. What was more American than that? Sure, he read Qur’an out loud at the mosque, and most of his friend were Afghan, but Agha had a strong American side too. He spoke of the safety and opportunity America had provided us. “America has been good to us,” he said, and it had a right to protect itself. We had cast our lot with America. Suddenly, we were America. But wasn’t that what our family had been fighting this whole time, in a cultural sense? Being American? Assimilation? Losing our ethnic and religious identity? That day Agha admitted that America had let him be himself. Sure, there was pressure to assimilate, but who said anything to you if you surrounded yourself with people from your village in Afghanistan and made your children speak Pashto at home? Sara hardly spoke any English before she started school. My youngest sister, Aziza, spoke more because she had discovered Sesame Street, and by the time she was learning to talk it was harder to control older siblings from speaking in English at home.
But I would not put a flag on my red Neon, a college graduation gift from my family. When I was a little girl, Agha would tell me that if I graduated college he would buy me a little red car. Red was my favorite color. When I got older, so did the story. It had been one of those things you hear as a child. I got married, got divorced, and moved on. But a few days before graduation Agha handed me a key and told me to look out the window. There it was – a Dodge Neon in shiny, beautiful, fiery red, the color that I loved to paint my nails before going to a wedding. My car had a big red bow on top. I felt like a little girl again.
And here I was, refusing to put even a little American flag sticker on the windshield, as my father urged me to do. I felt very American, and that’s exactly why I didn’t want to stick a flag on my car. Instead, I would express my Americanness in other ways. I would buy tickets to fund-raisers for firefighters, speak out against terrorism, look out for suspicious packages, shop at the Gap, and speak up for ordinary Afghans. That was being American too. In America, we were allowed to do all those things. That’s what I loved about it. | |  | SIGNALER CETTE HISTOIRE POUR REVISION | | | |
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Hello everyone,
The story that I chose to read was titled "When Their Eyes Cry for You", by Chelan M. Pedrow. In her story she describes how her desire to help the victims...
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