When the US government signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, the Afghan-Iranian artist, photographer and activist Fatimah Hossaini thought little of it. People warned her, of course. The Americans will leave Afghanistan, they said, and all kinds of trouble will follow. But she hardly listened. Life in Kabul, where she had been working since 2018, felt so full and free, it was all but impossible to imagine the clock turning back.
The simple fact was that she had lived with more day-to-day restrictions in Tehran, where she was born and grew up, than she had ever had to put up with in Kabul (her Afghan grandparents fled to Iran in the 1980s, during the Soviet-Afghan war). “Life was good,” she says. “In Tehran, people are a little depressed with the situation. But in Kabul there was so much hope and desire. A new generation was burning with it. I could see women in every sector: musicians, entrepreneurs, artists, politicians. I could teach my classes at the university without a hijab. I could show my students any image I liked. These things would never happen in Iran.”
A portrait of the artist and photographer Fatimah Hossaini by Maryam Firuzi, 2022
But life really was about to change. When a newly elected Joe Biden confirmed in April 2021 that American troops would be withdrawn by 11 September, Taliban insurgents began to intensify their attacks on the Afghan state; in May, for instance, a car bomb outside a Kabul school killed more than 60 people, most of them schoolgirls. “Even I could see that the security situation was different,” Hossaini says. “I lost two journalist friends [to Taliban attacks] during those months. When my mum called, which was every day, she would say: Fatimah, use a different entrance each time you come home.”
At one point she did go back to Tehran, largely at her parents’ behest. (Her mother is a housewife and her father runs a small business. The oldest of three sisters, Hossaini, ever independent, moved to Kabul when she graduated from university.) “But I only lasted a month and a half.” She struggles to explain it. “I just had to be in Afghanistan. I was there in the bright days; I felt I should be there in the dark days too.” Ahead of an exhibition of her photographs in the US, she had an American visa, and this was her insurance policy. “I thought: if the worst happens, I can use that visa.” She shakes her head. “My parents couldn’t believe I was going to go back. They said I was crazy. But I didn’t listen to them.”
In Kabul, things seemed calmer. She told her mother the media were exaggerating the situation, and that she was not to worry. But her mother did worry, and no wonder. Across Afghanistan, cities were falling to the Taliban: Herat, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif. It was now August. A friend called and said, book your seat to the US; in three weeks, commercial flights will be no more. “Imagine it,” says Hossaini. “I had heard my grandparents’ stories. I knew about all the people that got stuck in Afghanistan in the communist years, even those with visas. But still, I couldn’t believe it would happen to me. My mind turned away from it. The night before Kabul fell [on 15 August], I did an interview with CNN. I said: ‘People will never let the Taliban claim this city.’”
Yasamin Yarmal
An actor since the age of 14, Yarmal moved from the northern province of Balkh to Kabul against her family’s wishes and became a star of Afghan cinema during the Communist era. By the time the Taliban came to power in 1996, Yarmal had returned to Balkh, where she ran a secret school for several hundred students, many of them girls, defying the ban on female education. The school was discovered and Yarmal was taken into custody and beaten by the Taliban, suffering a miscarriage as a result. After 2001, Yarmal went back to acting, working in radio and TV as well as helping to revive the local film scene. The Taliban’s return to power has delivered a fatal blow to Afghan cinema, she says. Yarmal fled Kabul in August and now lives in Paris with her three children.
All captions by Killian Fox
On the same evening, she and 10 friends went to a cafe to drink tea. “One of them invited me to her sister’s wedding! We were just drinking and talking. We didn’t know, then, that this would be the last time we would meet.”
The following morning, having at last booked a flight to the US, she got a taxi to take her to a clinic for a PCR test. The driver thought she must have lost her mind. The Taliban are at the gates of Kabul, he said. Looking out of the car’s windows, she noticed that in the streets people were running. What kind of person runs in Kabul in August? “It wasn’t normal. I began to think something might actually be going to happen.”
At home she made some green tea and took it on to her balcony, with its view of her city, and it was then that she saw them: “Down below were Taliban fighters on their motorcycles, waving their flags. They’re here, I thought. I shouted it: ‘THEY ARE HERE!’ But there was no one to hear me. I was alone.”
She isn’t sure how she got through the night. She couldn’t cry, she couldn’t eat. She had missed her flight, if it had, in fact, left. The next day, another friend called. “She said: ‘They’re going door-to-door looking for journalists, musicians, teachers; make sure you’re not alone.’ I got my backpack, my laptop, my camera, and a hat that’s traditional to my tribe [Hossaini is an ethnic Hazara, a group that has often been persecuted in Afghanistan], and I went to stay with friends.” She spent the next two days with them, deleting all her social media, begging journalists who had any footage of her to take it down. Her voice is full of contempt. “Those fucking terrorists. One day, early in the morning, we had three Taliban at the door. They were only looking for food, and when we gave it to them they left.”
Shegofa Ibrahimi
An actor and musician in her early 20s, Ibrahimi grew up in Dasht-e-Barchi, an impoverished area of western Kabul populated mainly by ethnic Hazaras. She belonged to an all-women theatre group and was starting to train as a ballerina and a violinist when the Taliban returned to power. ‘She told me she went through a tough journey to choose art and to work as an artist,’ says Hossaini. Ibrahimi fled Afghanistan after Kabul’s fall last August, leaving her family behind and taking nothing but a traditional Afghan dress that her mother had made for her. She now lives in Lyon. ‘When she said goodbye to her parents, she didn’t know where she’d be living,’ says Hossaini. ‘She took the dress to remind herself where she came from’
But her mind was clear now: it was, she finally conceded, time to go. Like thousands upon thousands of other desperate Afghans, she pitched up at Kabul airport. She would spend the next four days there. “It was crazy,” she says. “Mothers abandoning their children; lovers abandoning each other. People were so desperate, they would do anything to leave.”
It wasn’t, she tells me, as we might have seen it on television. She wasn’t in the military section of the airport, where British and American soldiers were filmed by news crews lifting tiny babies over wire fences. She was in the commercial part, a chaotic realm that could only be accessed through seven Taliban checkpoints. Inside, people stood in long lines, each one corresponding to the country to which they hoped to travel seeking asylum. It was frightening, and surreal. Looking around, she saw several Afghan politicians, and the singer and TV personality Aryana Sayeed, one of Afghanistan’s biggest stars.
At first, Hossaini joined the American line. She knew that to go to the US would make it almost impossible for her to see her family again: travel between the two countries is extremely difficult. But she was desperate, and she had her visa, after all. Wouldn’t it help her? Apparently not. “Get back, get back!” the Americans shouted. This made her very angry. “I thought: you betrayed us. We’re about to lose everything. You have ruined our country. At least be a little nice.”
Like others in the airport, she began to call out to embassy staff, irrespective of which country they represented. Germany, Italy, Poland: four days in, and she would have gone anywhere.
It occurred to her that in France, artists are admired, even revered. “Just take me,” she yelled, in the general direction of the French. “I’m an artist!” She was duly allowed to move from the American line to the French line – and it was at this moment that the miracle occurred. “David Martinon, the French ambassador in Afghanistan, used to come to my exhibitions in Kabul. I was wearing that crazy outfit with a scarf; only my eyes could be seen. But he recognised me. ‘Fatimah?’ he said. He put his arms around me. ‘You will be welcome in Paris,’ he told me.”
Anarkali Kaur Honaryar
Born into Afghanistan’s tiny Sikh community in 1984, Honaryar grew up dreaming of becoming a pilot. Instead, she studied medicine at Kabul university and qualified as a dentist. After the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, Honaryar joined the loya jirga assembly to elect Afghanistan’s interim government, and helped draft the country’s new constitution. She later became the first non-Muslim woman to serve in the lower house of parliament, advocating on behalf of the country’s embattled Sikh and Hindu minorities. In 2009, she was voted “person of the year” by Radio Free Afghanistan, and in 2011 received a Unesco prize for her efforts to protect Afghan women from domestic abuse, forced marriages and gender discrimination. Honaryar left Afghanistan for India in August 2021 and arrived in Europe this spring
Some hours later, she flew alone to France, relieved but sorrowful, grateful, but in mourning (her friends were eventually all dispersed to other countries). “It was very hard,” she says. “Afghanistan didn’t only give me pain; it gave me love too. I was connected to it by my heart, and when France gives you asylum, the arrangement is that they take your Afghan passport and your ID card, and you must sign a paper that says you won’t ever travel there. Can you believe it? My heart. I had to promise them not to go back to Afghanistan.”
* * *
I meet Hossaini in Paris on a hot July day. She is wearing a sleeveless, pleated dress – it’s so fine, you could probably pull it, Fortuny-style, through a wedding ring – and a brilliant smile that only rarely dims. A year on, she is living in the city in a tiny attic, a bona fide garret at the top of an artist’s colony on the edge of the Marais. And how she has made it her own. The building’s wide, sweeping staircase and peeling plaster walls are so very belle époque they might have come from the pages of a novel by Colette. But step inside her rooms, which smell deliciously of roses and cardamom, and you find yourself in a little bit of Afghanistan: low seating, striped throws, a bowl of nuts to welcome the visitor.
A man cleans a poster of one of Hossaini’s pictures during the La Visions d’Orient photography festival, which runs until 30 September 2022 in La Gacilly, western France
On the walls hang some of her own photographs and – I notice it straight away – the brightly coloured hat she grabbed on that fateful day when she left her home in Kabul for the last time. “Women make these with their hands, out of nothing,” she says, taking it down to show me. “Textiles are an important part of Afghan culture because the country was on the Silk Road, and they have many meanings. You can tell by looking at these whether their owner is married or single. It’s a beautiful thing for me – a symbol of resilience.”
In Afghanistan, women must currently draw on every available ounce of their resilience. According to a recent report by Amnesty International, in the year since the Taliban took over, Afghan women and girls have experienced a “suffocating” crackdown on their rights. They are banned from attending school and restricted in the ways they can work; should they dare to protest against such infringements, they are inevitably arrested, and often tortured and abused in custody. The burqa, a garment that covers every part of a woman’s body, including her face, has been widely reimposed. There has also been a surge in child marriage.
Mursal Sayas
Sayas was in the final year of her masters degree in international relations at Dawat University in Kabul when the return of the Taliban last August forced her to flee. It’s not the first time her life was disrupted by the movement: her family left Kabul for Badakhshan when the Taliban first seized power in 1996, returning after their overthrow in 2001. When Sayas started working at the Human Rights Commission in Afghanistan in 2017, she began writing the stories of some of the women whose cases she investigated. These portraits, of women suffering under a patriarchal society, were published under a pseudonym on Afghan websites. Now Sayas is gathering them into a book to be published in France, where she has settled in exile. Under the Taliban, Sayas believes, the plight of women in Afghanistan will only get worse
Is Hossaini surprised things turned so bad so quickly? She shakes her head. “The Taliban are exactly the same as they were 20 years ago,” she says, her voice scornful. “The only difference is that they have Twitter accounts now.” She knew they could not be taken at their word, and she isn’t optimistic that things will change any time soon. “They are stupid, idiot terrorists, incapable of governing properly. On the other hand, so much talent has left the country, and I am not sure that even half of it will ever go back. I am with those women who protest. Their resistance is very brave. But no, I don’t feel very hopeful.”
Hossaini, who is 29, was a well-known (and well-connected) figure in Kabul – a photographer, a curator, a university professor, and the founder of Mastooraat, an organisation that supported artists and performers in Afghanistan. Leaving was agonising. From childhood she had longed to see the land of her grandparents, and from the moment she first visited Afghanistan in 2015, she fell passionately in love with it. She had so many friends there. “This crazy connection with my roots,” as she puts it.
But in terms of her work there was a particular wrench. Inspired by the fact that whenever she travelled abroad, people would inevitably ask about the burqa, she had spent several years photographing the country’s supposedly “unseen” women with their faces uncovered, their bodies swathed in fabrics of every imaginable colour – a project she would now never finish.
In Paris, though, her mind turned to it again. Why shouldn’t she complete it with a series of portraits of women just like herself? After all, a person is no less an Afghan just because they are in exile. And what better way to celebrate aspects of a culture – singing, painting, acting – that are now banned by the Taliban? (In Kabul, people are struck now by the absence of music; the city’s soundtrack has no melodies.)
Atefeh Amini
A multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and actor, Amini was born to Afghan parents in Iran and relocated to Afghanistan in 2020. In Kabul, she starred in several films, including The Dogs Didn’t Sleep Last Night, and was working on a film about her own experiences in Afghanistan, as well as a series of paintings exploring Afghan women’s lives. Fleeing the country last August, she left her film unrealised but managed to take some of her canvases with her to France. ‘They were the only things I brought,’ she says. ‘Everybody told me to leave them behind, but I couldn’t. My paintings are like children for me.’ She now lives in Lille, where she continues to paint. ‘It is the only way I can deal with my traumas,’ she says
To her original collection, then, she gradually added portraits of some of those who had fled Afghanistan in August 2021: women such as Aqila Rezai, a film star who had worked in Afghan cinema for 30 years, and Shegofa Ibrahimi, a theatre actor who left the country with nothing but a dress made for her by her mother; women like Anarkali Kaur Honaryar, a Sikh doctor and one of the first non-Muslim members of the Afghan parliament, and Marzieh Hamidi, a member of the Afghan national taekwondo team.
“My aim has been to break the stereotype of the Afghan woman,” she says. “I have worked to portray all backgrounds, and all ethnicities. In every province, faces are different, some fair-skinned and some dark, and traditional dress is different in every province too. This project is all about the face: its power, its individuality, its ferocity.” But the series has also taken on extra meaning – a new resonance – since the Taliban took over in Afghanistan once again. “It’s the most valuable thing, because the pictures preserve things – ways of being, and of dressing – that are important culturally. To see a woman’s face at all …” Her voice trails off. There are no words. Even now, it all seems so unbelievable.
Marzieh Hamidi
When 20-year-old Hamidi left Afghanistan for France last November, among the few things she brought with her were her precious taekwondo medals. Born in Iran to Afghan parents who had fled the first Taliban regime, Hamidi fell in love with taekwondo at 15. She won several competitions in Iran before her family moved back to Kabul in 2019. Hamidi continued to train in Afghanistan despite discrimination and was part of the Afghan national team when the Taliban returned to power. In Paris, she is practising hard and hoping to compete in the 2024 Olympics. ‘I could never have imagined that one day I would have to leave my country because I want to be a champion of Afghanistan in sport and I can’t, because I am a woman,’ she says
And what of her own exile? The past year, she says, hasn’t been easy. “When I arrived I was in shock. It took two or three months to accept what had happened.” She knew no one, and spoke no French. “I’ve struggled a lot. But I have been made welcome, in a very honourable and respectful way. I hear that in England, Afghans are still living in hotel rooms. Here, I’m respected as an artist, I’ve been able to continue my work, and I have a platform from which to speak about the women of Afghanistan.” Will she stay? She sounds uncertain. “I love Paris. It’s amazing. I do feel France can be my home. But maybe I will go back to a central Asian country to live, just to be somewhere close to Afghanistan.”
What does she miss most? If I were able to visit, where would she tell me to go? She looks out of the window, towards the shimmering Seine. “I really miss my house,” she says, softly. “I miss the nights when my friends came over and we cooked food together. I miss the mountains. I could see the Hindu Kush from my window. I miss being able to travel to Bamiyan [a province in the highlands noted for its carved buddhas, the most famous of which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001]. That’s where I would tell you to go. To Bamiyan, for the buddhas, and the lakes, and the amazing food; and I would tell you to go to Herat too, to see the Citadel, and to eat an orange and some small fishes from the river … Yes, I really do miss every inch of my home.” Does she think she will see it all again one day? She nods. “One day.” It’s a matter of circumstance, not desire. When – if – the chance comes, just let them try to stop her.
Aqila Rezai
A journalism student who became an actor, Rezai [aka Agheleh Rezaie] remained in Afghanistan when the Taliban first came to power, even after the regime murdered her husband. In 2003, she starred in Samira Makhmalbaf’s film At Five in the Afternoon as a young Afghan woman going to school against her father’s will – Rezai attended the film’s premiere at Cannes, where it was awarded the Jury prize. ‘She was a superstar in Afghanistan, everyone knew her,’ says Fatimah Hossaini. Last August, Rezai left the country with her three sons and moved to Bordeaux. ‘She told me she didn’t realise that one day she would be coming back to France as a refugee,’ says Hossaini. ‘In exile, she feels like a dead soul across an ocean, a nobody, compared to the prestigious life she had in Afghanistan’
