Voices of Afghan Women

Recently I did a reading. Not the fortune telling type. The type that writers do. In the writing world, a reading is an event where a writer promotes his or her work at, say, a book launch party or at a bookstore. I, however, was not reading from my own work, but from the work of someone else. I was nervous, not because I was expected to read in public but because I was asked to lend my voice to the work of a woman who didn't have a voice, not because she couldn't speak but because she is an Afghan woman. 

The Afghan Women's Writing Project (AWWP) is an organization that has enabled women living in Afghanistan to share stories about their lives, trials and triumphs, dreams and disappointments, and to provide the outside world with a peek into the often-harsh conditions they endure. How does this work in a country where it is dangerous to be a woman, let alone a woman writer? AWWP is an online project, founded by writer and journalist Masha Hamilton. It connects Afghan women with writing mentors in the USA who provide guidance on writing skills, grammar and sentence construction, and then AWWP posts the writings of those women on their website. The results are some of the most powerful, haunting personal essays and poetry available on the web today.

The essay I chose to read for the occasion—an AWWP fundraiser held in the living room of a New York apartment—was called “Museum of Memories.” It was written by a woman called Roya who was born in Kabul and remained in Afghanistan during the Taliban period. She has been one of the foremost contributors of stories on the AWWP website, and has been quoted as saying, “The AWWP gave me a voice to tell my life stories, gave me the power to feel that I am a woman, and gave me a title, the title of writer, Afghan woman writer.”

Read her personal essay here: http://awwproject.org/category/writers/p-r/roya/ and if you wish to see more of her writings, and support the voices of  Afghan women, visit the AWWP website here: http://www.awwproject.org 

Like me, lend your voice to the stories of these women because the more we lend our voices the more they begin to reclaim their own voices.