Aiza Khan Professor Reza Pirbhai ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Georgetown University Beyond Activity and Passivity The Oral Life History of an Afghan Refugee Woman in Pakistan Aiza Khan Professor Reza Pirbhai ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing a thesis is harder than I expected and more rewarding than I could have imagined. I would like to acknowledge all the people whose assistance was a milestone in the completion of this project. I have to start by thanking my mentor, Professor Reza Pirbhai, without whom this project would not have been possible. During my first class at GU-Q, Professor Pirbhai and I discussed individual agency and determinism; I was adamant that people had agency and he tried to explain to me that it was more complicated than that. Over the past four years and particularly in his mentorship of this project, he has made me a more sophisticated thinker and better able to understand the nuances of the subject. I am tremendously grateful to Dr. Sophie Richter-Devroe, whose work introduced me to the value of oral history and inspired this thesis. Your guidance and advice has been instrumental in the completion of this project. To Amma, Halima and Pharhan Mamu, for their endless support from thousands of miles away. I truly have no idea where I’d be if it weren’t for your faith in me. To all those who have been a part of getting me there: Danish, Fatima, Haider, Fatema and Ayesha. Thank you for supporting me throughout the entire process. I will be grateful forever for your love. Lastly, I am grateful to all the women who shared their remarkable stories of strength and resilience with me, especially the woman whose life this thesis narrates. Without you, this would not be possible. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 HER STORY 16 BOOKS/KITAAB 25 PURDAH/PIETY 31 SABR/ENDURANCE 39 INQUILAAB/WAR 47 CONCLUSION 52 BIBLIOGRAPHY 58 INTRODUCTION McCurry, Steve. “Afghan Girl.” National Geographic Magazine Vol. 167, No. 6, June 1995. The cover of a National Geographic Magazine in 1995 featured a photograph titled “Afghan Girl”. This portrait became one of the most popular magazine covers in history and the face of the US-led war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The girl in the picture was Sharbat Gula, who was twelve years old at the time (Qasim and Safdar). The caption read “Haunted eyes tell of an Afghan refugee’s fears”. Decades after the picture was taken, however, it was discovered that the look of horror on Gula’s face was not one of a “refugee’s fears”, but rather of being photographed without her consent (Azami, Nauman & Dawar). In addition to the violence of unsolicited photography, Steve McCurry’s photograph was part of a larger epistemic violence committed against Afghan women. This epistemic injustice entails the silencing of their voices and portraying them as not having any agency. DuPre notes six visual signifiers to mark Gula’s victimhood: her veil, childhood, eyes, anonymity, refugee- status, and femininity (336). This discourse of victimhood takes away all agency from the victimized and yet puts the victim at the forefront by serving the warped ends of the creator of this discourse (337). By analyzing these signifiers, DuPre insists that the image was orchestrated to tug at the heartstrings of its American audience in order to help Reagan generate more tax dollars under the guise of US aid to Afghanistan. In fact, DuPre is not the only scholar to note that Afghan women “provide the perfect grounds for an elaborate ventriloquist act in which they serve as the passive vehicle for the representation of US interests’’(Schwartz-Du Pre 336, Kumar & Stabile 778). Post 9/11 representations of Afghan women, particularly those issued in the Western world, are replete with examples of such assumed or imposed victimhood. These narratives are simplistic, reductive and at best, only partially true. For example, in 2016, the George W. Bush Institute published a book called We Are Afghan Women. It claims to capture the voices of Afghanistan’s women. In the introduction, former First Lady of the United States, Laura Bush, depicts these women as the victims of barbarity and abuse at the hands of many atrocious regimes that have ruled Afghanistan, from the Soviet-backed government of Mohammad Najibullah to the Taliban. In particular, Bush recalls being horrified and appalled by the extreme cruelty and conditions imposed on Afghan women by the Taliban. After having established that Afghan women have been helpless under these regimes, Bush proceeds to explain how American contributions have impacted these women positively. She discusses at length how many more girls attend schools and colleges, and how the Western liberal model of education delivered at institutions introduced since the American intervention in 2001 have positively influenced these women’s lives. Laura Bush’s narrative confirms the continued use of the long-repeated, reductive and essentialist trope of Afghan women, like Muslim women more generally, as damsels in distress. They are docile, passive and lack agency. Their sole salvation, in fact, has been Western intervention. This thesis will test the validity of these claims by engaging in dialogue with an ordinary Afghan refugee woman in Pakistan. In particular, by means of field research involving intimate interviews with multiple persons, it documents the oral life history of an Afghan woman refugee – referencing her as ‘Summaiyya’ to protect her privacy. Besides critiquing existing representations in the process, this thesis articulates a more nuanced understanding of the experience of Afghan women. In this thesis, I narrate Summaiyya’s story and through her experiences, preferences, aspirations and her own understanding of her circumstances, I challenge the stereotypical representations of Muslim and Afghan women. I argue that while Summaiyya’s decisions and life choices would not be desirable to all, the reality that she made those decisions for herself demonstrates that she was an agent in her life. I also argue that Summaiyya felt limited by her socio-economic and political circumstances, and not her particular experiences of womanhood, as per the stereotypical representations. This oral history is guided by a library of valuable work published on a variety of subjects ranging from Afghan women, Muslim women, agency, subversion, resistance, representation, Afghan history and historiography and the refugee experience among others. Nancy Tapper explains that women have been excluded from anthropological discourse about the region due to ethnographic and cultural bias against them, and this epistemic violence does not capture reality (20). Tapper’s book Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society, is a study of marriage in the Afghan Turkestani Maduzai tribe, but also provides information on the roles and treatment of women in the larger Afghan cultural context. In this ethnography, she questions the absolute nature of male authority in the household and in the community particularly in segregated societies. Tapper insists that because male authority, honor and reputation is hinged on the loyalty and behavior of the women in the tribe, women hold considerable power in the community (xviii, 104). Because men are able to draw status claims based on their control over women and their control over women’s productive and reproductive labor, Maduzai women have the power to undermine male authority in the household and in the community (22, Chiovenda 181). In homes like Summaiyya’s, where women’s roles are seen as limited to the domestic sphere, Tapper notes that women's activities within that sphere are essential to the functioning of the household as well as the community as a whole. Furthermore, in studies such as Tapper’s on women in segregated societies, subversion is a popular trope. Tapper uses the term subversion to describe “certain possibilities for women’s action which, while they are implicit in the dominant ideologies of gender espoused by both men and women, nonetheless are constructed in opposition to the ideals of male dominance which they contradict”' (21). Lila Abu-Lughoud also sees subversion as a prominent vehicle that women employ to assert their agency. She flips Foucault’s popular assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance” (1978: 95-96) to “where there is resistance, there is power”, which she claims is more intuitively sensible and fruitful for ethnographic analysis (42). Amineh Hoti builds on Tapper’s idea of subversion and argues that “any society prohibiting women’s access to a professional sphere tends to develop alternative, quasi-autonomous female networks of circulation. Gossip and gifts between women demarcate a ‘sub-society’ serving as a psychological outlet between women demarcate a sub society serving as a psychological outlet in a situation of male domination” (Hoti 11). Tapper, in her study of the Durrani Pashtuns notes institutionalized elopement, lesbianism, prostitution and magic are women’s ways of subverting patriarchal authority (22). Abu-Lughoud sees subversion in women smoking cigarettes in their segregated spaces, in their songs, poetry, and stories. She arrives at this conclusion by noticing that the women see masculinity as the absence of the womb rather than femininity as the absence of a penis. They see men as governed by their sexual desires, and women as more rational (48). Both Tapper and Abu-Lughoud note that it is the segregation of spaces that allows for women to be subversive in these ways because men are not permitted to enter these spaces giving veiled women the room to act (46). Benedicte Grima contests the ideas presented by Abu-Lughoud and Tapper. She agrees that often male honor is placed on women’s modesty and subservience, and that women contribute to it through their chastity and obedience. Hence, a woman could hinder family honor through her disobedience. However, Grima argues that such acts of disobedience or subversion cannot control honor because women, particularly in segregated societies such as the Afghan one, are almost completely dependent on their families.

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