Close to Home Sarahmaslin

Close to Home Yale Daily News Magazine, February 2012 cover BY SARAH MASLIN Tuesday, February 21, 2012 “Afghanistan doesn’t deserve to be in the U.N.,” he said on the third day of class. “It’s too primitive.” All the heads in the room turned to look at the girl in the hijab. She had her head down, scribbling notes, but she felt their eyes watching her, waiting for her to blow up or burst into tears. Wazhma Sadat said nothing. Though her classmates didn’t know it, a battle was unfolding inside her head. Should she say something, or remain silent? She knew she couldn’t stop herself from getting upset: “When somebody says something about Afghanistan not knowing enough about it, I know that by not saying anything, I’m not doing it justice,” she said later. Sadat is the only Afghan student at Yale. “But,” she added, “I can’t say things without hiding my emotions.” During class that day, as she struggled to control her anger, Sadat remembered her childhood in Kabul. While her classmates argued about nuclear warfare, she remembers thinking to herself, “Do people know what they mean when they talk about people dying? Or is it just numbers for them, is it just video games?” When Sadat first saw video games where the goal was to “Kill Talibs,” she was horrified. “Maybe they haven’t seen people dying,” Sadat thought. She has. The struggle to hide her emotions, Sadat says, evoked powerful memories. Sadat spent much of her childhood hiding: in basements during rocket blasts, in an unfamiliar country to escape the Taliban, in a U.S. high school where she was ashamed of being from Afghanistan. Sadat is one of a tiny group of Yale students — the admissions office will not release exact figures, citing student confidentiality — for whom war and genocide is not just the stuff of political science classes or video games. It is the stuff of their lives. When she came to Yale in 2010, Sadat joined an even smaller group: students who, after living through war and genocide, have decided to study it. Research on genocide survivors in the classroom is scarce, and most models of healing from the last 50 years focus on psychological treatment. But the more recent research stresses the need to move beyond the “limitations of western constructs,” as the Chicago School of Professional Psychology asserts in a study of Rwandan trauma survivors. The School’s March 2011 article advises professionals working with genocide survivors to look for other ways of promoting healing: through education, community discussion, art, and literature. The ways in which genocide survivors at Yale have chosen to approach their past experiences are drastically different from one another. One student has elected an intellectual pursuit of policy. Another prefers an emotional approach through literature. For Sadat, a “continuous process” of struggling to learn about her country has enabled her to begin to understand the conflict in which she grew up and make sense of her own identity. Five years ago, she didn’t even want to admit she was from Afghanistan. Sadat, a sophomore, was five years old when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan. Like many others in the war-torn country, her bewildered family had no idea what was happening, or why. The same was true throughout the six years of the Islamic fundamentalist regime for many Afghan citizens, most of whom didn’t have television or Internet and paid little attention to newspapers and politics. There is such a lack of awareness, Sadat says, that even today “people don’t know how old they are.” For Sadat, being able to learn about the Taliban from a safe distance allows her to finally confront a regime that thrived on misinformation and fear. “Now when I study the Taliban at Yale I understand that the entire world knew what was going on except the Afghan civilians,” she says. “All we knew was that every night we had to wake up at three in the morning and go into the basement because there were rockets.” The first time Sadat heard the word “Taliban” was in a cartoon. The image showed a Pakistani leader, Benazir Bhutto, feeding a little baby with a long beard. A caption identified the infant as the Taliban. Five-year-old Sadat, entranced with the picture of the bearded baby, asked her father what the cartoon meant, but he wouldn’t tell her. To escape the conflict and the Taliban, her family moved temporarily to Pakistan in 1998, where she lived in a two-room apartment with her parents and six siblings. The family wove and sold carpets to make a living; in Kabul, her father had been an architect. When they returned to Afghanistan after the Taliban’s fall in 2001, she attended high school in the brutal regime’s former headquarters. “I could see blood stains on [the walls of] our classroom,” she recalls. When Sadat came to Florida for her senior year of high school, as a part of the U.S. State Department’s Youth Exchange and Studies (YES) program, she avoided courses that might touch on her country’s complicated history. For the first six months she rarely talked about home, and for a school project on the Middle East, she did what all the other students did — she read about it on Wikipedia. “I was really ashamed of who I was,” Sadat says. “I was embarrassed to tell people that I had to weave carpets to make money for my family.” It didn’t help that her fellow high school students in Florida were unwelcoming and even racist. “They would block my way, call me names,” she says. It was only after returning to Afghanistan to recruit other young women for the YES program that Sadat realized that her experiences under the Taliban had not been isolated — before that, she thought “they had just happened to me.” Visiting villages in the remote parts of the country, she met others forced to leave their homes when the Taliban came to power, and she saw people living in far worse poverty than her own. She recalls one tiny town with “no clocks or watches” that subsisted on a single sheep killed every week. For once, she says, “I felt lucky.” She was stunned to learn things about Afghan history and culture that she’d never been taught as a child: “It was as if I was visiting a foreign country.” Driven by her growing desire to learn more about her country and the rest of the world, Sadat took a bold step: while on a high school trip with an American aid organization to sell handmade gifts in New York, she called Yale on a whim. When she arrived at the admissions office and saw the other applicants with their cell phones and computers, she recalls, she almost chickened out. Sadat didn’t own a cell phone. “I’m in the wrong place,” she told her admissions interviewer. The interviewer assured her that was not the case, she recalls. He offered her some water, and, six months later, a spot in the class of 2014. Last semester, Sadat was a student in Trumbull Dean Jasmina Besirevic’s class “Genocide and Ethnic Conflict,” a small seminar that tracks conflicts from the Holocaust to present-day Afghanistan. Besirevic uses videos, presentations, and testimonies of survivors alongside academic texts to weave together a powerful account of genocide. Instead of being trapped on the inside looking out, Sadat says, the class gave her the ability “to look at [conflicts like the one she grew up in] from the outside.” Besirevic, who left Bosnia on a student visa in 1992 — five months after conflict broke out there — describes watching students like Wazhma learn about other genocides and realize the parallels to their own life experiences: “You can see the light bulb go on,” she says. After learning about post-traumatic stress disorder in class, Sadat began to recognize PTSD symptoms among those she knew back home. “It’s why they are pessimistic, why they’re not doing anything ... They’re extremely tired of war. But they don’t realize it. Nobody realizes it.” Now she suspects that the silence that affects so many from her country is another sign of PTSD, a collective reaction to so many years of violence. To this day, she says, members of her family “haven’t had a single conversation about anything that has happened.” Conversations about Afghanistan can be challenging, as Sadat learned in her political science section. Until that third class, she had kept quiet when they talked about her home country, striving to appear objective and not wanting to get upset. But the more her classmate talked about how “primitive” the country was, the more Sadat began to feel she had to speak up. And when another classmate said, “Palestine should just keep bombing Israel, because they have higher birthrates, so eventually they’ll take over all the Jews,” Sadat had had enough. Though the rest of the class was stunned to silence, Sadat raised her hand. Glancing down at her notebook, she rattled off a list of objections to his statement, trying to stay calm but feeling herself getting angrier as she spoke. When she finished, she couldn’t help scolding him for his ignorance: “I’ve always wanted to meet someone like you,” she said, shaking her head. Such comments no longer silence Sadat — they make her more determined to speak out. But occasionally, rather than deal with ignorant and insensitive classmates, she chooses simply to avoid them.

Load more