My Pen Is The Wing Of A Bird Extract: New Fiction By Afghan Women
Service95 is delighted to present an excerpt from My Pen Is The Wing Of A Bird: New Fiction By Afghan Women (MacLehose Press, 2022), an anthology originally written in Dari and Pashto. The collection of stories is brought to you by Untold Narratives, a development programme that works with writers marginalised by community or conflict. This extract is taken from Batool Haidari’s short story I Don’t Have The Flying Wings – Haidari was among the first writers to join Untold’s Write Afghanistan project in 2019. The text has been translated from Dari to English by Parwana Fayyaz.
“I place the mirror against the case and focus it on the roundness of my face. I pull the little stick from the kohl box and run it over my eyelids, turning them dark. Inside the box is also a lipstick with no lid, turquoise in colour around the edges, as if it were withering. I apply a little to my thin lips and then, with the tip of my finger, spread the colour around. I see my mother’s wine-coloured beret with its soft loom-beading. I put it on. Then I put on her white shawl with its golden edges, which she has so neatly folded away. It spreads softly around my shoulders. The tickling feeling, which had waned a little, returns to my body. I look in the mirror and I am a beautiful young woman.
“I clap my hands together, and then I start on one foot – leaping and circling. I dance, my hands resting on my waist. I stab the ground softly. I dance on the tip of my toes with grace and delicacy, just like any other girl. I feel as if all the boys are kneeling in a circle around me, clapping for me as I make the other girls jealous. Whenever I stamp my feet on the ground, the dust rises up into the faces of the smiling boys. And I feel shy. As I dance, I look upwards. I see the sky and I see the clouds in blue and white. The hem of the shawl touches my face and the sweat feels warmer around my body. I sense the sound of the tambur in my ears – the sound for which young fingers would give their lives. I dance as if I have been liberated from my body. Despite the heat of my skin, my liberty keeps me cool. I admire my own beauty. I open my thin lips, ready to sing out the poem that has always rested in my throat.
“It is at this precise moment that I feel someone watching me. I turn around and my father shouts out my name. I pull the shawl from my head and toss it away. I feel heavy. The colours have gone; the smells are different. His eyes have turned red – bright red and smoky. He seems suddenly to have aged. He is pale, furious.”
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Batool Haidari is a clinical psychologist, writer, and activist who has worked in Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan. She was teaching psychology at Kabul University before she fled Afghanistan with her family in August 2021. Her work has been published in Dari, German, and English. She now lives in the UK with her three children and her husband.
Parwana Fayyaz is a scholar and teacher of Persian literature at the University of Cambridge. She is also a poet and translator who focuses on promoting Afghan writings and culture around the world. Her first poetry collection, Forty Names, was named a New Statesman Book of the Year and a White Review Book of the Year.
The authors of My Pen Is The Wing of a Bird have a new book coming out this August: My Dear Kabul: Twenty-One Afghan Women, Twelve Months, One Group Chat (Coronet, August 2024), an extraordinary collective diary documenting the experiences of the all-female writer’s group in the wake of the Taliban’s retaking of Afghanistan. Pre-order the book here.
