Conclusion: What is telling “if telling is all there is?”

2005

It is only in the last decade that issues of violence and social suffering have received substantive attention from anthropologists. The fact that both traumatic and everyday forms of suffering have become endemic to our world may be one motivating factor behind this attention. But there is also the issue of disciplinary rejuvenation. In anthropology, important questions have surfaced in the wake of critical reflection on how we research and write about the people whom we study at close range. Given the discipline’s conventional interest in peoples of the Third World (read: the colonized), anthropologists witnessed acts of violence and cultural genocide inflicted on local populations. Yet we remained mute and chose to focus on the “cultures” of disappearing worlds.2 Such a depoliticized stance gave us a comfort zone that we still enjoy as we continue to write for institutions that support and reward us for our work. We rarely research or write for the people whom we study, even if t...

2015

Retelling violence can heal. It can also hurt. Post-Second World War exigency silenced numerous victims of sexual violence. The legacy of this 'silence' and the brutality of the crimes remain divisive in Asia. Yet, when breaking silence, victims pay a martyr's price. Their trauma appropriated for wider agendas. Personal suffering commodified as national pain. Scarred bodies and psyches used as criminal evidence. In the hands of others, memories take on currency beyond personal pain and outside circles of healing. In courts, testimonies become valued only for probative worth and legal weight. Politicians use trauma as diplomatic leverage. Restitution claims monetise scales of suffering. No simple formula exists for trauma's emotional arithmetic. Sharing experiences can provide relief, even release. However, this article shows that, in crying shame, survivors also pay a steep cost for speaking out. For some, it may be better to keep silent.

Cairo Studies in English

Over an August night in 2021, Taliban unexpectedly took over power in Afghanistan, almost twenty years after the U.S. waged war on extremism on the Afghani soil to eradicate the Taliban terrorist regime. This sad turn of events brought back all the memories of oppression, violence, poverty and terrorism to the Afghani people, who struggled over the turn of the century to wipe out the misery imposed on them by the Taliban regime. This power takeover came as a devastating shock to Afghani women in particular, who hardly overcame their traumatic experiences with this regime, that held women in a lower rank in all life aspects. The present study examines sixteen narratives written by Afghani women over the period 2009 to 2015, as part of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign. The Afghani Women Writing Project (AWWP) joined this campaign by compiling a number of narratives, by Afghani women who share their stories of suffering, oppression and gender-based violence (GBV) whether under the Taliban regime or otherwise. They tell stories of discrimination in education, living, rape and other aspects of oppression. The study particularly focuses on how the narrators project and construct their identities via narrating. Ever since the narrative turn, it has become established that narration could be seen as an identity-construction tool. In fact, Bamberg and Georgakopoulou consider "stories [as] privileged forms/structures/ systems for making sense of self by bringing the coordinates of time, space and personhood into a unitary frame […] for further analytical scrutiny in the form of 'identity analysis' (2008, 378). Bamberg also reiterates this, considering how "narrating enables speakers/writers to disassociate the speaking/writing self, and thereby take a reflective position vis-à-vis the self as character in past or fictitious time-space, make those past (or imagined) events relevant for the act of telling" (2011, 7). Similarly, Ayometzi regards personal stories as "a means through which tellers develop differentiated personal identities and a form through which they are led into the construction of a collective identity" (2007, 45). The present study scrutinizes the narratives in the light of Bucholtz and Hall Identity framework. Setting off from the premise that "identity is the social positioning of self and others" (2005, 586), Bucholtz and Hall set five main principles that inform identity construction: emergence principle, positionality

The American Historical Review, 2008

Excerpts from Doctoral Thesis in Social Anthropology …, 2003

مجلة البحث العلمی فی الآداب

Western media had stereotyped Afghan women as creatures who face discrimination and marginalization from men and fundamentalist societies. In Zoya's Zoya's Story (2002) and Latifa's My Forbidden Face (2001), the two female authors speak about the terrible conditions of women in so-called democratic Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban. Ethnoautobiographies of Afghan women, in general, demonstrate a new understanding of life under oppression and how they strive to maintain their autonomy in the face of repression and subjugation. The texts understudy show that Afghan women are neither submissive nor passive figures but had tried to retain their autonomy under the rule of the Taliban. This research is framed by administering an approach that combines Michel Foucault's theory of Power/ Knowledge and Stuart Hall's theory of Representation / Stereotyping and directing a critical analysis of two ethnoautobiographies of two Afghan women activists who challenge their passive stereotyped images set by Western societies to justify the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. This paper argues that Afghan women attempted to maintain their autonomy and fight for their rights before the rest of the world rushed to free them. Afghan women resisted suppression in several ways, but Zoya and Latifa participated in non-violent resistance against the Taliban regime.

Global Public Health, 2020

This empirical research documented voices of women and girls in female shelters and prisons in Samangan, Laghman and Wardak provinces who experienced systematic sexual and gender based violence before and after they escaped forced marriages, forced virginity tests, physical and sexual violence. Women who challenged the status quo, fundamentalism and extremism faced imprisonment for up to five years. The research interviewed primary, secondary and territory health care professionals, who carried out or witnessed invasive virginity tests. The evidence suggests that women are being deprived of basic human rights of exercising autonomy and freedom. It shows difficulties some health professionals encounter in documenting, reporting, and treating cases of violence against women and girls. The research concludes that a survivor-centered approach and secular framework are required against tyranny, misogyny, and oppression. Instead of imposing moral arguments and harmful laws that undermine women’s rights, brave leadership at many levels is required to tackle health inequities, dismantle patriarchy, counter fundamentalism, and other entrenched systems of inequality. A new kind of feminist citizenship is needed not based on identity but political values.

International Affairs, 2018

Religious Studies Review, 2019

Literary Studies

Historical traumas are carried forward into the present in the psyche and life not only of those who experienced the trauma directly, but also to the generations that follow. And in many cases, silence has been an important carrier of this unspeakable past. Revisiting the past becomes an effective strategy of interaction and dialogue in order to reconcile with the historical trauma. I discuss two texts which deal with the depiction of historical violence and the resulting trauma—Tara Rai’s Chhapamar Yuvati ko Dayari (Diary of a Guerilla Girl) and Khuswant Singh’s Train to Pakistan—and attempt to see how recovering memories of the past, as psychologist Ramsay Lieum claims, can contribute not only to understanding the lasting psychological impacts of intense social and political conflicts but also exploring prospects for personal and social reconciliation.