Going to the Movies

I was lucky enough to go to the Embassy again today, but I was in the same drab building I visited last time; however, our reason for going was spectacular. I was able to see a documentary film entitled Mohtarama that was directed by Malek Shafi’i and Diana Saqeb. The title of the film is, as far as I could understand, a term of endearment for women – something akin to calling a woman “Mother,” “Darling,” “Wife,” “Sister,” “Daughter,” and the like, and Director Diana Saqeb was at the showing.

The film is about the lives of Afghan women, and it showcased women in Herat, Kabul, and Mazur-e-Sharef in three different years – 2009, 2010, and 2011. Although because of technological glitches (as if I don’t understand THOSE by now!), we were unable to see the end of the film, it moves through the day-to-day lives of these women who are oppressed by society, religion, and men in general, and how, for many reasons, a women’s movement has not taken hold in this country to provide women with more opportunities.

I think most of the people who attended, and the drab room was full, would agree that in some ways, women’s lives are better now than they were under the Taliban regime; however, the women in the film who shared with the audience their lives had little to say that was good. One woman’s father had died when she was young. Her mother eventually remarried a man who had a son. The two parents affianced their children, and so the interviewee gave her age as 24, telling us that she had been married for 12 years. Another woman, who is a professional, tells about being unable to go out in public without layers and layers of clothing lest she be called worse than a prostitute. Another, a young woman and an activist trying to make things better for women, despairs over the fact that no organized women’s movement in Afghanistan exists.

As an aside, one of the women of the film idolizes an ancient Afghan poet, a woman named Rabia. She was of royalty and fell in love with a servant. She wrote beautiful poems that dreamily told of the love she felt – secret love, doomed love, unexpressed love – and eventually, she died for love. One story says that she was found out by her brother and he killed her for dishonoring the family; another says that she killed herself because she had been found out; another says that she was killed by soldiers as ordered by her brother (by the way, I know all this because of Esman, who schooled me in Rabia lore when I happened upon her name in a piece of literature). Unfortunately, it seems that women in this country still die for love – or almost so (please read the NY Times article I posted on my Facebook page). I suppose, however, if one has been married since age 12, true, deep love seems something too good to have missed.

The most important part of the film, I believe, is that these women want better things for their lives and for the lives of all the women in the country. My colleagues and I discussed the film after we left, and we had different “chill factors” – when chills ran up and down our spines. Leslie’s was a three-word phrase: “Victims of change,” which was the phrase used to talk about women who are reluctant to go too far out on a limb, lest they become those victims. Sarah’s was a line of Rabia’s poetry, which was beautiful, and gave the image of a woman whose soul is seen by the man she loves.

Mine was two-fold: First, the women talked about how education was the best opportunity to change. However, one of the screaming male zealots berating women for wanting their Constitutionally-guaranteed rights was an instructor at one of the universities. If that teacher is an example of what students learn at the university, I see little help for women in education. Second, was the hope of the young woman for a cohesive women's movement. My aunt, Susie, whom some of you know, was in on the beginning of ALL the movements (and I am proud of her stances in those years) – women’s, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, anti-Vietnam War – and the one thing in the women’s movement she never had to worry about was getting killed or maimed.

These women in the film, the ones who ask for what their own Constitution guarantees them – equal rights – risk their lives in doing so. I believe they are going through what the Civil Rights workers and activists went through in America in the 1950s and 1960s – they are risking being “victims of change,” real victims, just like the little girls who were killed in the bombed-out church, and the innumerable northern Civil Rights volunteers and Civil Rights activists who found themselves dead in the South for speaking up for change that was required by our Constitution. Many people died in that fight. I wonder how many will in this one.

The very good news in all this is that I had a discussion with Diana Saqeb, and she has given me permission to get the trailer for her film from her Facebook page and put it in my blog! You will be able to see at least some of it. I haven’t had time to do it today, but I will do it as soon as I have a minute or two, and I guarantee you will see something that will make you think. I enjoyed talking to her; she is a beautiful woman, and she has made several films, including one about the first Afghan woman who competed at the Olympics (Run Roobina Run).

Most important, she and I share a very important viewpoint: change, any change, comes one person at a time. I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to effect change in one person, or maybe two or three, and I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to be changed.

The other things that I want to tell you, including that on the way to the Embassy, I saw, get this, a COW standing in the bed of a teeny-tiny pick-up truck that was careening down the road, seem unimportant after my viewing the film, shot in stark black and white (of course). Sometimes, things just change perspectives. This was one of them.