Margaret Atwood on Afghanistan: No country can exist without women

A very, very long time ago, in 1978, when people who are now forty years old weren't born, Graeme Gibson and I went on a trip around the world. Our destination was the Adelaide Festival in Australia, but we bought a round-the-world ticket that allowed us to make stops along the way because we were traveling with our eighteen-month-old daughter and thought a direct flight would be too long for her . The stopover in Afghanistan was my decision. Just what little I knew about the history of this country had fascinated me from afar - no foreign invader, including the British, had ever ruled the country for long. Famous is the saying of Alexander the Great that it is easy to invade Afghanistan, but difficult to get out again.The Russians would experience the same thing later, and the Americans a few decades after them. Why?

Perhaps it is due to the connection between an extraordinarily harsh landscape and the unrestrained freedom of the residents.

Before we left, my father said: "Don't go there, there will be war soon." How could he know?

Six weeks after our visit, President Daoud Khan and almost all of his family were murdered, sparking the 40+ year war we have witnessed since then.

We experienced this overwhelmingly beautiful country just before it fell into the abyss.

What is happening in Afghanistan?

There are those who say that one of the reasons Daoud Khan was murdered was his advocacy of the education and employment of women. Regardless of whether that's true or not, the role of women in Afghanistan, especially their almost complete invisibility in public life, made a deep impression on me. It is evident that this invisibility is one of the many influences - historical and contemporary, from around the world - that has found expression in the role of the woman I created for the Republic of Gilead in The Maid's Report.

I started this book in 1981, it was published in 1985; my fiction of an American theocracy that forces women into an extremely subordinate social position arose shortly after my visit to Afghanistan. But what about today - now that a puritan theocratic regime has come to power again in Afghanistan? Women who were previously active as teachers, scientists, thinkers, creators or in the medical field are being forced back into invisibility. They will be told that they are not allowed to receive any training because - one or more of the reasons given at many times and in many countries can be inserted here: That women are incapable of higher thinking, that their real destiny lies in it,Giving birth to children and serving the family, and so on.

In nineteenth-century Britain, it was even suggested that educated women had too much blood supplying their brains and their reproductive organs shrank. Countless reasons have been given, and none of them stand up to scrutiny. Let's just say that in reality it is more about power and domination and that an evil side in human nature should also come into play: the pleasure that some feel when they cause pain to others. Many Afghan women have refuted claims that women cannot teach, learn, research, invent, heal and create. Now they are forced into the dark again, hidden from view, their talents withheld from their country and their communities; but what they already know cannot be erased.I cannot see into the future and I do not know how the amputation of women and their skills will affect Afghanistan.

Perhaps younger women will be more desperate because they did not see the time when Afghan women became visible. Perhaps older women will be more persistent in the belief that what has been achieved can be achieved again. In our strange and sad time of being plagued by a pandemic and the effects of a climate crisis, nothing is predictable. But the Afghan women themselves said: “We are still there!” That alone is a statement of weight: after more than forty years of overthrow and destruction, reconstruction and renewed destruction, they have already gone through a great deal.

No country can exist long without women.

No matter how much a regime hates and punishes women, it cannot do without them.

But what kind will these women be?

We will see.

Margaret Atwood