Caught up in the struggle
Published Saturday November 22nd, 2008
Sally Armstrong's latest book follows the story she's been pursuing for 11 years: the work of activist women trying to improve education, health care and human rights in Afghanistan. Story by Kate Wallace
Sally Armstrong expects her latest book, Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots: The Uncertain Fate of Afghanistan's Women, will get some "push-back," a rather understated term for the kind of indignation she thinks the book will spark.
At a recent public reading, she shared a passage from the book's first chapter excoriating the "so-called religious men" who have made it the norm "to murder your own daughter and call it honour"‚."‚."‚. to ask her how she was dressed - was it modest enough? - when the rapist defiles her" in the war-ravaged country.
"I thought, 'Good grief, you should never have told the truth to this degree,'" the veteran journalist and author said recently from her home in Toronto.
"I expect I'll be hearing about that," she said. "The fundamentalists will be enraged."
Their ire has not deterred Armstrong in 11 years of reporting from Afghanistan. Neither have the difficult conditions of working there, including security concerns and the harsh climate.
"Last winter, it was between -20 and -25 C the whole time I was there. And there's no heat, so you're freezing all the time. Then you find out that 900 people died at the same time, most of them children, so you stop whining about yourself.
"But it just takes all of your waking hours to get your story."
She first went to Afghanistan in 1997, as a journalist with an assignment from Homemakers to report on the country following the takeover by the Taliban.
"I went, I wrote the story, I was shocked," she said. "It was one of those stories that practically wrote itself, it was so shocking. But I thought that was the end of it."
When the magazine, which Armstrong was editor of at the time, received an unprecedented 9,000 letters from outraged Canadian readers, she realized this was a story with legs.
More than a decade later the veteran journalist still sees Afghanistan as a good story, "but I must say, I'm caught up in the struggle."
In regular contact with a network of the women she has met there, "I want to know how it turns out. I keep going back to see where they are."
Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots details the work of activist women trying to improve education, health care and human rights in their country, which is still divided by a striking gender apartheid.
"Even the most emancipated woman is still seen as a vessel of blame by men," Armstrong said. "I think even the most modern men have a distance to travel in terms of equality for women."
The book is alternately heart-wrenching and hopeful. Armstrong catalogues the atrocities women are still subjected to - rape, mutilation, being traded as chattel - alongside advances. These include seats in parliament, a significant gain since her 2002 book Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan, which documented what life was like for women under the Taliban.
"To me, the women and girls in Afghanistan are like a blueprint of what can go wrong and how terribly wrong it can go," Armstrong said. "You have everything happening there; you have a human rights catastrophe, you have misogyny, but you also have these incredibly courageous women who have decided to challenge the status quo and fix it themselves."
Armstrong said their struggles are not totally detached from that of North American feminists.
"In Canada, in the '60s and '70s, women who saw the need for change in this country shouldered open the door - and thought the government and the institutions would go through that opening.
"But you know who went through that opening? Nobody.
"Canadian women discovered that if you want to make change, you have to do it yourself. And Afghan women have discovered the same thing."
While action by the international community, such as a United Nations resolution passed in June deeming rape a security issue, is important, Armstrong stressed that change must come from within.
"All the resolutions in the world are not going to alter the status of women anywhere, only the women can do that. They have to take up this fight and in Afghanistan today the Taliban are targeting these reformist women and they are murdering them in a ritualistic style. They murder them in public, in front of their children, by shooting them in the face.
"This is terrorism."
She pointed to the efforts of Afghan women in promoting human rights, a term that wasn't even part of the lexicon 10 years ago.
"It's not like everyone woke up one day and they had human rights, but the buzz has started," Armstrong said.
"Everybody is talking about this."
Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to Salon.
Disabled
Search Articles
More CE Network Sites & Partners:
