Dreams Drowned in Dust — from a white coat to a red bridal gown 

By Naimat Zafary, a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex and a former Afghan Chevening Scholar.

Every refugee I know lives at least in part in their home country, as if a slice of your heart and mind remained even as the rest of you took a small rucksack of belongings and flew in an army rescue plane towards an unknown future. 

I am no different. On paper I am a PhD student at the University of Sussex pursuing a thesis and playing my part in academic life. I am a Chevening alumnus and a UK resident. But there is a split screen always at play in my mind, one here and the other there. One life is lived in a British seaside town, the other in Kabul in my devastated home country — Afghanistan. 

The Autumn colours here in Britain signal a new academic year. Here there are books and school bags as my older daughter begins her second year of secondary education. Yet in my parallel world, her cousin of the same age with a broken heart is unable to continue her education under Taliban rule. As she looks ahead, her opportunities diminish to a vanishing point. Time moves on, but she cannot. 

In Brighton, I walk across a campus led by an exceptional woman and see men and women pursuing their studies on equal terms. But I think also of my cousin; a third-year medical student, who has faced a blanket ban on women in universities.

A year before, I told my cousin I would send her an iPad so she could study English and practice her lessons; she said she was reading her old books and re-reading her lectures so she wouldn’t forget her studies. She asked repeatedly when I thought the universities would open. Hopefully soon, I said. 

The wider family wanted her to succeed — a daughter who would become a doctor in a community and world that urgently needed medical expertise. Yet as time passed, the family grew more and more worried about her future. ‘’What to do? There is no news of opening the universities; day by day, things are getting worse’’. Her life choices had narrowed to only one. She accepted a marriage proposal. 

It isn’t only her. My second cousin who had waited to begin her university studies for more than a thousand days has also sensed that there is nobody coming to the rescue of Afghan women; she too has married. The sadness is not the marriages themselves, but the loss of what could have come first and the opportunities with them. 

This is the story of actual loss in my parallel world of Afghanistan. To me it is not a film or news footage. It is the real loss of individual dreams for people I know and love. And not just in the field of medicine but in the media, finance, banking, law, politics, governance, development, you name it; in all these disciplines, the presence of the women who once shined in them is disappearing in my country in what has rightly been called gender apartheid. What has been stolen is not only education, prosperity and time. At its worst, the most cruel loss of all is the erosion of hope. 

A kind friend shared a letter sent by great writer EB White and it touched my heart. ‘’As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time.’’, he wrote. If that hope is taken, the desolation is complete. 

Afghan women and girls are rightly known for their courage, but they cannot change their circumstances alone. They are forced to play the hand they have been dealt. Yet still hope persists, even as they make painful and pragmatic choices. In every second sentence, they speak with longing of a future and education. As Rumi says, they show their worth by what they seek. 

Sometimes, though, the burden of their current pain is so significant that even their strong shoulders cannot bear it. Some become hopeless and surrender, to lives they did not wish for and some turn away from life altogether out of grief. Who could blame them — certainly not I. 

And so for a third year we say that ‘hopefully’ secondary and higher education will reopen for our many talented Afghan girls. But there is a moral duty at stake too — on global institutions to go beyond hope and translate it into action. To work together to secure opportunities for Afghan girls, including scholarships (in-person or online). Even modest steps put pressure on the Taliban, and they signal to women under effective house arrest that they have not been forgotten. 

Sartre once wrote, “Every word has consequences. Every Silence, too.’’ As I witness the silencing of Afghan women and girls in my split-screen life, I do what I can to amplify their dreams. To tell the stories of their lives. Like Virginia Woolf, “I want to write a novel about Silence… the things people don’t say’’.

My challenge is to convey the desperate need of one of my worlds to those who live in the other, busy with their own lives and concerns, so far removed from the first. And yet it is my own stubborn hope that it is possible for the cries of one to be heard by the other. That we won’t be deaf to injustice. That the arc of history may indeed bend forward.