Afghanistan 2021 - Somewhere Under The Rainbow · 11:31am Aug 24th, 2021
Once upon a time, there was a handsome boy, whose father had died.
He went to work and came home exhausted.
He was tired of working.
He wished he could be a girl so he wouldn't have to work.
One day, a wise man told him that if he passed under a rainbow,
He would become a girl.
"What's a rainbow?", he asked.
It's a memory left to us by Rostam, the great hero,
To free us from pain and misery.
Boys turn into girls, and girls into boys.
The tale upon which this journal opened may be about just what you think, or it may not; what matters is that in Afghan culture, "Kaman e Rostam", or "Arch of Rostam", so named after a Persian mythological hero, is a poetic term for the rainbow. How oft-told this tale is to children in Afghanistan, I do not know; I am not Afghan. But it is a tale told to a young girl in a movie from 2003, marking a return of Afghan cinema, after film-making had been banned in the country under the Taliban regime.
Osama was originally conceived as closer to an allegory by its director, Siddiq Barmak. The very title is allegorical, the name given to the girl when she must pass off as a boy to feed her family, in a society where women may not work, even after the men of the house have died at war. But the movie that was made is far from allegorical. It is painfully real and true. A fairy-tale ending that'd have shown the girl passing under the rainbow, gaining her freedom, was replaced by a harsh ending, the only way in which this story could end.
While protests rock Australia over the duty to wear a mask for the sake of our fellow humans, remember there was a time in one country of Central Asia - of whom many inhabitants sought refuge in Australia during the early 2000s - when every woman was forced to cover her whole body, all for the purpose of control by cruel, power-hungry men.
The Taliban were in control of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, a mere five years. Years that left scars deep enough that now, twenty years later and a whole generation having grown up free of their terror, many will still flee as they return to power. For how long this time shall be, only future history books could say.
These are not people who can be redeemed. Watch Osama if you can, it is available for free for online, to see a glimpse of what life was under their rule, and remind yourself this will all happen again. Following the words of Khaled Hosseini, this is not Afghanistan as it has to be, yet it is how the world shall remember it.
If you are a praying person, pray for Afghanistan. If you don't believe in prayer, keep your hearts open to their plight.
The rainbow can only shine so long as we keep its memory alive, a beacon against pain and misery.
It frankly breaks my heart that the taliban are in control again. That president after president treated Afghanistan as a side show instead of giving it the attention it needed. That people didn’t seem to care at all about the war unless they had family over there. My only hope is that the taliban eventually fall and something resembling good government comes to power in Afghanistan.
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Thanks for sharing the sentiment. I do not reply all that often to your comments, but I appreciate them every time. Sadly, the rather American-centric nature of Fimfiction means I cannot think of many forums on which re-posting would either be considered appropriate or noticed.
Let us hold to that hope.
History repeats, once more. I have to say that news of the Taliban takeover has been one of the most depressing - outside of COVID, of course.
The Taliban's words are not to be trusted.