Hello, dear reader!
I hope you are well. Thank you for reading this text. Before you continue, I want to clarify one thing. You are not meant to be an audience of one. My pencil and I are the mediators of millions of women today. These remarks are the cry of thousands of silences. The cry of women in boxes that, as Mr. Kobo Abe says, no one sees or takes into account. But the main difference between Mr. Kobo Abe’s box man and us is that we did not choose to be in boxes. We are forced to live in boxes. Wait, let me tell you what I mean by a box. Our box is a fence of do’s and don’ts. A woman in our society knows what she shouldn’t do before she learns to eat.
Let me put it more simply. Think of a mother who wants to tell her little girl a bedtime story. What choices does she have? It can’t be “Little Red Riding Hood” because her daughter will never have the right to wear a red cape with a hood, and the wolves don’t have to bother pretending to be a grandmother to tear her apart. They will form a pack and tear her apart in the street without any pretense. No, “Mulan” is not a good choice either. Mulan could dress up in men’s clothing and go to war in her father’s place, but Nooria, the girl in Afghanistan who wore men’s clothing to work for herself and her family, was trapped and forgotten. The fate of Nooria prevents mothers in Afghanistan from telling Mulan’s story.
None of the Disney princess stories will work here either. The mothers of this land know that men will not be the saviors. Our mothers will not find any story to tell because their daughters’ dreams will never come true. Our mothers do not speak about the colours that their daughters will never see because it is unfair to them. They must pass on to their daughters adaptability, not dreams.
Their girls will grow up, they will learn to not be loud, to not be seen, to not write, to not read, to not move, and to not exist. If someday they achieve the right of existence they will not know what to do. They would get lost, they might remain in the boxes that do not fit them. They might remain in costumes they never chose and cannot describe. Like eyes that get used to the darkness.
Dear reader, you might get my point. Here is the land of books, but the light has been taken. This is the world of stories, but the happy endings have been taken. I write to you from the land of Farkhunda, a girl who was sacrificed to collective anger. A large crowd used a misunderstanding to vent their pent-up anger, and the fate of the victim was of no importance. You might find it familiar: perhaps it brings to mind Mr. Jean Teulé’s book Eat Him if You Like. Or maybe it’s Alain Dumouni and Farkhunda who share a common fate, years apart. One in Afghanistan and one in France, but their unfair death is the same. During the Franco-Prussian War, people under the pressure of war and an unequal society brutally murdered an innocent man after hearing a rumor that he was an enemy spy. Two hundred years later in Afghanistan, collective anger did the same thing to Farkhunda through a religious misunderstanding. The collective anger in both stories comes from a thousand reasons that evade wisdom and repeat pain.
I write to you from the land of pain. Dear reader, here we have many stories, but our stories are doomed to perish with all their passion, intensity, and beauty. Here we are condemned to watch pain silently. I write from the world of Margaret Atwood. We live in The Handmaid’s Tale. Fear, suffocation, despair, violence, and oppression that we are condemned to endure and become accustomed to. The difficulty is in believing that it is possible to live another way. Our story is not exactly the story of these books, but the common pain of our people connects these tragedies.
Dear reader, I write because I still recognize words. I can distinguish colors. Maybe these are the last sentences we will write from under the boxes. I don’t know how many of us still have an old pencil in our hands and have managed to find a piece of cardboard to write on. But I know that these pieces of cardboard and their messy but honest writings will find their audience. I don’t know how long these boxes will last, I don’t know how many of us can survive without boxes if we get rid of them. But I know that as long as we look for a piece of pencil and a piece of cardboard to write on, there is still hope. If something is written then it will find its reader.
Best regards,
A letter from the box
