Uprooted and Blooming

Before she came to America as a political refugee, Zohra Daoud was the first and only Miss Afghanistan and a star of Afghan radio and television.

Asifa Etemadi was the editor of an Afghan family magazine, with 15 writers under her supervision and her own car and driver.

Kawky Anwar was the vice principal of a prestigious Kabul girls’ school named after Malalai, a 19th century Afghan heroine.

When many people think of Afghan women, they visualize only shapes, made formless and featureless by head-to-toe coverings. They think of women under the Taliban--banned from working, banned from learning, in danger if their faces are seen or if their shoes squeak as they walk. They do not picture women like Daoud, who sat reminiscing on a recent morning in her marble-floored Malibu kitchen wearing a stylish short-sleeved knit shirt and designer jeans, looking at 30-year-old photos of herself in lipstick and eye shadow, uncovered on the streets of Herat and Kabul.

The tens of thousands of Afghan refugees who came to America after the Communists took over in the late 1970s and early 1980s included the elite of their homeland, the intelligentsia. The men who came were Afghanistan’s ruling class--its cabinet ministers, its experienced civil servants, the heads of its large institutions. The women were often prominent professionals, too.

But though the women seemed to adapt to their altered status--starting over by taking menial jobs, for example, as they studied English in night school--many men simply could not accept the changes. When their once-powerful husbands refused to make the jump from cabinet minister or doctor to cab driver or grocery bagger, the women took on more responsibility in their families. As a result, Afghan American men have often been far less visible in their communities and in public life. And in many an Afghan home here, the traditional balance of power has shifted.

Khalil Rahmany, a Concord clinical psychologist who also left Afghanistan two decades ago in the exodus, wrote his master’s thesis and his doctoral dissertation on Afghans’ adjustment to America. He sees many Afghan families in his Northern California private practice and in his work at the Portia Bell Hume Behavioral Center in Concord. Afghans call in to his weekly radio show, called “Tabibi Radio,” which he translates as “Doctor of the Radio.” Over and over, he’s heard the same story.

“All of a sudden, there was this role reversal,” Rahmany said. “It’s men being back in the cave and the women being hunters.”

“So many of these highly professional and elite men, they came here with a great deal of knowledge,” said Rahmany. “But they become severely depressed. They sit at home. All of a sudden, they find themselves on SSI [Supplemental Security Income], being prescribed Prozac. Basically, it’s a great loss.”

Certainly, women experienced great losses as well. In the 1950s and 1960s, urban women had made great strides in Afghanistan. In a 1964 constitution, women won equal rights under the law. Wearing a veil was a matter of personal choice, not anyone’s edict.

But though they spoke with great pride of their professional accomplishments in Afghanistan, many women didn’t let the memories of their former status get in their way in America, said Thomas E. Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “Women, and particularly the younger ones who had been educated in Afghanistan, they were more willing to take a different kind of job, like going to work as a sales clerk or going to work at a supermarket or working at a fast-food place, and they went out and they did that,” said Gouttierre. “They weren’t so intimidated by what they had been.”

Daoud, who exudes elegance and grace and who grew up with a chauffeur and cook and French lessons, landed first in the back of a Virginia bakery, scrubbing floors.

Etemadi, whose Pushtu-language magazine had celebrated Afghan women’s progress--each month marking firsts, from the first woman crane operator to the first female cabinet minister--found herself tending the salad bar at a Sizzler.

Anwar, who now lives in Simi Valley, worked in a Canoga Park factory, assembling disk drives. From there, she moved on to receiving, where she unpacked parts, counted them and entered the numbers into a computer.

In some cases, Afghan American women became their family’s only breadwinners. Even so, many found the time to look outward, starting organizations to gather other Afghans to celebrate annual festivals such as Eid al-Fitr, the breaking of the fast after Ramadan. They used their skills as mothers and nurturers to bring lonely refugees together. And in recent years, agonized by the suffering of the women and children still in Afghanistan, they also led their communities’ fund-raising and humanitarian efforts, arranging for food donations, raising money to dig wells in times of drought.

“We proved it here. We proved that we can do something,” said Rona Popal, founder of one of the earliest groups, the Afghan Women’s Assn. International in Fremont, a Bay Area city that is home to the largest concentration of the estimated 100,000 Afghans in America.

“You know why we started our groups? You know why we worked so hard? In order to show the world who Afghan women really are, that Afghan women can make a difference. The Taliban has tried to degrade women. We wanted to show the strength that Afghan women have.”

Few Traces of What

They Once Accomplished

Years of war and instability have more or less erased the evidence of their achievements in their homeland.

Their schools have been destroyed. Their former jobs have ceased to exist. The rights that two decades ago seemed theirs to keep are pipe dreams for the women in their homeland today. Now, they say, it seems as if few people in the world are aware of the freedom they once enjoyed.

“People say to me here, ‘Oh, how soon you adopted our culture. You changed your clothes. You adopted our lifestyle,”’ said Etemadi, who lives in Alameda. “I say, ‘No, we were like you before. We had civilization. We had beautiful homes. And I would never, never, never go out without high heels on outside my door.”’

Gouttierre, who lived in Afghanistan for a decade until 1974, remembers the women in the capital city of Kabul, unveiled and often chic.

“They dressed for the most part modestly but also fashionably,” he said. “They used to walk in the parks and wear short skirts--which they called mini jupes . You see, they read the French fashion magazines and they took the styles to their tailors. In the mid-1960s, the country was moving incrementally toward more personal freedom. Everyone was a little more comfortable and relaxed about personal style.”

The phenomenon was mostly limited to the big cities. Still, women were studying in larger and larger numbers at Kabul University. They were making their mark on the most prestigious professions. The number of women doctors, for instance, was growing steadily.

Women have pointedly ignored the ethnic divisions that often keep men in Afghan American communities divided, Rahmany said. They are good at willing away the kinds of barriers that stop their husbands.

“You have no choice. You find your place,” said Daoud, who co-founded the Afghan Women Assn. of Southern California and has been organizing regular meetings for the group since Sept. 11. “Afghan people, they are very tolerant, and especially Afghan women. Afghan women are very strong--inside and out.”

These are women, after all, who had faced bigger challenges. Farida Anwary, once the head of radio and television for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Arts and Culture, walked with her 5-year-old daughter over the border to Pakistan in 1983. For five nights, they walked. They made their way at a near run up the steep trails of the Khyber Pass. It was nothing special, she said. It was just the route people took to get out.

Her escape took her and her daughter from place to place--from Pakistan to India to France and finally to Fremont.

“Afghan women are very motivated people,” the 54-year-old woman said matter-of-factly.

Anwary, who had a proper studio in Afghanistan, was thrilled when the opportunity came for her to broadcast here without one. Three years after applying for a spot on a Northern California station, she was offered two hours a week, on Sunday mornings.

“I wouldn’t have minded one hour. I went to the flea market, and I got tape recorders and all those things that I needed. Secondhand. Thirdhand,” she said from her home in Union City, which until recently also served as her studio. Until a few months ago, when the money got too tight, she broadcast all day long from her house, running her own tiny satellite station, called Radio Meli Afghanistan.

“Men, you know, it’s hard for them to accept going out and starting from scratch again. We had a lot of professionals, doctors. They didn’t dare to go and take the exams and maybe start working in a smaller piece of the medical area. So what happened? What happened is they got old. They got old without their dreams. Me, I couldn’t separate from mine.”

Anwary now is back to just one Sunday show on a local AM station. Still, she uses her radio forum, as she always has, as a community life preserver. When she first started broadcasting here, many Afghans in the area felt lonely and scared, haunted by wartime trauma, awkward and uncertain in America.

“Our community needed cultural information, information on adapting to the new life,” she said. “Our community was very, very isolated. I wanted them to get out. They were capable of doing a lot of things, but they were so under the pressure of the situation, they felt that they were not able to do anything. I told them they can go out and volunteer. I told them about senior centers, about family planning, about events. I just kept talking.”

In a way, Anwary’s role in the fledgling Northern California Afghan American community was more central and important than her high position in Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, even with growing rights, women lived in a traditional society. “They’re doing very good here because in Afghanistan, you know, they were a little bit under the influence of religion, under the influence of culture, under the authority of men,” said Etemadi, 55. “Here, they get a little bit of freedom. Now they do everything.”

For some, that freedom has come at a high cost, said Rahmany, the psychologist. Domestic violence has become common, particularly in homes where men have found themselves permanently displaced from positions of authority.

Divorce--both culturally and religiously shameful back home--has also become more frequent, he said. Sometimes, too, Afghan men who have divorced their first wives head to the refugee camps in Pakistan to try again with much younger wives, mere teenagers who have seen little of the world.

For some women, particularly the younger ones, it is family conflict and the clashing cultures of America and Afghanistan that have energized them and made them activists.

Shekaiba Wakili, 30, wasn’t raised in a tight Afghan community. Only 10 when she left Afghanistan, she grew up with her stepmother and father and sisters in a Long Island suburb. She rarely saw other Afghans--maybe once a year at the Eid al-Fatr celebration in Queens.

But even though her day-to-day life was American, she was expected to abide by her father’s strict, traditional codes. In college, when she wanted independence and insisted on living in a dorm instead of at home, he disowned her. Feeling alone, paying her own way through the State University of New York at Old Westbury, Wakili wanted to know if anyone else shared her experiences. She began interviewing people for her thesis, on Afghan American women and cultural conflict.

“Along the way, I was able to meet women like me, women who are independent, who are on their own,” said Wakili, an art teacher who lives in New York. “It helped me mentally.”

Wakili, who recently married a non-Afghan, said her battle with her father over the sort of life she would lead put the rights of Afghan women in high relief for her.

Now, she’s active in efforts to help women under the Taliban.

“A lot of us are very distraught about what the Taliban has done, and we want to give back. There are a lot of women like me out there who want to help out,” she said.

A Look Back at a

Very Different Life

On a recent afternoon in her Malibu home, Daoud looked through old photo albums, at pictures of her in 1972, lipstick perfect, posing as Miss Afghanistan. The competition was never held again after the Communists took over, she said.

“Mom, that’s you? Oh my God. I’ve never seen this,” her 17-year-old daughter, Woana, said, giggling, when she arrived home from Malibu High School with a friend and walked into the family kitchen, with its sweeping hillside view of Zuma Beach.

Daoud pointed out old photos of fashionably dressed women surrounded by men, working side by side with them in Kabul.

She said many Afghan men, including her husband, Mohammad, a commercial pilot for a U.S. airline, grew up with reverence and respect for women. Her husband likes to say that if Afghan American women took over Afghanistan after the Taliban, the troubled country might finally achieve real peace and progress.

Daoud said she believes it will take years for Afghan women to win back the rights at least some of them once had.

“People still know me. They remember me as Miss Afghanistan. But you know what? I’m not Miss Afghanistan. The real Miss Afghanistans are the women who are still stuck back at home. We have at least to give them some rights, to give them the dignity of living,” she said softly. For decades, she said, men have been raised there as fighters. Many are illiterate. Many are war-hardened. Under the Taliban, they’ve been taught to reject women, to make them invisible.

“There’s no love in Afghanistan, unfortunately. These men there now, they became orphans. They don’t know the love of a woman, the love of a mother. And this is what we have to offer. This is what we have to bring back to our country.”