Young Companions in an Afghan American Journey

A watercolor of misery serves as the cover of Volume 1, Issue 1. Before a ruined cityscape sits a woman shrouded in a mud-brown burka, a crying infant on her lap. The child’s head is swathed in bandages stained in red.

The image was painted by Ustad Youssef Kohzad, Afghanistan’s former cultural minister and a refugee since 1992. It has its echo on Page 4 in a poem by Zalmai Herman, an Afghan expatriate living in Sweden:

... Like the women of Kabul behind walls

Like the children with families--upon the red snow

I feel frustrated and humiliated for not being able to do a thing

The new quarterly Afghana Journal--22 glossy pages of art, essays, short stories, memoirs and poems--is a response to such emotions, and the triumph of an enterprising 18-year-old journalist named Mizgon Zahir. Her mission is summed up in the magazine’s slogan: “unveiling Afghan Americans.”

With about 150,000 Afghans estimated to be living in the U.S.--the largest concentration in the San Francisco Bay Area--the community’s younger generation has struggled to find its identity, pulled between their parents’ conservative Islam and the opportunities within America’s relatively liberal, multicultural mainstream.

Zahir, born in the United States to parents who departed their homeland during the Soviet invasion, knew well about the identity crisis among Afghans living in diaspora, among her peers and within herself. One recent day, sitting among friends and colleagues at the low tables inside a restaurant in Fremont’s tiny Little Kabul--”a hate-free community,” according to a few red, white and blue posters--Mizgon and her 27-year-old sister, Giti Zahir, recall their conversation after watching the documentary “Kandahar.”

“I was saying I want to go back to Afghanistan,” says Mizgon, a freshman at Cal State Hayward. “Then I said, oops, I can’t go back, because I’ve never been there.”

Giti, however, remembers how a smuggler guided a group including herself and her mother on the long, open truck ride through remote mountain passes to the Pakistan border. Afghan guards halted them for two days but eventually relented when an uncle persuaded them that Giti’s mother was ill and in need of treatment in Pakistan. Once they made it to Peshawar, they set out to join Giti’s father, a government minister who had already managed to leave the country.

Giti, a psychotherapist who works in student health services at Stanford University, says immigrants such as herself, who remember their homeland from childhood, tend to be more comfortable moving between the conservative Islamic traditions at home and the liberal culture of American youth.

“I relate more to my parents on a cultural level. My mom and I went through that journey together.” Because of that, “you feel an obligation to fulfill their dreams.”

Afghans born here are more apt to clash with their parents’ values. It is not unusual, for example, for Afghan girls to keep a secret stash of makeup at school. Whatever dating may occur is typically done on the sly, or perhaps with the willful ignorance of parents. Protecting the family’s reputation is of paramount concern.

Though Zahir is the youngest person in the staff box, she found support among youthful compatriots: Farhad Azad is the 26-year-old creator of afghanmagazine.com, a Web site dedicated to Afghan arts and culture; David Sahar, a 28-year-old surgical resident at UC San Francisco Medical Center, maintains an Afghan Web service; Ghezal Omar, a 22-year-old film student, has made a documentary called “Afghan X,” in which she interviews Zahir and five other young Afghans in America about their perspective on the Sept. 11 terror and its aftermath.

Their Americanized generation, regardless of how well they remember--if at all--the old country, share a perspective that may help rebuild Afghanistan, they say. Young Afghan expatriates expect women to take a more assertive role in society. And young Afghans in America, they say, don’t recognize the ethnic and tribal conflicts that have riven Afghanistan.

Omar, for example, has pale skin and green eyes, traits common to the northern Tajiks. Zahir has the darker complexion and brown eyes common to the Pushtuns in the south. But the two think of themselves as Afghans first and foremost. “To be honest, I didn’t really know what a Pushtun and a Tajik was until Sept. 11 and this whole thing erupted,” Omar says. Now she understands her father is Tajik, her mother Pushtun.

During his recent visit to Washington, Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s interim prime minister, urged young Afghans in America to help rebuild their homeland. These were encouraging words to the Afghana Journal crowd. When the Bay Area’s Afghan community selected a delegation of 10 leaders to meet Karzai, only elders were chosen. As Sahar expressed frustration that young leaders had been ignored, Zahir took notes. This might be a good story idea, she says, for the magazine’s spring issue.

Zahir embraced her native culture with the assertiveness of an American woman. At age 13, she was host of a youth program on a pioneering Afghan community radio broadcast, an endeavor that required her to adapt the formal Dari she spoke at home to the more colloquial dialect of Farsi. “It was like jumping in a river and learning to swim,” she says. She wrote articles for Afghan-oriented Web sites, sometimes using a pen name.

She later contributed to Youth Outlook, or YO, a teen-oriented Bay Area monthly published by the nonprofit Pacific News Service. YO, says Pacific editor Sandy Close, was created as a forum for “kids who didn’t have voices” in mainstream media, including many children of refugees. After learning that the news service had successfully incubated youth publications for other immigrant communities, Zahir began assembling editorial content last summer for Afghana Journal’s premiere issue, before funding was even assured. If no money were to come through for publishing, Zahir figured, she’d make it a low-cost online operation.

Soon after the attacks, the Tides Foundation offered grants to promote understanding of the conflict. Close secured a grant of $5,000 to fund Afghana Journal’s initial run of 2,000 copies on high-quality paper stock and provide modest commissions to the staff. Zahir urgently assembled new content to reflect the latest heart-rending reality.

Close considers the creation of Afghana Journal an act of moral courage. “What Mizgon has done is remarkable, and at the same time living in a very traditional community with a lot of obligation to her family. She has just stepped up to give a visibility and a voice to all these people, to give a sense of what it means to be a young Afghan in America today. I mean, can you imagine a more complex dilemma?”

Sahar struggles to describe his anguish. As U.S. and allied forces bombed his beloved homeland--a country that has survived a generation of warfare--he was besieged by an onslaught of hate e-mail on the Afghan community Web site. “If you want to know how Afghans feel in America,” Sahar says, waving the Journal, “this is it.”

He flips the pages and reads a passage from an essay titled “A Letter From ‘The Enemy’” by Nadia Alit Maiwandi, a Portland, Ore., writer whose parents immigrated to the United States in 1966:

“Suddenly I am not a cute little novelty anymore, but the enemy. Me: The first with all the rock albums and the annoying Valley-girl vernacular? ... “The anti-Middle Eastern sentiment of the past [during the Iran hostage crisis and the Gulf War] pales in comparison of that today. Growing up, I was called many names ... and I knew some kids deliberately did not befriend me, for I was the enemy.”

In another essay, Maiwandi takes the American media to task for what she considers its simplistic bias. She pointedly notes that this is the same media that had largely ignored Afghanistan in recent years while it was obsessed with such newsmakers as Monica Lewinsky.

“It is easy to hate when you have little knowledge of your enemy--when the people you wish dead are faceless, evil ‘barbaric terrorists.’ But slowly, we began to be shown in an empathetic light as the world saw for the first time the atrocities inflicted on the Afghan people. With this new information ... America began to replace ‘Why do they hate us?’ with long overdue questions like, ‘What can we do to help?’”

An essay by Rameen Moshref, who says his family urged him to stay silent, passionately argues that anti-war sentiments among Muslim Americans are an act of patriotism: “If we say we are not for war, we are seen as unpatriotic or siding with the terrorists, having sympathies with them.

“Didn’t we become Americans, with full rights and privileges, when we were naturalized as citizens? Does patriotism mean supporting mass killing of innocent people just because they happen to be in the same country that houses a network of terrorists? Will spilling innocent civilian blood avenge those innocent lives lost in the World Trade Center? Will their martyred souls rest in peace after the massacre of starved women and children? Is it not patriotism to try to prevent American hands from being stained by innocent blood?”

Mizgon Zahir now finds herself wearing other hats, developing a circulation and advertising strategy to make Afghana Journal support itself. (For now, it can be ordered at www.afghanajournal.com.) She shows the Journal’s first issue to Wahid Andesha, owner of the Salang Pass restaurant. He boasts that he has been interviewed by the media 27 times since Sept. 11. Little Kabul is that small.

Soon Zahir works out an agreement. Andesha says he’ll display a copy and sell it from behind the counter. Andesha suggests that with a cover price of $5, Afghans won’t buy the magazine, but maybe “generous Americans” will.

Zahir shifts from English to Farsi to quote ad rates. The restaurateur says he’ll go for a half-page, and Zahir beams. It’s her first sale.