I escaped the Taliban: As a 12-year-old family skivvy in Afghanistan, Sola Mahfouz’s
Defiant Dreams
by Sola Mahfouz and Maliana Kapoor (Doubleday £16.99, 320pp)
At the beginning of her compelling memoir of escape from Afghanistan, Sola Mahfouz writes: ‘I began to grow up the day my mother told me to stop laughing.’
That abrupt end to Sola’s carefree childhood happened just before her 12th birthday in 2008.
She and her female cousins were bicycling round and round the inner courtyard of the family’s compound in Kandahar, safely out of sight, but audible, as they were giggling and singing a popular Bollywood song.
Suddenly, something came flying over the wall, and they heard a group of boys laughing and whooping.
At the beginning of her compelling memoir of escape from Afghanistan, Sola Mahfouz (pictured) writes: ‘I began to grow up the day my mother told me to stop laughing’
It was two large sacks stuffed with excrement. ‘After that day,’ Sola writes, ‘I listened to my mother’s warnings.’
Her mother was terrified that even a momentary giggle would bring a strange man to the door, ready to kidnap or kill to silence the sounds of a young woman.
And this was during the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, when you might have thought life would have become easier for women.
In hindsight, we know how short-lived that respite from Taliban rule was to be.
None of us who watched the unfolding nightmare in 2021 can forget the traumatic sight of young Afghans so desperate to escape from the return of Taliban rule, with its medieval laws and barbaric punishments, that they clung to the sides and wings of a U.S. aircraft as it took off during the chaotic withdrawal of American and British troops.
But Sola’s fascinating book shows how, even during the Nato-controlled interlude, the terror for the citizens of Kandahar (the birthplace and spiritual home of the Taliban) never stopped.
Her mother carried on wearing her burqa, so as not to risk attacks when she went out shopping. And the Afghan burqa, Sola reminds us, is ‘the most confining covering for women in the world’.
With no sleeves or face openings, except for tiny criss-cross slats to peer through, ‘it strips women of their sense of humanity, reducing them to sky-blue monoliths’.
Random suicide bombings by the Taliban, and abductions of children (their cut-off fingers sent to parents who wouldn’t pay up) made life in the city terrifying.
And it was not just this that made Sola long to escape from her homeland to a better life. ‘Every day,’ she writes, ‘I faced the prospect of two deaths: the death of my body, and the death of my personality, my independence, my girlhood.’
Sola’s fascinating book shows how, even during the Nato-controlled interlude, the terror for the citizens of Kandahar never stopped. Pictured Maliana and Sola
From the moment she turned 12, she was expected to be a full-time skivvy, spending all day in the kitchen cooking elaborate meals for the men and boys of the family, (not allowed to eat with them, subsisting on their leftovers), and also a potential bride, her mother entering into negotiations for her arranged mid-teens marriage.
Her whole soul recoiled from the prospect of surrendering her existence to a man she’d never met, and to living with his family as a domestic drudge and childbearer.
And she’d seen enough of her own mother’s life under a tyrannical mother-in-law (her grandmother Ana Bibi) to know about mothers-in-law from hell. When Sola was born, Ana Bibi had refused to hold her because she was a girl.
Going to female cousins’ weddings, Sola watched with dismay as they were handed over like cheap bargains in their wedding gowns.
Just reading about Sola’s confined existence made me claustrophobic. Although she was allowed to go to school as a child, her teacher was a sadist, torturing and bullying the girls and whipping them with a long, thin pomegranate branch.
She watched with envy as her brothers got an education, enabling them to study at Western universities.
Seven words of her grandfather’s rang in her ears. ‘English,’ he said, ‘is the window to the world.’
So Sola decided to learn English. Her brother refused to help her. Far from putting her off, his refusal ‘lit a fire’ under her.
She’d show him what she was capable of. After finishing her chores, she’d stay up half the night doing an online course. It didn’t stop with English. She joined the online Khan Academy to study maths and science from scratch.
On an online language-learning platform, she linked up with an undergraduate at the University of Iowa called Emily, and they became friends.
From the prison of her existence, Sola asked Emily how she could study in the U.S. She told her that she’d need to take the obligatory SAT and IELTS tests. But there was no test centre in Kandahar; the nearest was in Pakistan.
Sola is now a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Pictured: Sola and Maliana
And she didn’t have a passport (most Afghan women don’t, as they rarely leave the house, let alone the country).
The book becomes a real page-turner as Sola recounts the mental agonies she went through. Her father allowed her to apply for a passport, but on arrival in Pakistan, after a dusty journey, she was told that the exam registration was already full.
Emily made it her business to make sure a slot was opened up for her.
She passed! And she was offered places at colleges in America. Now she needed a visa. An official at the U.S. embassy in Kabul rejected her. He didn’t believe she was really going there to study.
The New York Times picked up on the story — to Sola’s family’s horror, because they thought this would put them in danger.
But nothing terrible happened to them — and for Sola, the publicity changed her life. The U.S. embassy rang to say her visa application had been approved.
As she disembarked from the plane at Chicago Airport, Sola removed her headscarf. Emily collected her.
For the first time in her life, Sola sat in the front of a car, was driven by a woman, saw a man (Emily’s father) do the cooking, had a long, hot shower, saw people drinking alcohol, and cycled along a road rather than round in circles in a compound.
But she hadn’t predicted her acute homesickness, or the culture shock of living in a partying hall of residence. This was by no means an escape into instant happiness.
In 2021, she watched on TV with dismay as the Taliban retook Afghanistan, before the U.S. and UK had even withdrawn.
Her parents managed to escape over the border in a car, but, horrifically, it flipped over, trapping her mother underneath, leaving her a quadriplegic.
Sola is now a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Quite an achievement.