At the time of this email exchange, New Delhi is agog with talk of the India press conference of the foreign minister of Afghanistan. No invitations have been sent out to women journalists. But it won’t do to ask Shamsia Hassani what she makes of the situation; in any case she speaks through her art.
Even in a faceless, voiceless email exchange, Hassani’s love and longing for her lost home are obvious. The written word weeps. “I tell myself I wish we had never gone back to Afghanistan. Maybe then I would have never known what it means to belong to a homeland or to love it, and losing it wouldn’t hurt this much,” the 36-year-old artist tells The Telegraph.
Shamsia was born in Tehran, Iran, to Afghan parents. In 2005, the family moved to Afghanistan. She says, “I got so attached to my country, to Kabul.” She continues, “For the first time, I felt a sense of ownership over the sky and the land; it felt as if I had been born again at
the age of 16.”
In the last 15 years, Shamsia has made a name for herself — exhibitions in London, murals in Los Angeles, Kristiansand — with her visual commentaries on war, strife, displacement, women’s rights, Gaza, Ukraine, but especially life in Afghanistan.
In 2001, the US stormed Afghanistan and ousted the Taliban. This was the country Shamsia landed in. She says, “Everyone thought the hard days were over. But the Tali-
ban were still present behind the scenes… they had only been taken off the stage.”
In 2021, US troops pulled out of Kabul completely, ending an arrangement that had been in place for two decades. Around this time, social media came alive with Shamsia’s artworks. One such showed dollar curtains, pulled back, and behind them an exposed cityscape — buildings, canons, smoke. Tugging at the curtain was a turbaned woman with downcast eyes.
Much like R.K. Narayan’s Common Man, the commentator in Shamsia’s art series is the Afghan Everywoman. She is drawn without a mouth. She is also missing a heart — in its place is a hole, or a shooting target, or a bullet wound. Her heart, when it is painted in, is chalk white, as if to suggest it has been drained of life force. The landscape in her paintings is always stark, fractured; armed Taliban figures loom as a collective, all chiselled features and guns at attention.
“I became an artist in Kabul, with all its limitations and insecurity,” says Shamsia, who has since 2021 moved to the US. She adds, “We lived with fear, fear that we might become victims of a suicide attack or an explosion. We laughed with fear… Our youth passed in constant fear of explosions, loss, and migration. We never lived. Until the day Kabul fell, that day I felt as though Kabul had fallen into an abyss that I could no longer reach.” The Afghan Everywoman she draws is always on the edge, be it of a window, a roof or a rope.
Most of Shamsia’s art floating around in the virtual world comes with poignant taglines and text. Some come sewn to a lone word — “wish”. According to Shamsia, her earlier paintings were suffused with hope. After the siege of Kabul, that changed. She says, “Hope in my paintings turned into a wish.”
Here’s a description of a “wish painting” — a woman holding a flowerpot with a lone dandelion. Says Shamsia, “The Black Vase of Wishes is the name of my art series. Ever since I was a child, whenever I heard or saw anything about Afghanistan, it was always about war and disaster. It felt as if the country had turned into a black vase, a place where no hope, no dream, no sign of life could survive. Each time people thought they could plant their hopes and dreams there, they were proven wrong.”
Immediately after the exit of the US, the Taliban took over Afghanistan. News reports about the country from the last four years read thus: “Women protest against all-male Taliban government”, “Ministry of Women’s Affairs abolished”, “Taliban order all Afghan women to cover their faces in public”, “Afghanistan’s female TV presenters must cover their faces, say Taliban”, “Surge in suicides among women”.
Shamsia says she cannot stop thinking about the endless injustices against the women of her homeland. “Although I live far away, my spirit is still there. I have never experienced, and still don’t experience, what it feels like to live with a peaceful mind. I still paint, to satisfy myself that I am doing something for my people in my own way… With every painting, I try to remind the world about them.”
In his second India press conference, Afghan minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said the exclusion of women journalists had been a “technical issue”. He added, “We have 10 million students in schools and institutes, including over 2.8 million women and girls. In madrasas, education continues up to graduation. Some limits exist, but we’ve never declared women’s education religiously ‘haram’, it’s only postponed until further order.”