The Dreams of Fatema

FATEMA HOSSEINI made her way to work in Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, an unremarkable figure at first, but transformed hour by hour into a spectacle, and finally, a target.

Afghanistan’s president had fled the country and the U.S. Embassy was being evacuated, according to breaking news reports, and in a city where a full hijab was suddenly advisable, the then-27-year-old journalist’s loose headscarf now looked too perfunctory, her fashionable skirt ending well above the knee now shameful, despite the jeans worn underneath.

It was widely assumed that the tottering central government would collapse after U.S. forces’ withdrawal, scheduled for completion 20 years to the day after the terrorist attacks that had brought them here. The abruptness of it, while troops were still filtering out, had been a frightening jolt for everyone, even at Kabul Now, the investigative English-language news agency where Hosseini covered corruption, women’s rights and other controversial topics. Outside, Taliban fighters roamed the capital’s streets, unopposed, for the first time since 2001.

Her anxiety mixed with defiance. Wasn’t now the time for journalists to do their jobs? Worried for her safety, her mostly male colleagues urged her to get home and lie low. While none of them was safe, her in-your-face social media approach—typified by her use of Twitter tags like #TalibanGotoHell—made the diminutive, unmarried Hosseini a tempting object for retaliation. It could come via a bullet or, what scared her more, forced marriage to some Islamist insurgent turned de facto government soldier.

With a male colleague and his wife, she fled through streets that had assumed a zombie apocalypse vibe—cars colliding, pedestrians running in terror. A tan pickup, one of thousands abandoned in the U.S. retreat, rolled past them, loaded with Kalashnikov-wielding guerilla fighters.

The only woman outside in her neighborhood, she ignored the urge to run and instead strolled calmly home—a strange vision to men embracing the new reality. “Look at that bitch,” spat a shopkeeper who’d never before bothered her. “You’ll find out things have changed.”

At her flat, where her parents, teenage brother and adopted baby sister—recent evacuees from the Taliban’s takeover of the western Afghan city of Herat—were sheltering, her calm evaporated and she fell into her mother’s arms.

The next morning her mother forbade her to go to work. With a crushing headache, Hosseini lay for hours on the floor of the apartment thinking of her bleak future in Afghanistan, knowing she and her family had to escape—but how?

Hosseini recounts the start of that life-threatening journey from Kabul to Ukraine to the United States in a series of interviews in Knight Hall. Now a graduate student in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, she isn’t just willingly relating the traumatic events of her final days in Afghanistan, but reliving them through frequent nightmares. Many nights, the world is again collapsing, and she is being chased, grabbed, beaten by pitiless men who despise every facet of her identity. “Getting out of Afghanistan, part of me died there,” she says. What survived is a drive for autonomy and freedom that has shaped her life.

GENDER WALLS AND DOORS
A few years after returning from Iran, Marzia Hosseini took an office job at the provincial governor’s office in Herat, supplementing her father’s income as a recently enlisted Afghan soldier. It allowed Fatema to enroll in a prestigious private high school in the city, but meant grueling commutes from an outlying suburb, a schedule that became still harder when she began daily, two-hour classes to prepare for college entrance exams.

One morning, she was robotically trudging to the bus after only a few hours of sleep when a man rushed at her on a dark, deserted street. He seized and groped her, pulling at her clothes. Exploding with screams and flying elbows, Hosseini broke free and sprinted for a main road. Her mother heard the commotion and came running to grab the man, who claimed before fleeing that a vicious dog had chased the girl.

Shaken and in tears, Fatema declared she was done leaving the house before dawn to make the two-hour journey to school. Masuma comforted her daughter, but told her if she quit, it would simply confirm to doubters among their neighbors and extended family that girls and education don’t mix.

She endured, suffering the psychological aftermath: “You want to peel your skin off so you can wash it.” She was ready for the next attack, too. When a man roughly fondled her through the thin fabric of the seat bottom on a bus bound for school, she spun and smacked him across the face. What would be a gutsy move on the D.C. Metro could have gone very badly in provincial Afghanistan. She avoided a potentially violent response when the other passengers instead forced her off the bus, shouting, “Whore!”

Fatema was partway through high school and Marzia was just starting at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul when the family of the would-be husband appeared in order to plan the marriage their mother had approved years earlier. Marzia again refused, sparking a tense family showdown.

It was ended by Sayed Hosseini, a low-key man of little education who had lost the family’s savings in a real estate scam upon their return from Iran, plunging the Hosseinis into near-poverty. He’d since habitually deferred to his dynamic wife as the family’s tactician, but now he spoke up, citing his mother’s unhappy arranged marriage. If Marzia wanted to opt out of the tradition, he declared, no one would force it upon her. The same, he added, held for Fatema, whose marriage to a cousin had been pending.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m free’—the door was open for the future,” says Marzia, who today works with refugees in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the Salvation Army and is engaged to be married on her own terms. “It set an example for Fatema, too. She knew she had choices, and she could say no and be taken seriously.”

Nearly 10 years after arriving in Afghanistan from Iran, Hosseini left for Chittagong, Bangladesh, where she’d received a scholarship to study computer science at Asian Women’s University. She’d withdrawn from the prestigious Kabul University, which she’d quickly soured on after being herded into an economics major, partly for gender reasons, and sharing cramped quarters with a roommate who insulted Hazara people and bullied her.

Compared to tense Kabul, where Taliban terror attacks were intensifying, Bangladesh was a warm hug. “I was there five years and never once called out” for gender, race or religion, she says.

She graduated in 2018 and started a fellowship at a climate-focused nonprofit in the capital, Dhaka, developing friends and feeling secure for the first time working in the presence of unrelated men. Then her life in Bangladesh ended.

Her mother, caring for Fatema’s ailing grandfather while pursuing her own deferred university studies in Herat, collapsed with a leaking blood vessel in her skull. Marzia had won a college scholarship in the United States, and Fatema told her not to surrender it.

So she returned home, and after her mother’s condition stabilized, needed a job. Intrigued by the thought of exploring the confusing currents in Afghan society that had buffeted her and her family, Hosseini accepted an entry-level position at Kabul Now in January 2019.

She interviewed people from across political and ethnic spectrums for her stories, and began working as a freelancer for USA Today, which needed local reporters to augment its coverage of the coming end of the U.S.-led Global War on Terror. Her journalism career was gaining traction as her country sank beneath the relentless Taliban advance.

TEMPORARY REFUGE
She fled hatred and intolerance as her parents had done before her birth. Now she vowed to bring them and her siblings out as well.