Rahul Singh
While consuming it, we rarely think about the circumstances under which art is created. The context is always taken for granted, lost either to the sheer volume of consumption or to our indifference to matters that don’t directly affect us. Even the people who are interested in the process of creation somehow make certain basic assumptions without ever articulating them—of course, the writer’s preoccupation must be with the routine of writing, or with enhancing their productivity, or with thinking only about sentences and words, and so on. What about the writers or artists to whom these preoccupations sound alien because of the conditions they are forced to live in? For them, the sheer act of creation becomes more than a practice of craft. In her interview, the artist Atina Sultani mentions the word “preserve” a few times. For example, she says, “It is my way to preserve memory, resist silence, and tell stories that were never written or read.” With a collection of Afghan women’s writing, Usawa Literary Review, in a special issue, have made a remarkable attempt to “preserve” some of the art coming out of this region, taken over by a regime that treats its women worse than anywhere else on the planet. The collection is brought together and edited by guest editor Shikha Sawhney Lamba. Titled “We Are Here: Writings by Afghan Women”, it was published under Matchbox by Usawa in September 2025.
This collection consists of reviews, interviews, original artworks, poems, and short stories. There are also first-person accounts of women who have lost something or someone. These pieces tell familiar stories of hope and despair but written by people for whom these are more than mere concepts. These women writers have a real stake in hope; they suffer in the most literal sense of the word. This is where the pieces in this collection derive their strength from. It is both heart-wrenching and heart-warming to go through them. Heart-wrenching because of the condition they are written in, and heart-warming because at least these stories are getting written.
The parts I liked the most in the collection are the conversations with the artists and writers. The way they talk about their work is reassuring. If it can make an indifferent reader feel some hope, one can only imagine what the act of creating must mean to these women artists. To quote Atina Sultani again: “My ideas often come from the world around me: conversations with my mother, the pain my loved ones endure, the news, feelings of helplessness in the face of injustice, and the uncertainty of an unclear future.” It would not be presumptuous to say that most of what we read in this collection has its origins in places where the artists finds their inspiration from. There is also Nadia Hashimi who writes: “Stories flow best when I can hear and see the characters in my head, when it feels more like I’m witnessing than creating.” It is a profound statement on the nature of stories. Easy it might sound to people like us, witnessing must be a harrowing experience for Afghan women. And to craft this witnessing into stories, I’m sure, would take more than literary skills. It is accounts like these that bring to light how the artists and writers from troubled regions are thinking about their vocation.
Why are these accounts important? Why should a male reader leading a comfortable life in a modern city be bothered about the writings of women coming out of Afghanistan? Because most of what we get to read about this region concerns geopolitics and hence, is hardly human. There is enough literature available that argues and counter-argues the presence of the Taliban regime. There is enough geopolitical sludge one wades one’s way through in the pages of newspapers. The grand geopolitical narratives must necessarily resort to grand abstractions, like the nation-state for example. What they lack is the nuance of lives lived by the most repressed section of the society. This nuance can only be captured and communicated through individual voices.
Usawa has performed an important task by bringing out some of these voices. In a small way, they have inverted the gaze from top-down to bottom-up. For this, they need to be congratulated.
Guest-edited by Shikha Sawhney Lamba, “We Are Here: Writings by Afghan Women” can be accessed here.
Rahul Singh is a data analyst and lives in Bengaluru. He runs a weekly newsletter called ‘Mehfil.’ His work has been published in Usawa Literary Review, The Hooghly Review, The Pine Cone Review, and Indian Review.
Cover artwork by Angela Gulistani
