My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban - A Young Woman's Story

Latifa

ISBN 10: 0753115344 ISBN 13: 9780753115343

Publisher: ISIS Audio Books, 2002

Synopsis

Latifa was born into an educated middle-class Afghan family in Kabul in 1980. She dreamed of one day becoming a journalist and was interested in fashion, movies and friends. Then in September 1996, Taliban soldiers seized power in Kabul. Her school was closed and from that moment she became a prisoner in her own home at just 16. Latifa was now forced to wear a chadri.

With painful honesty and clarity Latifa describes the way she watched her world falling apart, in the name of a fanatical interpretation of a faith that she could not comprehend. Her voice captures a lost innocence, but also echoes her determination to live in freedom and hope.

Earlier this year, Latifa and her parents escaped Afghanistan with the help of a French-based Afghan resistance group.

About this title

Review:

My Forbidden Face frames a fragment of Afghanistan's bloody history through the eyes of its author, Latifa. Now 22, Latifa was 16 when the Taliban seized power in 1996. Overnight, Afghani women were stripped of their aspirations, their pleasures and their freedom. She describes the sudden change that transformed her home into her prison and her clothes into symbols of shame in evocative yet matter-of-fact tones. The facts are familiar to us from countless articles and petitions but reading them here in a personal account brings home the state of abject fear Afghani women had to adjust to as the new reality of their lives. Every day Radio Sharia, the Taliban's mouthpiece, would broadcast harsh new decrees to bind the confines of peoples' lives ever tighter. The severest restrictions were reserved for women: they were forbidden to go out unaccompanied by a male relative--which meant poor widows risked beatings and even death, they were forbidden to work or to go to school and even forbidden health care--since that would have meant being treated by a man. From being an educated, outgoing girl who dreamed of becoming a journalist, Latifa was plunged into sickness and depression. But somehow, this timid--and by Western standards--sheltered girl, finds the enormous courage to start running a "school" in her living room--just as her mother, a nurse runs an illicit surgery for women from their home. This combination of naivety and worldliness makes Latifa's voice extremely poignant. My Forbidden Face is a powerful, readable little book you will want to absorb in one gulp. Not only does it give a voice to the nameless sufferings of so many but its bravery and determination are inspiring lessons to us all. --Rebecca Johnson

Review:

Her descriptions of watching videos in secret, listening to the radio in terror lest she be caught and hovering on the edge of a black hole of depression during what should have been the liveliest years of her life give a very human face to the known facts of how the most repressive government on the planet operated. (IRISH INDEPENDENT)

A salutary read for any Western woman, and one that makes you appreciate the freedoms we often take for granted. (GLAMOUR)

A poweful and poetic account of life under the Taliban. (DAILY TELEGRAPH)

This thoughtful and affecting account...questions the complacency of Western feminism which has forgotten the many women across the world who still have nothing. (DAILY MAIL)

About this edition

• Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0753115344
• ISBN 13: 9780753115343
• Binding: Audio Cassette