#MyVoiceIsNotForbidden

Written By The Gender Security Project

Source: X

Under the Taliban regime, women and girls in Afghanistan have faced significant setbacks to their rights and safety. The rise of violence targeting women and girls has also been accompanied by a steady increase in global calls for holding the Taliban accountable for gender apartheid. Women and girls have been prevented from accessing education, healthcare, and employment opportunities, and overt violence has escalated significantly.

Backing such violence with laws and policies, the Taliban has recently published new restrictions, (through 35 Articles spread across 114 pages) on women to promote virtue and to combat vices. One of these rules prevents women from singing or reading out loud in public, and states that their voices should not be heard beyond the walls of their homes (Kassam, 2024). The new laws also force women to wear thick clothes covering their bodies and faces in public, and makes it punishable for them to look directly at any men they are not related to by blood or marriage. Failure to comply can result in detention and severe penal consequences.

The new laws have emerged against a backdrop of deep-seated gender discrimination where the Taliban has steadily evaded women’s rights since 2021 (UN Women, 2024). More recently, the Taliban has claimed that it will resume stoning women to death for adultery.

Raising voices, resisting violence

Resisting the Taliban's moral policing, women across Afghanistan began pushing back. They sang songs, recorded themselves doing so, and uploaded these videos online in defiance of a decree that tried to erase them from the public sphere. The videos show the women singing outdoors, loudly, in defiance of the restrictive law that sought to silence them.

The songs they chose carry lyrics of rebellion, protest, and strength. For instance (Abbasi, 2024):

Here we are, the women, the world,
Singing freedom like a bird
Rise up, my people,
Rise up, my friend.
Their boots might be on my neck.
Or their fists to my face.
But with our deep light inside
I will fight through this night.

One woman stood outdoors and recorded herself singing, and another woman dressed in black from head to toe, keeping her face concealed by a long veil as she sang. In other videos, women sang alone or in small groups. Some also used hashtags like #NoToTaliban and #MyVoiceIsNotForbidden.

Following their videos, Afghan women around the world joined in, posting videos of themselves singing in solidarity, to demonstrate their resistance to the restrictive laws that strive to silence them.

This initiative, however, is not new. In 2021, the movement began with two sisters uploading a video of themselves singing, dressed in blue burkas to conceal their identities, on social media, through an initiative they called "The Last Torch" (Khamoosh, 2024). They released their first video in August 2021, shortly after the troop withdrawal. With time, the duo released a range of other songs, including the following famous poem by Nadia Anjuman, who wrote a piece in protest against the Taliban during its takeover in 1996 (Khamoosh, 2024):

              How can I speak of honey when my mouth is filled with poison?
Alas my mouth is smashed by a cruel fist…
Oh for the day that I break the cage,
Break free from this isolation and sing in joy.

Resisting with Agency

Through this campaign, Afghan women have strived to use "the weapon they used against us" to "fight back against their restrictions" (Khamoosh, 2024). These efforts have evoked a tremendous response from all over the world. On the one hand, the campaign itself has gathered steam across Afghanistan and is continuing on full steam ahead. Another major outcome was the global impact as more and more women from the Diaspora have also begun to respond with videos of their own. Effectively, this accomplished exactly what the Taliban did not want. The Taliban, for its part, has released videos of its ranks burning musical instruments and arresting and parading musicians. It has also intensified its crackdowns, banning rallies and arresting those who defy the ban.

Even as Western nations with dubious records on gender equity and justice campaign to push for the Taliban to be held to account for gender apartheid, the women of Afghanistan have clearly asserted that their goal of holding the Taliban to account is entirely their own to frame, articulate, and pursue. Afghan women have stepped up to subvert a system that continues to try to silence and oppress them, using the very tools that the oppressor wanted to erase. They not only assert their agency in the protests and their approach to their protests, but also drive their idea of liberation for themselves.

References

 

The Gender Security Project
Next

Building Sustainable Futures with Camu Camu: The Women of ASMUCOTAR