Afghanistan is a very different country from the United States, but there’s one sentiment that should resonate with native-born Americans and immigrants alike: parents want their children to have it better than they did, and are willing to make sacrifices to their own welfare to make that happen. By that standard, Hawa’s life is a success: she may have been denied the opportunity to attend school and been forced into marriage at age 13 with a man 30 years her senior, but her daughter Najiba Noori became a journalist and made a movie about her mother’s life. That film, Writing Hawa, offers an insider’s view of ordinary life in Afghanistan before and after the Taliban takeover, with a particular focus on the lives of women and girls.
Writing Hawa is an intimate film, spending much of its running time in the basic but comfortable living room of Hawa’s Kabul household, which includes several of her six adult children and their kids as well as her husband, who has dementia and requires near-constant attention. People lounge on cushions, eat, watch TV, and discuss life—and it’s Hawa that keeps it all running. The filmmaking is basic but effective, conveying a sense of daily life in a country that’s often in the headlines for geopolitical reasons.
At age 56, after spending most of her life living for other people, Hawa has two ambitions: she wants to learn to read and write, and she wants to start her own business. To facilitate the first, she buys children’s textbooks and a whiteboard and practices with the assistance of her children and grandchildren. For the second, her idea is to create fashionable clothing incorporating traditional Afghan embroidery, and to find the right artisans she travels to remote areas of the country and haggles with the women who do this intricate, detailed, work.
As if that weren’t enough for one person to manage, Hawa also takes in her 12-year-old granddaughter Zahra, who ran away from her abusive father. There’s a bit of danger involved in taking the child in, since the father was granted custody when Hawa’s daughter Fatima divorced him, but Hawa agrees to care for her until she reaches the age of 18, hoping to give her the advantages she herself never enjoyed—like going to school, getting a job, and choosing her own husband.
Then comes the announcement that American troops will withdraw from the country. The Taliban promises they won’t impose restrictions on women, but if you believe that promise I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might like to buy. After the American withdrawal, Writing Hawa often feels like a science fiction movie, projecting a sense of impending doom as Hawa’s family monitors news reports of the Taliban’s advances in the way movie character might be helplessly waiting for the arrival of zombies or space aliens or people infected with the rage virus.
Had Najiba Noori not been able to leave the Afghanistan for France, we wouldn’t be watching this film. She left in a rush, not even able to say good-bye to her mother, and entrusts the continuation of the filming to her brother Ali. Hawa doesn’t mince words when giving her opinion of the Taliban: “It’s a blessing she could escape those braindead monsters. They’re a bunch of uneducated savages, those sons of bitches.”
Meanwhile, evidence pointing to the advance of the Taliban is evident everywhere: billboards have women’s faces painted out, girls’ schools are closed, and television broadcasts air sentiments along the lines of “Our women do not need European-style women’s rights. European feminism uses women’s rights as an excuse to force women to go naked, thereby exposing them to rape and violence.” If you’re tempted to think “that sounds reasonable” just try reversing the genders and see how you would think about a world in which women have the unilateral power to determine what rights men need. | Sarah Boslaugh
Writing Hawa is available for streaming on Icarus Films.
