Secret Sewing Club, Powerful Words: Her Stories Ignite Hope in a Broken World. ✨
Read, Listen, Play & learn about Homeira Qaderi's arty refugee experience 🎮
Click here to play & learn.
Back Story
‘What alternative is there for writers and poets in Afghanistan except to write?’ asks Homeira Qaderi, Afghan-born activist, writer and academic. For Qaderi, to write means to immortalise her experiences as a woman both living under the Taliban regime and as a refugee looking back towards those still living within its borders. Her work asks readers to consider impossible questions and understand a situation that may seem alien and unimaginable to a Western literary audience. How would you choose between living with your child and living in personal freedom? What happens when your home becomes unrecognisable? Homeira’s harrowingly personal but beautifully crafted novels pose these questions towards her readers in a commendable campaign for empathy towards the refugee experience.
Homeira Qaderi grew up in Herat, Afghanistan, during the Russian occupation of her home country. She was born into an educated family, with her mother as an artist herself and her father as a teacher, both of whom instilled a deep appreciation for learning. Her childhood culture of education became a foundation for her later pursuits as an author and advocate.
The privilege of learning and understanding would come under threat when the Taliban rule came to Afghanistan in 1996. Aged only 13, Qaderi faced the harsh reality that education for Afghan girls is undergoing erasure. Determined not to be subjected to systemic ignorance, in an act of defiance, she took part in undercover literature classes for herself and other girls in her town, teaching them in secret under the guise of a needlework group known as the ‘golden needle sewing class’. This act of courage allowed books of Persian literature to become a symbol of rebellion and personal agency, marking the beginning of Qaderi’s lifelong mission to use art as a means to fight for women's rights and education in Afghanistan.
Qaderi’s writing and literature are deeply rooted in her real-life experiences, particularly in the two instances in which she was forced to flee her home country. The first, documented in her heart-wrenching memoir Dancing in the Mosque, followed an unprecedented divorce from her husband, an event that led to the painful decision to leave her young son behind in order to escape. After obtaining a bachelor's, master's and doctorate in Persian literature, she returned to Afghanistan, only to face another forced departure during the Taliban’s resurgence in August 2021. She was among the last civilians evacuated from Kbul on a military flight, a moment that marked yet another turning point in her life once she left and took up residents in the US. Despite these adversities, Homeira’s unwavering resilience shines through in her artwork. ‘I have risen and continued more confidently because I realised that the journey is long and the battle must be fought’, opting to channel her writing into promoting long-term change for Afghan women. She believes that by sharing her experiences, she can encourage readers to empathise with and understand the struggles of Afghan women, even if they are oceans away.
Living in the United States, Qaderi has undertaken an accomplished academic career as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, writing about the experiences of young women under Taliban rule. However, her pursuits as a fiction and nonfiction writer have allowed her name and story to reach a wide array of audiences in the literary sphere, bringing the stories of Afghan women and families to the public eye.
Unable to watch gross social injustice rp through her homeland unnoticed, Homeira’s writing is both a political statement and an entrancing call for awareness, demanding attention to the oppression facing Afghans under Taliban rule.
Homeira’s debut novel ‘Noqra, daughter of the Kabul River’ was released in 2009. Narrated by ‘Eqlima’, the story moves through seven women working in a royal palace kitchen, detailing what led them to this position and how they plan to move towards a hopeful future. Eqlima is the illegitimate daughter of the titular ‘Noqra’, who is expelled from her family as a result of the scandal. Finding solace among the other women of the kitchen, Eqlima and her counterparts exemplify Qaderi’s key themes of resilience and female solidarity, which remain at the forefront of her artwork.
Perhaps Homeria’s best-known work is her memoir, Dancing in a mosque: Letters from an Afghan Mother to Her Son. The work provides an intimate look into her childhood, using personal memories structured around letters to explain to her son why she was forced to leave her behind. The memoir becomes a personal letter and a vessel for understanding the impossible choices faced by women under the oppressive regime.
The book’s title comes from a powerful memory in the third chapter, where Homeira describes dancing in a mosque during a family gathering. Although considered a rather un-becoming sight for a young girl at the time, the memory itself becomes a more significant symbol for Qaderi’s ethos throughout the book, as well as her later activism. The defiance of societal expectation and the prioritisation of personal freedom over compliance with oppression is rife in Qaderi’s artwork, inspiring readers to think critically and act for themselves rather than accepting the ideologies of others.
However, though Qaderi’s works address extensive political discussions about women's rights, personal freedom and the destructive power of war, Dancing in the Mosque is a profoundly human story of a mother and son that encompassed her key themes in a universally recognisable bond. It highlights the impossible decision she had to make: to stay in Afghanistan and endure an oppressive marriage and political climate but be present with her son, or flee and sacrifice their relationship in hopes of a better future in the long term. Her memoirs show readers that escape from oppression and instability is not a sure guarantee of peace, instead, leaving a country often means sleaving with heartbreaking sacrifices and personal guilt.
‘I have always and always will want to be a mother for you, but I also need to be Homeira for myself’, Qaderi writes, highlighting the balance between personal freedom and maternal love and how shocking it is when one finds oneself in a situation where they are incompatible with one another.
To stay and lose everything, or to flee and lose everything but potentially gain even more, qaderi gets to the core of the refugee’s impossible dilemma but uses the medium of the novel to explain her decision to her son and the reader. It is a grand exercise in empathy and a lesson to anyone who believes that fleeing a country is a simple black-and-white decision. Her writing shows that being a refugee is not necessarily a case of leaving a poor situation into an objectively better one if one's flesh and blood must remain on the opposite side of the border.
References
https://homeiraqaderi.com/
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/literature-in-afghanistan-a-dream-gone-to-ruins/
In this post Sophie highlights the arty refugee experience of Homeira Qaderi. She is a citizen journalist on a placement with us organised by Oxford University Career Services. She also organised the micro game to make the journalistic experience interactive.
Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to visit our gift shop here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.
