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A Different Kind Of Daughter

A Different Kind Of Daughter

Author:Raphael

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Introduction
For every woman and child of war and oppression the world over, struggling to play and learn in peace. May these pages help to light your dark paths to freedom...They send girls like me to the crazy house—or simply stone us to death. Lucky girls might get married off to a rival clan, in the hope of tainting the tribe’s blood. I am the product of one of those punitive tribal marriages. In a sentence meant to damn them both, my maverick mother married my renegade father having never laid eyes on him until their wedding. The tribal elders did not foresee the instant love match or the combined force of my parents’ courage and shared ideals. They certainly did not foresee me. And they could not stop our brazen family of Pashtun rebels from multiplying. Even among my own, I was considered a different kind of daughter. I hated dolls, was miserable wearing fancy dresses, and rejected anything remotely feminine. My ambition would never come to life in a kitchen, or flourish within the four walls of our home. Just to stay sane, I needed to be outside, under the open sky and running free—the very thing that tribal law forbade.
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Contents

Breathtaking mountain chains framed my childhood home, a boundless vista

known only as “the Abode of God.” They were massive daggers of rock, full

of light the color of fire. Nestled between the peaks, hidden in soft pockets,

flowed rivers edged with villages made of mud and stone. And above it all, a

big blue dome of clear sky stretched out with no end. Across the valleys,

where corn grew and sheep grazed, there was sometimes no human in sight.

No sound. A person could walk for days across the plains and not see a soul

and yet feel God’s touch everywhere.

For me, that quiet and beautiful land is heaven. Still, when the world thinks

of my home, they envision an outpost of hell. South Waziristan is one of the

Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northwest Pakistan, but in reality it

governs itself through an ancient system of tyrannical tribal laws. Ax-shaped,

its 2,500 square miles of territory cut into the lawless and blood-soaked

border of Afghanistan, and it is the present-day headquarters of the Taliban.

My native land is considered the most dangerous place on earth, but it lives in

my mind as the tribal home I would go back to without a second thought if I

could—if no one there wanted me dead.

In the afternoons of my childhood, a steady breeze blew and the dancing

gusts shifted from warm to cool and back again. But as the weather changed,

before a storm or as the seasons slid one into the next, a new wind would

steal over the mountains, rushing through the peaks with long strips of cloud

and wrapping the ranges as though in thick reams of gauze. The nameless

foreign scents and, as I imagined, whole invisible worlds carried on that

sweet wind dared my mind to roam far beyond our quiet place between the

mountains.

That same breeze blew on the day I was born, November 22, 1990, in a

village like all the others, quiet and small, an insignificant speck nestled in a

wide green valley. My mother, Yasrab, was twenty-six years old and had no

help in giving birth to me—not a hospital or a doctor, and no medication of ny kind. Neighboring women came and went with cups of cool water, quick

whispers, and strips of clean cloth. Men left to pray at the mosque, eat

mangoes picked from the wild groves, suck on sugar cubes, and stayed well

away. The birthing room was kept dark and no one could hear a sound

through the locked door. When it was over, it would not really matter to the

clan whether my first cries were hearty or whimpering, or if I was born alive

or dead. I came into this world like my sister, Ayesha Gulalai, four years

before me—a girl, a blemish on the face of our tribe.

My father, Shams Qayyum Wazir, not yet thirty himself, was a liberated

man of noble blood, which meant that he was a renegade among Pashtun

men. Shams never once made my sister and me feel inferior to our brother,

Taimur Khan, who was born five years before me, or to the twin boys,

Sangeen Khan and Babrak Khan, who came as a double blessing when I was

four. Unlike in other Pashtun families, where the females were subservient to

the males, we all lived within our large mud-brick home as carefree equals.

Together, we adhered to our Muslim faith, observing feasts and fasts and

praying five times each day, but my father taught us that people the world

over found many ways to reach God. My family were freethinkers, and it was

that quality that would eventually make us outcasts within our conservative

tribe, at the same time as it liberated us.

*

Every inhabitant of Waziristan, North and South, is known as a Wazir; but

Wazir is also a name that refers to a sprawling Pashtun tribe among the many

that exist in our region, connected by the same Pashto tongue and governed

by our Pashtunwali code of honor, the ancestral laws that settle our many

blood feuds and rivalries. Though the Wazir are splintered into clans, we

come together as one at the hint of a foreign threat. No outside power,

however mighty, whatever their modern weaponry, has ever succeeded in

subduing the Wazir, or even occupied our ancient territory for a single day.

British imperialists, with their experience in conquering and colonizing,

unleashed legions of soldiers in uniform over the heart of Waziristan, only to

encounter fearless Wazir warriors who forced them back, massacring four

hundred British soldiers in a single afternoon, as my father once told me with

great smiling pride. To a guest in their home, Pashtuns will offer up their

every precious possession, but insult them once and they’ll have your severed..head in a sack before you so much as blink.

During my childhood, I saw no people but those of my blood, whom I

could recognize from just a glance. Even if they could get there, tourists

never visited my small thicketed-away portion of the world. Foreigners

wouldn’t manage a step onto our land before catching every dark Wazir eye.

Wazir people are heavyset and tall, with strong limbs and powerful wide

hands. In protecting their own, Wazir women are fearless, and their voices

thunder up and shake from deep inside their bodies. They used to say that

when a Wazir woman spoke, you had better listen. According to one legend,

our people are descendants of a famous Pashtun leader called Suleiman and

his son, Wazir. From their progeny, many tribes flourished and spread out in

vast human tributaries, consuming masses of land where they settled.

On a map, Waziristan appears like a patch sewn to the tattered edges of

Pakistan and straddling the Afghan frontier across the Preghal mountain

range. Shared bloodlines and an interwoven past, which began in the ancient

valleys of Afghanistan, spill across the border straight through the Khyber

Pass, part of the Silk Road. No boundary carved into stony ground by any

man with the muzzle of a rifle, or painted onto paper with the blood of

thousands, could ever cut deep enough to tear apart the tapestry of our

common lineage. Everywhere I went, my land, my people, my father

reminded me that I was a full-blooded Wazir. I am Wazir before all else.

Every memory I have of our first house, with its mud-covered pucca

bricks, begins the same way: a slow film opening in the silent morning, warm

sunshine thick over everything. In my home there seemed to be a magic in

the way the day was born, though it was always the same routine, like a

family anthem of activity playing out in every home and in every village. All

Pashtun mothers woke very early, before the first crow of the rooster. A tribal

mother required no alarm or even much forethought to go about her day. Her

duty—to set in motion the rhythm of the family—was as sacred and inborn a

task as the beating of her heart, and its momentum pried open her eyes,

however tired she might have been from the tedious domestic labor of the

previous day. In everything a Wazir mother did, she followed in the long,

rutted path of the mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers who

came before her. She was permitted no other way. She had no access to

television or newspapers or magazines, and even radios were scarce.

Knowledge itself was a stranger, not to be trusted—or even invited in.

I grew up with the accepted practice that a Pashtun woman remained in the home and only ventured out enveloped in head-to-toe garments called abayas

or burqas, or big shawls called chadors and with a male—even just a young

boy—watching at her side. To confine a woman in such a way—duty-bound

between four walls and hidden away inside her clothes—was known as

having her live in purdah, the conservative Muslim custom of secluding

women so that they may not be seen by men. This practice was never

questioned, in the same way a person would never question the direction of

the wind or the rising and setting of the sun. To outsiders, such a tradition

seemed like imprisonment, but to me, at least at that time, the women never

seemed unhappy dressed that way. There was a simple harmony in knowing

what we were all meant to do, where we all belonged. And we did belong—

to our station in the home and to our family’s position within the tribe. I

believed this until I stopped belonging.

I always imagined my mother’s waking imbued a living spirit into

everyone who woke after her—my father, my sister, my brothers, even me.

Before she rose to face her day, there was nothing at all but an infinite void:

no sky, no ground, no river, no spooned-out mountain valley to see. My

mother’s rising seemed to set the sun alight, just as she piled up wood and lit

the fires for cooking and fanned the smoke.

All through our mud house my family stirred in their dark, cool rooms that

smelled of earth, waking one after the other. For the good of the home, which

often contained several multigenerational families, Wazir mothers all rose

first and, like a gentle echo, the children next. Men, like long-slumbering

beasts, were always last to rouse. The younger men looked after the older

ones, shaving their leathery, time-creased faces and tending to their clothes

and hair. In Waziristan, many people lived in huge houses, walled-in

compounds with extended families all living together under a single roof—

aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, and, of course, the children. The

family always built the house together, and everyone had a position in its

hierarchy—the elders at the top—as though the family were a machine, each

person a moving part.

Even the birds, which we revered, had a special place among us. We

removed a single pucca brick from the wall of our front porch so that a

pigeon could make its nest there, and one always came and perched, finding

its place among us by some instinct that I never understood. Someone always

had the duty to break up the hard leftover bread into tiny pieces and feed it to

the bird so that it would stay.home and only ventured out enveloped in head-to-toe garments called abayas

or burqas, or big shawls called chadors and with a male—even just a young

boy—watching at her side. To confine a woman in such a way—duty-bound

between four walls and hidden away inside her clothes—was known as

having her live in purdah, the conservative Muslim custom of secluding

women so that they may not be seen by men. This practice was never

questioned, in the same way a person would never question the direction of

the wind or the rising and setting of the sun. To outsiders, such a tradition

seemed like imprisonment, but to me, at least at that time, the women never

seemed unhappy dressed that way. There was a simple harmony in knowing

what we were all meant to do, where we all belonged. And we did belong—

to our station in the home and to our family’s position within the tribe. I

believed this until I stopped belonging.

I always imagined my mother’s waking imbued a living spirit into

everyone who woke after her—my father, my sister, my brothers, even me.

Before she rose to face her day, there was nothing at all but an infinite void:

no sky, no ground, no river, no spooned-out mountain valley to see. My

mother’s rising seemed to set the sun alight, just as she piled up wood and lit

the fires for cooking and fanned the smoke.

All through our mud house my family stirred in their dark, cool rooms that

smelled of earth, waking one after the other. For the good of the home, which

often contained several multigenerational families, Wazir mothers all rose

first and, like a gentle echo, the children next. Men, like long-slumbering

beasts, were always last to rouse. The younger men looked after the older

ones, shaving their leathery, time-creased faces and tending to their clothes

and hair. In Waziristan, many people lived in huge houses, walled-in

compounds with extended families all living together under a single roof—

aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, and, of course, the children. The

family always built the house together, and everyone had a position in its

hierarchy—the elders at the top—as though the family were a machine, each

person a moving part.

Even the birds, which we revered, had a special place among us. We

removed a single pucca brick from the wall of our front porch so that a

pigeon could make its nest there, and one always came and perched, finding

its place among us by some instinct that I never understood. Someone always

had the duty to break up the hard leftover bread into tiny pieces and feed it to

the bird so that it would stay.In my village, every child had a simple task to complete. The girls always

looked after the youngest children before they themselves could eat breakfast.

Some walked with big buckets fully half their height to the stream that

wandered in a silver thread, bubbling with cool water, past the village. I

sometimes ran with my metal bucket, banging it with a broken stick, dry dust

from the hot ground swarming around my sandal-clad feet. In the high white

sun of summer afternoons, we went to the mountain stream in small,

chattering groups and jumped into the rippling water. Lotus-like flowers

adorned the surface, floating like delicate teacups.

By the time I came back to our house with the full bucket, heavy and

spilling over, my mother would already have finished preparing a breakfast

yogurt drink, made from churning fresh milk inside a barrel. There was the

smell of fresh naan bread, chopped mint, steaming pots of black tea. As soon

as the last men arose, the entire family assembled, the children all happy and

loud. The fathers sat quietly on silk mats against the walls. The women

moved among the group, slipping between sitting bodies like the stream into

whose cold current I’d just lowered my bucket, serving fresh, simple food,

such as small bowls of sliced fruit—all of us in the big warm kitchen that was

the heart of our house.

But the thing I loved best of all about morning in Waziristan was a quiet

ceremony that unfolded the moment I handed over the fresh water, having

played my part, which I think of now almost as a sacred duty. With this

water, my mother would dampen the earthen floor of our home, dunking her

hands in the bucket and letting big silver drops rain down with quick flicks of

her fingertips. Once the ground drank in the cool mountain water and it

softened, she would sweep and tamp it down, releasing a sweet, clean

fragrance from the moist clay. The soft perfume rose and traveled through

our house, its invisible beauty telling everyone that the long day had begun.

But before I was old enough to know that anything existed beyond our

idyll, we would have to leave it. My family moved out of that sprawling

house with its big airy rooms, far away from the hard-minded certainty.