PINKtank

OFF THE SHELF: ZOYA’S STORY: AN AFGHAN WOMAN’S STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM

Zoya's gripping memoir opens with her donning the burqa in stifling heat to cross the border at a Taliban checkpoint, returning to Afghanistan after five years as a refugee in Pakistan. She is smuggling RAWA literature documenting atrocities committed by Taliban militants, and will surely die if this is discovered. But as a woman, her burqa and a decoy male relative are the only passports required. The screen chafes her eyelids, and she can see neither ground nor sky. A fitting introduction to the woman called Zoya, pillar of the Jamiat-e Inqalabi Zanan-e Afghanistan (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, or RAWA).

OFF THE SHELF: LOVE AND WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

Love and War in Afghanistan by Gulchin Gulmamadova-Klaits & Alex Klaits (Seven Stories Press, 2005). It’s hard to imagine arranged marriage if your culture does not practice it. It may be equally hard to imagine spending your honeymoon in two northern provinces of Afghanistan, collecting love stories from the field. But that is precisely what [...]

OFF THE SHELF: INVISIBLE HISTORY, AFGHANISTAN’S UNTOLD STORY