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).
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
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