HOMEIRA QADERI

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Published Books

"Homeira Qaderi: After Afghanistan was surrendered to the Taliban, the first question the foreign media asked me was why we didn’t fight for ourselves. I told them that they have neither read the stories of the battles we fight nor have they wanted to see the defense of the ideals we fight for.

My memoir is the story of an Afghan woman’s struggle to fight for the rights that she considers inherently her inalienable human rights. My human rights have nothing to do with the East or the West.

Every Afghan girl is a soldier on the battlefield of women’s rights she is born with. I have also fought this battle since—it seems forever. I have been defeated many times because laws are written for the benefit of men, because the culture is misogynistic, because traditions are strict, because… However, after each failure, I have risen and continued more confidently because I realized that the journey is long and the battle must be fought."

"At the heart of this moving memoir is an aching sadness. Qaderi’s story is punctuated by letters to her son, Siawash, “snatched out of my arms” at only 19 months old. As the book’s subtitle attests, this is her desperate bid to tell Siawash their story and how she’s been “live-buried” by those around him.

“Losing you was the most severe pain I have ever suffered and I know you must be very, very angry,” she writes in one letter, referring to her Sophie’s choice, the details of which I won’t spell out here. “I always have and always will want to be a mother for you, but I also need to be Homeira for myself.”"

"Of all the indignities and tragedies Homeira Qaderi and her family endured when the Taliban seized Herat, Afghanistan, the most poignant to read about is her father’s ritual of hiding the family’s books. The Taliban were searching houses for guns, televisions and nonreligious reading material, so he wrapped their cherished library in plastic, placed the bundle in an iron box and buried it under a mulberry tree in the backyard. As Qaderi’s grandfather said when he placed a volume of poetry atop the stack, “We haven’t survived this long so that we die now for a bundle of papers.”

For three years, Qaderi’s father unearthed the books every spring and spread them out to dry in the sunlight before returning them to their hiding place for another cycle of seasons. When he realized his daughter was a budding author, he switched locations, saying, “The girl who writes must read stories. I will hide the books in the cellar.”"