Afghan Women, Mourning, & Learning

I'm trying to hold two reactions in balance as the Taliban reinstate regressive gender norms in Afghanistan: 

Pain and mourning for Afghan women and girls

&

A refusal to see Afghan women as powerless victims apart from U.S. military aid, and a refusal to merely assume the posture of a sympathizing onlooker.

Afghan women ought not experience this gut-wrenching reversal of human rights and opportunity. But, like oppressed women throughout history and throughout the world, we can expect (and have already seen) powerful, creatives uses of agency in the face of evil. It is there, and has been there, military aid or not. The point of this insight isn't to legitimize what is happening. Far from it. The point is to keep myself from diminishing the full humanity and power of victims, to avoid falling into the rhythm of passive sympathy and pity and, instead, to embrace the rhythm of one who is taught and convicted by the situation. 

For example, the resilience and courage of Afghan women can be see in their efforts to create underground schools for girls in regions occupied by the Taliban before the recent takeover. The courage and grit of oppressed women never ceases to humble and change me. That's right: it changes me. I mourn and I learn––I mourn gender injustice and I learn a bit about justice-seeking. I'm infuriated and I'm invited––I'm infuriated by the loss but I'm invited to be something more than an onlooker living a morally dull but internally pious life. I am angered and I am humbled––I'm angered by the oppression and by the U.S.'s mishandling of the situation, and yet I'm humbled by my checkered history of shallow concern for women's liberation (worse: my complicity in their harm).

So there's the tension. Mourning victims without being changed by their courage and grit fails to honor them in their full humanity. And it allows me to get away with sympathetic onlooking. Victims are not merely victims, though. They are agents capable of shaking the world, shaking their oppressors, and shaking the world's onlookers out of moral complacency and self-righteousness....And, yet, they are still human beings under the weight of deep evil, enduring horrendous suffering. Learning from oppressed people's moral courage without sitting in the agony of their oppression can easily become educational objectification. 

So I'm trying to sit with the tension: mourning and learning, infuriation and invitation, anger and humility.

Picture by Jovana Nesic