I Am a Bacha Posh Page 2

  Three years after their marriage, my parents had a son, my older brother, who is still alive. Then, for ten years, a curse fell over the couple. Seven girls and three boys were born under their roof, among them two sets of twins. None of them survived. The only one who lived longer than one year and overcame all the infant maladies drowned six years later.

  My father was a brave man, in his own way. He liked to follow the local customs. Beating his wife was one of them. When the children died at birth, for some weeks or months later, he would take his grief out on my mother and beat her violently. “Your father is cruel,” she said to me one day in one of her rare moments of defeat and discouragement. I was seven years old, and I did not understand anything. But I already knew that I didn’t want this life, my mother’s life. My mother had lost her parents when she was still a child and then her own babies. Her life was summarized by the loss of her loved ones. She hardly ever talked about her suffering—her fate was to suffer, to be quiet—when we would speak of the past, she would brush the air with the back of her hand “Miserable times . . . don’t ever look at the past, go toward the future, try to have a good life.”

  When I lived through the first day, my father immediately knew I was going to survive. He waited a month, and, watching me get bigger and put on weight in unusual proportions, given the poverty of the land, he used this phrase, which changed the course of my life: “You will be a boy, my girl.” My mother did not oppose, as she also needed a son. My older brother was already ten years old. My parents needed another boy to help provide for the home, run errands, take care of the animals, work the land, do men’s jobs—the jobs they have the right to do. We are Muslim and Pashtun, and there are rules: a woman cannot be seen alone in public; this considerably restricts their range of activities.

  From that moment on, by the will of my parents, my family and my neighbors had to consider me like a brother, to forget that I was born a girl, and to call me Hukomkhan, “the man that gives orders,” and no more by my birth name, Ukmina. If acquaintances came by the house with presents for a girl, my father would decline and say, “This is my son, and not my daughter.” I therefore became Hukomkhan. My father was proud of me. When I was five years old, he put me on his shoulders and walked around the village, making me look like a trophy: I was the long-awaited son. He bought me candy, sweets, chocolate, and beautiful clothes. At eight years old, to reward me for my work, he gave me the most beautiful present that I had ever seen in my life: a bicycle! It was amazing. I got on and admired the way we looked, my bike and me, in a small mirror that I held out at arm’s length. My brother patiently taught me to pedal without losing balance. It was not easy to do on the rocky roads near the village. I was happy! Free. I no longer felt the burden of my difference, because I did not see it.

  In our district, to state that a girl is a boy was nothing exceptional. In the village, there were about fifteen of us dressed like our brothers, in blue shalwar kameez, a long tunic over pants. There were Jania and Sakina, Matgullah, Geengatta, Sharkhamatha, Kamala, and Mamura. Families without sons and without descendants have the right to cross-dress one of their daughters to preserve the family’s honor. It is also said that this can ward off bad luck for the future children: the bad luck being the birth of a girl. One superstition concealed a more pragmatic reason: to dress a girl as a boy allowed them to help the family, because she could work and bring home money.

  Kamala, for example, did not have a brother, but six sisters. It was she who supported the home; she served tea in a shop. Her relatives knew she was a girl, but the customers took her for a boy and found no problem with having their favorite drink served to them by this child whose hair was hidden under a hat and who wore masculine clothing. If Kamala had not made up herself this way, the shop manager would not have hired her: girls did not work—they stayed in the house! Of course, they knew that Kamala was a girl, but because she was disguised this way, the honor was preserved, and all the world was content.

  This is an old tradition in Afghanistan. Everyone knows the story of King Habibullah Khan, who reigned from 1901 to 1919: he modernized the country and brought in Western medicine and initiated many great state reforms. In his palace in Kabul, he had a very modern idea: to guard his harem, he designated one of his daughters to dress in the clothing of a man. Before, there were eunuchs, emasculated and harmless men to look after the women of the emir. He devised a new plan. What’s better than a woman to look after other women? And what’s better than a man’s uniform to direct with authority the king’s mistresses? His youngest daughter therefore took the place of the eunuch until the death of her father, who was killed while out hunting. It is said that afterward, she refused to go back to wearing women’s clothing and ran away under the identity of a man. Nobody ever heard of her again.

  I didn’t know if Kamala was happy in her situation. She didn’t have the choice to tell the truth; I had the impression that she was of those girls who preferred to keep their hair long to publicize their identities more than hiding it, lying. For me, it was not a problem—quite the opposite! I knew that I was a boy deep down inside my heart, and that the destiny of a man awaited me. I do not lie.

  Kamala explained to me one day that I should not get attached to my boy clothes. “When you are ten years old, we will go back to being real girls. My cousin served tea here up until last year, but she is too old now. She wears the veil, and she helps her mother in the house. You will see that you, too, will have to, and you will go back to Ukmina. If not, Allah will punish you, and so will all the mullahs!”

  Kamala was right. I knew well that the majority of girls abandon the masculine clothing around ten years old, but I knew a certain Bibi who could help me keep my appearance as a man. She was the same age as my mother, worked at the market, and she had the strength of a man. Word had it that she had killed someone during a fight about land.

  When we went to the bazaar, I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. She scared me but also intrigued me. I never dared say a word to her. The villagers call these women bakri, a word that means “women without desire,” those who give up marriage to stay near to their parents. Nobody here uses the expression bacha posh, a Dari expression, the language of Kabul.

  Little girls like me make up part of the landscape: there is no specific name designated for us, no label. We are integrated into the community, even if we have a different life.

  At seven years old, when the other girls began to wear a sadar, a simple veil only covering the head, we ran in the mud with the boys. My playmates went to school; my father did not see the use in sending me, since I was a girl. I dreamed of learning to read and write. I watched them leave at dawn; I didn’t not understand why I couldn’t follow them. One night, I took my courage in both hands.

  “Father, why do I not have the right to go to school?”

  “Because there are no schools for girls.”

  “But I am not a girl! I work in the fields like the boys, I guard the sheep in the mountains, I play with them . . . so why can I do everything they can except go to school?”

  “Because it isn’t worth it; you do not need to.”

  The discussion was over for the day. But I came back to it many times, for weeks and months. I was nine years old when my father made up his mind. He took advantage of a particularly cold winter; the activity of the farm had slowed, and he didn’t need me as much.

  “Alright, you can go, but only a few days, and you will make up the lost time very quickly. You will be bored and back at the farm—I am sure of it!”

  In the district, there were no school for girls, but ten kilometers from the village, there was a public establishment that welcomed boys from the nearby areas. The night before my first day of school, I prepared my most beautiful shalwar kameez, the least damaged of the two that I owned. From the frost-covered window, I caught a glimpse of the sky, illuminated by millions of stars. The day would be cool, but beautiful. My father had come to an agreement with the neighbo
r that, when their son passed by, he would take me with him. His name was Manirula, like my grandfather. I liked him; we often went out herding together. He had been going to school since the previous year, and he did not like it. He told me that he wanted to stop going as soon as possible because it bored him. It’s always like this—those who have the chance to do something forbidden to others do not take advantage of it. . . . He did not realize that, for the last year, I watched him leave every morning with envy. Today, I watched him as he passed through the door of his house and made his way toward mine. I hurried to meet him.

  “Salam alaikum, Manirula!”

  “Alaikum salam. So you did it? You convinced your father? You really are the most stubborn person that I know, Hukomkhan!” He was smiling while he said this. I knew that he liked me; we grew up together. I knew that there was no difference between us, between boys and me. He always called me Hukomkhan even though he knew that I was Ukmina, a girl dressed as a boy. Was appearance more important than the truth? Without doubt: because I resembled the other boys, because I did everything to be like them, I was one of them.

  That morning I was proud as we took the path to school. The sun rose timidly behind the mountains. We had to walk an hour and a half at a good pace: we kicked rocks; he sent his flying the farthest. When we arrived in front of the little building that housed the classes, I barely noticed time had passed. I stayed close to Manirula in the class; there were about thirty of us, and I sat by his side on a bench. The others did not pay any attention to me. I did not seem like a girl—the honor was preserved; this was not a problem for anyone. The air was ice cold, there was no heating, but I concentrated on the teacher, who taught us how to count while drawing the numbers on the blackboard. Then it was break time, and he came over to me

  “You are new—where do you come from?”

  “From Dragai.”

  He looked at me for a long time. He understood. He asked me my first name. I told him,

  “Ukmina. But I am called Hukomkhan.”

  He smiled.

  “Welcome, Hukomkhan. But do not give me orders; it is me who makes the rules!”

  I liked school; I really wanted to know how to read and write. There, I came close to that which separated the men from the women in our country: education. Men have the right to learn. I did not understand why this right was refused to girls, why there were so few schools for them. Later, these boys would become men, and they would make it their duty to prevent women from accessing this knowledge. Why should women learn to read, when it would only pervert their minds? Why would they need to write, if only to tell nonsense? And the Pashtun men argued that they must protect the women, to make them respectable. They prohibited them from showing themselves, especially in public places, like schools.

  My mother encouraged me. Every night she made me recount my day at school. She thought about circumventing my terrible fate as a woman. To make a son out of me was to give me the best chances in her eyes: to be educated. But she could not oppose my father. A few weeks later, he forbade me to return to school; it was spring, and there was too much to do in our fields.

  I went back to the way of the pastures. My days started early, at the break of dawn, around 5:00 a.m. After morning prayers, I took the animals out. I met with other children in the village, and we left to spend the day grazing the sheep and cows in the desert or in the mountains, depending on the season. I preferred the mountains; the view was splendid, and we busied ourselves collecting firewood. It was a big responsibility for me to look after the animals, and I dreamed of having a weapon, like the men! In the home of Pashtuns, weapons are for men as jewelry is for women. I chose my faction: I hate jewelry, and I love weapons. As a little girl, I dreamt of pistols and rifles, daggers and sabers. I had no intention of using them, but, in my head as a child, it was the definition of a man! While waiting, I had only a poor stick. I came back at dusk to help my father and brother with different tasks: take out the feed, milk the cows, fix the fence—outdoor and physical work that girls do not do. In the winter, I wove wool, a task reserved for men.

  When it rained or when we came back early from the fields, we sometimes had time to play. They were still children, boys and girls mixed, but already they had different games. The girls played tookay, jacks, haki baki, and hide-and-go-seek. The boys pushed each other to make each other fall down; it was khusay, the game of the little cow. They also enjoyed mardakay, a kind of marble game, except that we didn’t have marbles in our remote, timeless province, so we rolled around little stones by pushing them around with a finger. And, of course, we played soccer. I liked the boys’ games; it’s with them I spent all my free time.

  Every Friday, after the big prayer, we met around the dams. There were plenty of them—the villages dug vast trenches in the soil to hold the rainwater. In the dry season, these reservoirs of water kept the villages alive: the oxen went there to bathe themselves, the women went there to fill their buckets for the kitchen and the laundry, and we went there to bathe and to swim. These were our swimming pools, our lakes, and our joys. It was always a good time there! I swam in these farming waters; I hung from a large piece of wood that served as a raft for us. We held on tight to it; we came back to it with large bursts of children’s laughter.

  At ten years old, everything changed. Around the lake, the girls and the boys could no longer mix. The body could be glimpsed through wet clothes. My brother and my father forbade me to join the boys.

  I did not understand the reason for this sudden rule, and I refused to obey. But my friends knew I was a girl. If I continued to be around them, they would denounce me, because in doing so, I would bring shame on them.

  In contrast, in the pastures, far from the world of the adults, they continued to let me play their games with them. I therefore built myself in the ambiguity of my kind. In the eyes of my parents, I was a boy, but I had to stay a girl in the eyes of society: I had to abide by certain rules such as prohibitions. Because I wore men’s clothing, I could go out alone in the street or work in the fields; but because my sex was that of a woman, I could not approach the boys. At this age, the other girls veiled themselves. Those who had, like me, lived their childhood as a boy, gave up their shalwar kameez and the freedom that it conferred, little by little. They abandoned their fields and their games to integrate into the framework of their whole life from this point forward: the walls of their home. They learned how to sew, take care of the children, help their mothers. It took a few months before they embraced their destiny as women: at twelve years old, they wore burqas and did not leave the house anymore without the presence of a man.

  I saw that the gap was widening between the two conditions: the independence and the autonomy that comes with the status of being a man and the confinement and alienation that signifies the life of a woman. In my childhood mind, I did not see anything wrong with envisioning another destiny other than the one I was given by chance at my birth.

  For me, there was no doubt that I was a girl, and I accepted that; I couldn’t change my nature. But I wanted to live as a man. I worked hard with my parents, I threw myself into doing physical tasks to shape my body, and I exceeded my limits to strengthen my will. Little by little, I felt stronger than the boys around my age and was more courageous than the girls. Because I resisted, I did not bow my head. I hardened myself to face that which did not fail to produce obstacles for me. I had a hunch.

  ________________

  1 The year corresponds to 1968.

  3

  IN THE FLESH OF A MAN

  “I will never wear a veil.”

  This is what I told my father, who had just received a visit from the mullah of the village.

  “It is a sin to remain dressed as you are. You must become a woman, otherwise we will have problems.”

  My father became more and more tense, as the pressure of the ulema, the religious people of the district, grew more and more every month. Guna, a sin. This word penetrated me like a poison arrow. Th
roughout my childhood, I saw no wrong in wearing boys’ clothes, those that my own parents gave me. And now in the eyes of the neighbors, in the eyes of my father, in the eyes of Allah, I was the incarnation of evil.

  When I was fifteen years old, I understood that my behavior was anti-Islamic. The mullah I had known since my childhood took me aside. We sat opposite one another on the living room carpet. It was light and pleasant; we all respected him. This was the first time that he had ever addressed me with such firmness.

  “Ukmina, listen to me well. Islam does not accept women wearing men’s clothing. If a woman does this, she loses her identity and her place in society. A woman has particular emotions because it is a weak creature; it is the contrary for men. You cannot change your name, Ukmina. A woman, by definition, is soft; this is not the case for men. Therefore, when a woman hides herself under men’s clothing, she changes herself and becomes a man, and this is outlawed.”

  “But I want to be free like the men!”

  He looked at me, horrified by what I had just said.

  “There is no sense in that, Ukmina. A woman cannot gain freedom just by changing her clothing. It is not freedom that she gains, but suffering. She loses her respect and becomes an insult to the society, which insults her in return. Then what do you say, Ukmina? Women are free! They can move about and travel. They need only to be accompanied by their husbands. They can leave the house with a close friend, it is not a problem, and even to go to work, so long as they are accompanied on their journey. You must understand, Ukmina: a woman that wears men’s clothing is committing a crime. Islam does not accept this at all.”

  With that said, he got up and left me alone on my carpet. This speech did nothing to change my determination—quite the contrary. Manirula had said that I was stubborn. Well, I had a reason!