2026. Afghanistan. A world in which women have fought for years to be heard. To be heard among the voices of men. Men, who command, who silence, who conquer. Men who conquer them during the hardest, most desperate times, denying them of the most basic necessities, the most basic freedoms, the most basic humanity.
It is a reality so stark that people have noticed. Celebrities, actors, socialites, the world’s elite all have something to say. In 2024, celebrated actress Meryl Streep took to the stage at a UN assembly, to reveal the shocking truth of the matter; “a cat has more freedom than an Afghan woman”.
Picture this: a woman sits at her window, sun glaring through the panes of glass. The sun should warm her. She should feel it on her face, its soothing caress. But she cannot. Instead, she glares at her black cat through blue mesh tightly bound around her head. Glaring, as she watches it roll about in the sand, golden light reflecting off its eyes.
No light reflects off her eyes. The woman cannot see. Cannot hear. Cannot breathe. She is choking on her suffering, on the silence that has swallowed her voice, on the years she has spent fighting to be heard.
She is owned by a man.
Her cat is not.
She has become a lesser being, than her own pet.
Yet still she fights. Still, she waits to be heard. Though owned, though silenced, she is not yet conquered.
This is the reality for so many women in Afghanistan.
Since the Taliban's return to power in 2021, the erosion of women's rights has been swift and systematic. Girls have been forbidden from attending all secondary education and universities. Women have been pushed out of workplaces, confined to their homes, and stripped of the right to appear in public without a male present. They have been denied access to parks, gyms, and public spaces, their voices effectively erased from public life. The burqa- once a choice - has become a command and the freedom to move, to learn, to work, to simply exist, has been revoked.
The world watches, and the world must not look away. Because a cat may roam freely in the sand, unbothered and untroubled, unaffected by society, but the woman at the window is not asking for much. She is asking for what should never have been taken: the right to be seen, to be heard, to be free.
She is still fighting.
And she is still waiting for the world to fight with her.
Sources:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr54d3qd5r7o
Jessica Fitzgerald