Oppression: definitions, contexts, and social impacts

¶ … Forbidden Face and the Woman Warrior

In My Forbidden Face, Latifa narrates a poignant coming-of-age story of a young girl growing up under the brutal regime of the Taliban. Latifa skillfully pulls the reader into a world that seems that of a typical teenager. She writes of "college, girlfriends in search of music tapes, film videos, novels to read avidly in bed in the evening" (11).

Latifa's protected world collapses when the Taliban assume power in 1997. Until then, Latifa had enjoyed the privileges afforded by her family's relative affluence. Latifa went to school, talked to her friends about fashion, dreamed about Indian and Iranian movie stars. She did not wear a veil and donned skirts that were hemmed at the knee. More importantly, the young author had strong career ambitions. Her own mother was a gynecological nurse, while Latifa herself planned for a career in journalism.

Latifa makes it clear that the oppression of the Afghan people in general and of the Afghan women in particular was a result not of Islam, but of the Taliban -- the extremist group with regulations on everything from the ownership of tea kettles (prohibited) to the social conduct of women.

As soon as they assumed power, the Taliban eroded the freedoms that Latifa and other Afghan women had previously taken for granted. In the following months, women were forbidden from attending work or school. They were forbidden from wearing skirts, pants or pantyhose. They are then made to wear the chadri, "a shapeless cloth tent sewn to a tight-fitting cap and covering the entire body" (46). For Latifa and the other Afghan women living under the Taliban, it was forbidden to simply show their face.

In the face of such oppression, however, women like Latifa continue to define areas of resistance. The mother of a young boy murdered by talibs throws stones at the passing official cars, risking flogging or death because she has "nothing to lose." Latifa's mother risks a possible death sentence by practicing medicine inside her house. As her daughters stretch dark material over the window to shield themselves from outside view, the former nurse sews up the mutilated genitals of three girls who had been gang-raped by 15 talibs.

A former flight attendant rips her chadri off in public, defining her resistance by refusing to accept that her face has been forbidden.

Latifa's own resistance takes the form of teaching. She establishes an underground school, a courageous act particularly when considered in light of other teachers who have been punished for deviating from the Taliban version of Koranic texts. Instead, together with a group of other resisters, the 18-year-old Latifa teaches history, mathematics, science. They manage to raise money for textbooks and prepare covert classroom in their family homes. They prepare staggered schedules, so the children never have to come to the same place at the same hour, to avoid arousing suspicion.

In a way, these schools symbolize not only Latifa's resistance, but also a whole community's fight against the Taliban. The teachers' families were complicit in the underground schools, since the classrooms were located in their houses. The families took enormous personal risks by sending their sons - and especially their daughters - to these underground schools. Many girls had to walk for half an hour through dangerous territory, simply to get to their clandestine schools. This fact alone is a courageous act of resistance on the part of the children, since several girls aged seven and eight have been kidnapped, raped and killed on the way to their schools.

Despite the dangers, the teachers, the students and the community of families continued to defy the Taliban regime by providing a real education, one child at a time.

Other female writers have written about similar forms of resistance against gender-based oppression. In The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston writes about Chinese patriarchy, which, in the author's text, can only result in a woman being sold as a slave or burdening her family with an unmarried daughter. In the society as depicted by Kingston, a woman can only aspire to the status of "a cowbird or a maggot" (222).

In one of the stories in The Woman Warrior, Fa Muh Lan disguises herself as a man to take her father's place in the Chinese army. She is able to escape the restrictions placed on her gender by passing herself as a man. Unlike the Taliban, many of the restrictions regarding women's conduct were deeply embedded in the culture.

Thus, for Kingston, freedom could not be attained simply be replacing the ruling party. Instead, resistance meant joining Chinese patriarch, as Fa Muh Lan had done. The other option was fleeing Chinese patriarchy altogether, as the author's family had done by taking refuge in America and becoming "citizens of the planet."