This essay compares two memoirs by women writing against gender-based oppression: Latifa's My Forbidden Face, a firsthand account of life under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, a reflection on Chinese patriarchal culture. The essay traces the forms of resistance each author and her community enacts — from underground schools and acts of public defiance in Latifa's narrative to cross-dressing and cultural migration in Kingston's. It concludes by arguing that because Afghan women's oppression is rooted in a ruling party's distortion of Islam rather than in culture itself, Latifa's resistance holds greater promise for reclaiming identity without abandoning heritage.
This paper demonstrates effective comparative literary analysis. Rather than treating each text separately, it identifies a shared theme — women's resistance to oppression — and uses that lens to reveal a meaningful difference: one author's resistance required cultural assimilation while the other's allowed for potential return and identity reclamation. This parallel structure makes the comparison intellectually productive rather than merely descriptive.
The essay opens with a close reading of Latifa's memoir, establishing the pre-Taliban world and its collapse. It then catalogs individual and community acts of resistance. The second half introduces Kingston's text as a counterpoint, examining mythological and real-world responses to patriarchy. The final paragraphs bring both texts together in direct comparison, culminating in the thesis that the source of oppression determines the nature and limits of resistance.
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 draws 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). Her account ultimately becomes a record not only of personal loss but of collective resistance — one that invites comparison with Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, another memoir in which a woman navigates a culture that systematically suppresses female identity and ambition.
Latifa's protected world collapses when the Taliban assume power in 1997. Until then, she had enjoyed the privileges afforded by her family's relative affluence. She went to school, talked to her friends about fashion, and dreamed about Indian and Iranian movie stars. She did not wear a veil and wore skirts hemmed at the knee. More importantly, the young author had strong career ambitions: her 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 Afghan women in particular, was a result not of Islam, but of the Taliban — an 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 were 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 continued to define areas of resistance. The mother of a young boy murdered by talibs throws stones at passing official cars, risking flogging or death because she has "nothing to lose." Latifa's own mother risks a possible death sentence by practicing medicine inside her home. As her daughters stretch dark material over the windows to shield themselves from outside view, the former nurse sews up the mutilated genitals of three girls who had been gang-raped by fifteen 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 teachers who have been punished for deviating from the Taliban's version of Koranic texts. Together with a group of other resisters, the eighteen-year-old Latifa teaches history, mathematics, and science. They raise money for textbooks, prepare covert classrooms in family homes, and arrange staggered schedules so that children never arrive at the same place at the same hour, thus avoiding suspicion.
In this way, these schools symbolize not only Latifa's individual resistance, but also an entire community's fight against the Taliban. The teachers' families were complicit in the underground schools, since the classrooms were located in their homes. Families took enormous personal risks by sending their sons — and especially their daughters — to these clandestine schools. Many girls had to walk for half an hour through dangerous territory simply to attend. This alone constitutes a courageous act of resistance on the part of the children, given that several girls aged seven and eight had been kidnapped, raped, and killed on the way to school. Despite the dangers, teachers, students, and families continued to defy the Taliban regime by providing a real education, one child at a time.
Latifa's resistance, however, will continue when she returns to Afghanistan, picking up where she left off. The difference between these two authors ultimately lies in the source of their respective oppressions. Where Kingston's patriarchy is woven into cultural fabric and can only be escaped by leaving that culture behind, Latifa's oppression was imposed by a specific regime whose removal opens the possibility of genuine return. For now, Latifa appreciates the fact that she can tear off her chadri and show her no-longer-forbidden Afghan face.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
Latifa. My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's Story. New York: Hyperion Books, 2001.
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.