Between Silence and Return: A History We Are Asked to Remember
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By Anosha Zereh
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Some of my earliest memories are of our living room in Afghanistan.
The BBC is on the radio. My parents are there, my siblings, our extended family, everyone gathered close and leaning toward the voice coming out of that small box. I could not have told you what the news was. I was too young for the words.
But I remember the feeling in the room. It was joyful. It was eager. It was the enthusiasm of people who believed their country was going somewhere, and that they were going with it.
I have carried that room with me my whole life. Only recently have I begun to understand what I was sitting inside of.
Born Into Reform
I was born in the mid-seventies, under Daoud Khan's republic.
It was not a simple time. In 1973, Daoud had ended the monarchy, set aside the 1964 constitution, and dissolved the elected parliament. The political world grew narrower. By 1977, Afghanistan was a one-party state.
And yet, for women, the door was still open. That same year, Daoud's new constitution stated, in Article 27: "All the people of Afghanistan, both women and men, without discrimination and privilege, have equal rights and obligations before the law." Women sat in the assembly that approved it. Girls were filling new schools. The veil was a choice.
That choice had a history. In 1959, when Daoud was prime minister, he called for women to set aside the veil voluntarily. At the independence celebrations in Kabul that year, the queen, a princess, and the prime minister's own wife appeared unveiled in the royal box. The wives and daughters of officials followed. The veil was never banned. It became a choice.
My parents belonged to that generation, the generation of the sixties. My mother was a young girl when Anahita Ratebzad took her seat in parliament. My father grew up in a Kabul where women were becoming visible as educators, professionals, and public voices.
So when my family gathered around the radio, they were not only listening to the news. They were listening to a world they had helped make. That was the joy I felt without understanding it. I was a child absorbing, through the skin, the knowledge that things could change, and that women could matter.
The Question Beneath the Date
Not long ago, I came across a claim that travels widely online: that Afghan women were granted the right to vote in 1919, before women in the United States, France, Italy, and Switzerland.
I understand why people share it. It pushes back against a false and damaging picture of Afghan women as people who have never had a public life, a political voice, or a place in their country's story.
But history is not made more honorable by making it simpler.
The more I looked, the more that date opened into a question. What does it mean to say women "won the vote"? Is it a reforming king's promise? A sentence in a constitution? A law that is enforced? Or is it a woman walking to a polling place, casting her ballot, and seeing someone like herself take a seat in parliament?
Afghanistan's history holds all of these, spread across decades.
After independence in 1919, King Amanullah Khan began a period of bold reform. Beside him stood Queen Soraya Tarzi, an advocate for girls' education and a public figure in her own right. Afghanistan's first written constitution was ratified in 1923. In 1928, at a grand assembly in Kabul, Queen Soraya removed her veil in public.
The backlash was fierce. Many saw rapid change, especially change touching women's lives, as a threat to faith, family, and the old order. In 1929, Amanullah was forced from power, and much of what he had begun was reversed or quietly buried.
But something had been seen that could not be unseen. For a generation of Afghan women and girls, it was now known to be possible.
I have come to believe that a right does not live in a single year. It lives across time. It is imagined, written, practiced, taken away, buried, and remembered. It survives in a daughter's schooling, in a woman's work, in a family story, in a poem, and in the quiet refusal to accept silence as destiny.
Four Names
The clearest opening came with the constitution of 1964, under King Mohammad Zahir Shah. It affirmed equality before the law and called for elections to the House of the People, the Wolesi Jirga, that were free, universal, secret, and direct.
In 1965, Afghan women voted. Women stood as candidates. And four women were elected to parliament:
Ruqia Habib Abubakr of Kabul
Anahita Ratebzad of Kabul
Khadija Ahrari of Herat
Masuma Esmati-Wardak of Kandahar
I want to say their names slowly. Too often, Afghan women are described only by what has been done to them. These four were voters, candidates, and lawmakers. They served from 1965 to 1969, in a parliament where women had never sat before. They belong to Afghanistan's democratic inheritance, and to every Afghan girl who has ever been told that women like her have no history.
This does not mean every Afghan woman shared in that opening. Village and city, class, literacy, language, family, and region all shaped whose rights became real and whose stayed on paper. But the unevenness of that history is a reason to remember it carefully, not a reason to forget it.
When I think of that living room, I think of these women. The joy in our house did not come from nowhere. It came from them, and from everyone who had pushed the door open a little further.
When the Room Changed
In April 1978, a coup overthrew Daoud's government. Late the following year, Soviet troops crossed the border. What followed was more than four decades of war, displacement, and exile. Millions of Afghans left their homes. Families were scattered across continents.
In homes across Afghanistan, and later in homes far from it, the radio stayed on. But what people listened for changed. It was no longer the sound of a country going somewhere. It was the sound of waiting for news of the people and the places they had lost.
Under the Taliban, first in the 1990s and again since 2021, Afghan women have been pushed out of public life almost entirely. Today, girls in Afghanistan are shut out of school after the sixth grade. Women have been barred from universities, from many kinds of work, and from much of public space.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a story of light returning, and that would not be honest. The loss is real. Women are being made to disappear, not as a metaphor but by decree, and that must be named plainly.
And still, I know something about what cannot be decreed away. I know it because I was once a very small child in a room full of people who believed women could matter, and that belief got into me before I had words for it. No one can take that room back out.
Children do not remember dates. They remember what the grown-ups around them felt. If a child grows up among people who expect the future to be good, some part of her keeps that expectation, even through years that give her every reason to let it go. I have seen it in myself.
What Survives
Between Silence and Return grew out of that room, and out of this history.
It is not a history book. It is a book of images and words, created in dialogue with the art of Kimia (Angela Gulistani), moving through three passages: Departure, Distance, and Return. It is for anyone who has left a homeland and still carries it. For anyone who has lost a place, a language, or an earlier self. And for anyone who has come to feel that return is not always a journey on a map.
Sometimes it is a return to your own voice. Sometimes it is a return to a story that was buried but never destroyed.
On the cover, Kimia has painted a young woman in a blue dress stepping forward from in front of a framed painting. Inside the frame, veiled women are tangled in red and black threads: grief, silence, dispossession, all that cannot easily be said. The young woman holds a green book in one hand. In the other she lifts a lantern. Where its light falls, the dark threads loosen and turn to gold.
To me, she is not a stranger to the women in the frame. She steps out of the same dark. The light she carries is not something she found somewhere else. It was with her all along.
That image holds the question at the heart of the book:
What survives when history asks us to disappear?
I don't have a tidy answer. But I think of that living room. I think of a joy that seemed to belong to one decade, and that turned out to belong to the people who felt it, and to those of us who were children at their feet. I think of four women's names, spoken again. I think of a girl somewhere today, reading in secret, holding a book the way the young woman on the cover holds hers.
Perhaps what survives is not the era. Perhaps what survives is what the era revealed about us.
An Inheritance
I did not live through the sixties, but I have lived through them, through what my parents and their generation handed to me without ever quite saying it. I carry the story of loss. But I also carry the knowing that it was otherwise once, that it was joyful, that we were leaning in together toward something good.
I think that knowing is part of why I became a writer, and why I later started a publishing house. A book is a small room of its own. People gather in it. They lean toward a voice. For a while, something feels possible.
That is what I have tried to put into this book. I offer it to the women who came before me, to the four whose names I have spoken here, to the families still waiting by their radios, and to every reader carrying a silence of their own.
If this essay speaks to you, I would be grateful if you would:
Preorder the ebook of Between Silence and Return on Apple Books. It will be released on November 8, 2026, and a hardcover art edition follows on January 25, 2027. https://books.apple.com/us/book/between-silence-and-return/id6808338658
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With love and remembrance,
Anosha Zereh
Writer, poet, and storytellerIqra Publishing & Media
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