I’m downstairs in Eason on O’Connell Street. That time of year. I’m bracing myself for the back-to-school blues. The place is eerily quiet. Everyone has already done their book buying. I hand my list to the sales assistant. He doesn’t look like he’s that long out of school himself. “Two of everything,” I tell him. “Twins. Girls,” I add. He nods and goes off to search.
They are always so helpful here. It would take me all day to find books they can put their hands on in seconds. There is one book the young man can’t find because it’s not in stock. Parenting fail. (Yes, I keep track of them. It’s humbling.) I will be a good parent this time. I ask him to order it in and give him a €20 deposit. The books are heavy. He double-bags them, and I put the rest in a small rucksack.
Upstairs, weighed down by schoolbooks, I search for a novel they need for second year. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, which to my shame I’ve never read. But I’ve been doing a bit of research. There’s a character in the book, the farmer Curley’s wife, who never gets a name. She has no name because she’s a woman and that is Steinbeck’s way of showing women had little value in that era. It turns out the novel is out of stock. Better parents have been in before me and bought them all.
There are plenty of words and wringing of hands but not much by way of action or even calls for action. Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown has been an exception
On the way home, I stop for lunch in a street food place on Talbot Street. I order prawn dumplings. And noodles. I look at the bags of books as I eat and it niggles at me, this luxury of being weighed down by books, even schoolbooks. Especially schoolbooks. The astonishing privilege of the back-to-school blues.
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The mothers of girls in Afghanistan are not weighed down by books, at least not in public. Their daughters can’t go to secondary school. No woman or girl can go to the park or to the beauty salon or to the gym or to visit their dead in the cemetery. The women and girls of Afghanistan are subjugated, oppressed and banned from virtually every aspect of public life because they are female. It’s two years this week since the women-hating, human-rights-violating, religiously extremist Taliban mullahs took over with their obnoxious claims that they are liberating Afghan people. It’s two years this week since more than a million people fled that country to live in exile all over the world.
I don’t see many people in power getting as exercised about all of this as you might hope. There are plenty of words and wringing of hands but not much by way of action or even calls for action. Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown has been an exception. As he recently pointed out, the Taliban are guilty of gender-based persecution and the international response should be far stronger. “On the second anniversary of the Taliban’s reconquest, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor should take legal action against the individuals responsible for what are the most egregious, heinous, and vindictive abuses of human rights systematically and viciously imposed on girls today.”
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All most of us can do in these back-to-school days is try to make sure the women and girls of Afghanistan are not forgotten. They already feel ignored. Depressed and hopeless. Prisoners of their gender. “The young people of Afghanistan are screaming their lungs out, trying to bring the world’s attention to themselves,” Mahbouba Seraj, an Afghan women’s rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, said this week. “The women in Afghanistan are being slowly erased from society, from life, from everything – their opinions, their voices, what they think.” And still, in extraordinary acts of bravery, these Afghan women persist and resist.
Schoolbooks neatly stacked on shelves, I bring my daughters to see Animal Farm: The Musical, a Dublin Youth Theatre production in Smock Alley. A parenting win. (Yes, I keep track of them. It’s comforting.) The teenagers are outstanding playing Mr Jones the drunken farmer, Boxer the horse, the raven, the chickens, the dogs. They are especially brilliant as the power hungry pig liberators turned dictators Napoleon and Squealer. The dramatic crescendo, though familiar, remains chilling: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others” is the final commandment written in red.
Welcome to Taliban Farm, a place where women have been all but erased and where for millions of girls there is no hope of going back to school
Orwell wrote his “fairy story” in 1945. It was no fairy-tale. In Afghanistan the former ministry of women’s affairs is now called the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. The Taliban have declared the day of their takeover to be a national holiday. This week their deputy spokesman, Bilal Karimi, told reporters: “Afghanistan was freed from occupation, Afghans were able to regain their country, freedom, government and will. The only way to solve the problem is understanding and dialogue, pressure and force are not logical”.
Welcome to Taliban Farm, a place where women have been all but erased and where for millions of girls there is no hope of going back to school. This week, Heather Barr, association director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch told CNN how things are going for the Taliban. “They’re posing in photographs with smiling diplomats, they’re getting on private jets to fly off to important high-level meetings where people roll out red carpets for them. They’re being permitted to take control of embassies in a growing number of countries. So I think from their perspective, it’s going pretty well.”
The pigs are in charge. Meanwhile, the world wrings its hands and then sits on them.