The Pearl That Broke Its Shell

No Country For Women

People would not even be able to imagine the horrors that Afghan women go through, were it not for a steady stream of books coming out, even if they are written by women (and some men) who have been able to escape the country.  Afghanistan was reported to be the worst country in the world for women by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Nadia Hashimi, whose debut novel The Pearl That Broke Its Shell makes for a disturbing read, is an American of Afghan origin—her parents emigrated to the US before she was born. Still, she wrote a book about her country’s unfortunate women, in a simple, direct writing style.

There are two stories set a century apart, but linked by their spirit of misery and hope. Rahima is one of five daughters, which is a curse in her country, since women have practically no rights. Very few have access to education or a say in who they marry.  Rahima’s father is a useless junkie, who works for a powerful warlord.

When things get unbearable, Rahima’s mother resorts to the Afghan custom of bacha posh—or dressing a pre-adolescent girl as a boy.  This enables Rahima to go to school, run errands for her family and also work for a living, something her mother and sisters cannot do, because they are not allowed to leave the house unaccompanied by a male relative. The strange thing about bacha posh is that everyone knows about it, but pretend that the girl is a boy.  But what happens when it’s time for her to revert to being a female?

Rahima and her sisters’ link to the outside world is their hunch-backed aunt, Shaima whose birth defect, has made her unmarriageable, but also given her a limited freedom to move around.  She tells Rahima and her sisters the story of their great grandmother Shekiba, who tried to make a life for herself as a boy, when she lost her entire family in an epidemic. She was burnt as a child and has a horribly disfigured face, that condemns her to a single life.

Shekiba is, however, caught by her greedy relatives, who enslave her and then pass her on to others as a slave, till by a quirk of fate, she is sent to the emperor’s palace in Kabul. There, she joined a posse of women dressed as men, hired to guard King Habibullah’s harem because the king doesn’t trust men to do the job.

Both try to hold on to their freedom, but are forced into terrible marriages. Their limited freedom in disguise as men, gives them an insight into the lives of women in their country.  Trapped at home with men who can marry multiple times, existence inside the cloistered women’s quarters is fraught with dangers of a different kind, as women fight for extra scraps of attention from their men. What gives them a modicum of respect is the bearing of sons. The trait of women treating women as their enemy arises from a situation like this, where men hold complete power over women. The atrocities a women endures as a young wife does not teach her to sympathise with others like her, but makes a mother-in-law mistreat her daughters-in-law; a sister-in-law or ‘co-wife’ to try to make life miserable for a newcomer into the zenana.

Despite its somewhat upbeat ending, Hashimi’s book is a depressing read, yet needs to be read if only to learn to value our own freedom.

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell

By Nadia Hashimi

Published by: William Morrow

Pages: 464