The loss of the right to live for half of society will be the first gift of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate.

Yesterday a woman from Kabul University wrote to me that female students and professors are deeply disappointed and demoralised because they doubt that the Taliban will allow women to study and teach.

She wished there were a possibility for women in Afghanistan who are studying, if they manage to retain internet access in their homes, to complete their education online and at a distance through a university in Iran.

I look at photographs of Afghan women from recent years and my heart grows heavy with pain. All those dreams of education, music and art and of effective social participation may be lost. Women will again disappear behind burqas and may no longer even have the freedom to move through society on their own.

I remember the final post of a thoughtful friend who wrote two days ago, before leaving his home in Mazar-i-Sharif:

“I feel the stench of life approaching. Even nature will no longer have the desire to smile. Love will no longer laugh. Dreams will wither and fall away, and like a soul tired of its body they will depart for another world, and the world will become a permanent graveyard.”

And one day earlier he had written:

“When we are born,
we cry because we enter this stage of fools.”
(Shakespeare, King Lear)

I do not know where this friend is, but wherever he is, may he be safe.
I wish tonight I could read for him, through the words of Shamlu, his favourite poet:

“Our side is not the night.
The flints lie ready beside the impatient fuse.
The anger of the street is in your fist.
Upon your lips,
a bright poem is being polished.
I love you,
and the night is terrified of its own darkness.”

My brother, my people and yours are a history of despair and hope. At midnight we ask for fire, and the flaming sun enters so fiercely that we raise both hands to shield our eyes. With our history ... we are a history of despair and hope.

Aydin Areta