Review of My Beautiful Sisters by Khalida Popal, pub. John Murray 2024
We will never stop being a nuisance.
This is the story of how a young Afghan woman, in the time between when the Taliban were first driven out of government and when the West, unforgivably, allowed them back, managed to create an Afghan women’s football team, and then had to get them out of the country before the returning bigots could wreak revenge on them. Along the way she has to combat conservative (one might rather say mediaeval) attitudes that are much the same whoever is in power, a warlord who encourages the team but only for his own murky ends, and men who resort to violence with little or no provocation. “To be a young woman in Afghanistan is to grow up with violence. To learn not to fight back. To fight back is to risk being killed. If you are beaten it’s because you were at fault, you must have done something wrong.”
Popal, however, does fight back because, and she makes no bones about this, she is a difficult, ruthless, uncompromising person who must sometimes be hard to live with. No other sort of person could possibly achieve what she did. As she says, “I wanted to kick open as many doors as possible before I was kicked out of one.” Unlike many, she was blessed with an understanding, non-religious family who supported her, but this made life very hard for them with their more conventional neighbours. Her father and brothers do sometimes beg her to row back a bit, which she will not do; only her mother is unfailingly supportive.
Under the first Taliban regime, her family, like many, escapes to Peshawar, where she and girls like her enjoy far more freedom than they had at home. “In our new neighbourhood, I was able to join in street football games, huge games with uneven teams. I loved it. We ran after the ball in packs, laughing until we couldn’t breathe.” When the Taliban fall, there is a noticeable generation gap between parents who can’t wait to return and youngsters, of both genders, who do not want to give up their new freedom. “I felt hugely conflicted, caught between my own raging emotions and the new light I could see gleaming from my parents and grandparents My brothers and I raged at the unfairness of it. We recognised their delight, but we could not share it.”
The pessimism of the young proves well founded as schools for women are shut down, (during the interim they had been so popular with girls trying to catch up on their lost education that the school day had to run in shifts). Music, TV, dancing and most of what makes life fun are banned, “Taliban” and “fun” being more or less antonyms. People anxious not to be persecuted themselves boost their credentials by informing on their neighbours. In the midst of all this, and in the teeth of men who physically attack her and shout “whore” after her in the street, Popal creates a team that ends up playing international matches with some success.
Unsurprisingly, she and her mother eventually become refugees in Denmark. From here, she becomes central to the frantic efforts to evacuate women football players before the returning Taliban can get hold of them. FIFA has no interest in helping them but some individuals, like Leeds United chairman Andrea Radrizzani, do miracles of PR, and Kim Kardashian sponsors a charter plane from Pakistan when it looks as if the government there will hand the women back to Afghanistan. There will be some surprises here, eg for those who were told that the Afghan army effectively gave in to the returning Taliban, when the truth is that they were desperate to fight but were prevented by the government.
This is a tense narrative, with many dispiriting aspects, but what prevails is a sense of exhilaration in the defiance of these oppressed young women:
“One day, a girl named Damsa, a powerful and talented left back, turned up to one of the training sessions visibly upset. When pressed she told us that she had been beaten by her brother because she had wanted to rush off to football before she’d finished washing the dishes. She had twisted free of him and got to training, but she didn’t know what she would return to. The other girls nodded along, tutting in sympathy. ‘Fucker,’ said Samira sharply, and the girls looked at her. ‘Fucker’, said Damsa, and the women laughed.
We all took off our headscarves and felt the air moving through our hair.”
It is incidents like this that make one realise how necessary it is to be stroppy, to make a pest of oneself, in order to change anything. “We will never stop being a nuisance. We will never stop poking and prodding. We will never stop asking for the rights that should be ours.” At intervals, Popal articulates what football means and has meant in her situation: “To be part of a team is to be reminded that you matter. To be relied upon and to rely on others. To feel that you exist. When your team scores and you run to greet each other, shouting in joy, you are calling out to each other, ‘I am here! I am here!’”