Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan by Zarghuna Kargar

made miserable.
    As a result, Afghan women tend to go on having babies one after another until a son is born; some women will even give birth to more than ten children in order to achieve their goal. Any woman who gives birth to a boy soon after her marriage is considered to be very fortunate, so many women spend much of their pregnancy praying and worrying about whether or not they will have a son. At special occasions families will ask God to bless them with a son, and it is customary at wedding ceremonies for older Afghans to approach the young bride saying, ‘May you become the mother of sons.’ In my Pashtun community, there are even special songs that reinforce the desire for male children, such as ‘A Son Is Gold’ and ‘God Only Gives Sons to Those Who Are Loved’.
    Sons are so important in our culture that some mothers will go so far as to neglect their daughters in favour of their sons. I’ve spoken to girls who’ve told me that at Eid their parents will buy new clothes for their brothers but not for them, and in some houses I have seen how mothers will serve their sons a large piece of meat while only giving their daughters a bowl of soup. I remember an Afghan relative who once visited us with her two daughters and son. She looked at me and my four sisters and exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, seeing so many girls together is very frightening. I wouldn’t know how to cope with so many of them.’
    I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve wished I’d been born a boy; I know my older sister feels the same. Before my brother was born, when female friends and neighbours asked my mother about her children, she would look sad and they would sympathise with her for not having a son. Some women in our family would deliberately make spiteful comments about her lack of male children. I remember when one relative – who enjoyed none of the social and professional advantages our family did – had just given birth to a baby boy. She said in a cruel way to my mother, ‘Oh, this is the will of God. Some women have all life’s luxuries while others don’t. But a wife who is able to give birth to a boy really completes a family, and that makes her a proper woman.’ At this my mother became very upset; I could see the pain in her eyes, and thought that she felt she was to blame for not giving the family a son. We comforted her and wiped away her tears, although she tried to mask her distress.
    ‘Mum, whenever this woman comes to our house she makes you upset,’ I said. ‘Why is this? What does she say to hurt you?’
    I remember my mother said, ‘My child, she’s lucky. She’s given birth to a boy, a son to the family. She’s not worried about the future.’
    When I asked her how it was that boys could safeguard the future, she replied that they would always be able to take care of the family, their sisters and their mother. I told my mother that I could do that just as well as any boy, and that I would take care of her and my sisters, ofthe whole family. She smiled and stroked my cheek, saying, ‘I believe that you could do it but you can’t do it in the way that a boy could.’
    I knew then that as a girl there was only so much I could do to make my mother feel better. The community had spoken and it had made her feel a failure. My older sister felt my mother’s pain, too, and would try to be like a boy – wearing boyish clothes that disguised the fact that her body was becoming womanly – and my mother would praise her and say how like a son she was. But I only truly understood why it was so important for an Afghan woman to give birth to a son when I was older.
    The tendency for parents to place greater value on their sons than on their daughters is common to every ethnic group in Afghanistan. One day Tabasum, one of our reporters at Afghan Woman’s Hour, rang to say she had interviewed a mother who had given birth to twins, a boy and a girl, and that the way the mother treated them had made her angry. I