Fatima Saadat

Broken Branches

Okay, here is one of my secrets: when I am alone in my room, I talk to my plants. I hug them and kiss the buds.  Sometimes, I punish them too, and prevent them from getting sunlight and water, pretending I am Mother Nature. I perform burial ceremonies for the dry and dead leaves of the daffodils, and harvest the basils.

This is how life repeats itself on the edge of my tall window. The rest of the windows in my little studio in Maryland are without life and covered with curtains. Only the middle window welcomes sun and rain. It also offers a glimpse of the people through the neighboring frames. My windows face the back of other buildings which have a similar modern style. Some of them are offices and some are residential units.

Among my plants, I cherish my pothos the most for their endurance, resilience, and independence. They just need water and sun for their roots, and are bound to no land. Almost like me. I stole the pothos plants from a massive garden and put them in my little Ikea glass bottles. Their roots have started to grow exactly where I broke them off at their nodes.

It is a Sunday evening around 5:00pm. Another sad silent Sunday, just like every Sunday for the past year. This one may be even longer. Although it is dramatic and depressing to think that the perfect suicide can happen on a Sunday evening, it is also a joy to have a beautiful landscape as a final point. Imagine standing in front of the tall window with its greenish glass reflected from neighboring windows in the background and the green plants lined up at the bottom. Suddenly the orange sunset starts to appear and is manifest on all the windows until a narrow leftover ray reaches the plants and my body. By this time, the light has changed to a greenish orange, impossible to describe in words. The plants spread their wings because they crave life and survival, but I open my arms and all I can think about is gravity and jumping down. There is something about some days that make them the perfect occasion for both a beginning or an ending: like Fridays in Afghanistan that mark the ending of a week and the beginning of a short freedom.

Everyone has a weird or unique friend who is not bound by the norms of society. Mine is called Paul. He loves the purity of nature and getting lost in the wilderness but hardly opens up to humans and crowds. He rarely washes or changes his clothes because of the artificial nature of detergents, and always appears in a red jacket and hat with oily spots on them. He is a mechanical engineer at John Deere, and sometimes repairs loud and massive machines. Now that I think about it, his work is quite the opposite to what he likes. Right after work, he will often join me for a walk in nature where he leads me into unpaved jungle sights and shows me deer tracks. Sometimes he makes random pheasant sounds that echo in the wild.

“Beauty is the balance between two opposing forces,” said Paul, on one of our walks while I was staring at his yellow uneven teeth. I guess, like the intense colors in a saturated summer sunset or the heat of flames burning on a frozen lake, beauty is the touching point between two encounters or transitions; one could be the beginning and the other could be an ending.

Most of my walks and conversations with American friends leave me wondering about our different interpretations and perspectives on life. I find myself playing the compare and contrast game, counting, and exchanging, silencing, and waiting. I find myself thinking of the last days before the fall of Kabul. I was not there and I wonder about the color of the sky that day, and even about the hidden beauty in a chaotic transition. How does it feel to see men with guns and women with fears occupying the street once filled with students and hope? Does the Qoriq mountain air still taste fresh after a long hike? Or does Karte Sakhi Mosque still shine with its turquoise blue dome? Are people having green tea on the graves of the shrine in clear glasses as they watch the sunset? I spent many years of my youth in Kabul discovering myself but now someone has to discover Kabul before it is gone. These contradictions continue to be part of my daily life, ever since I became an immigrant in the United States. Every day is a struggle to live in the present while haunted by the past.

The raindrops on the window, and the sight of my plants craving the sunlight, are mesmerizing to look at, especially on a day when nobody is around. Summer days in Maryland are a mix of rain, sun and wind, with a fast transition between the three. I have turned off almost all the lights in my room. Silence is the only invited guest. I pour myself a cup of Sharpshooter green tea, and add some cardamom and dried rose buds to it. The room is filled with the flowery sweet aroma of orange peel and gulab, and I keep looking at the soaked rose bud drowning in my cup. I steal my eyes away from my plants, especially from the mini red and white rose, and say out loud: I guess Mother Nature is cruel.

I look at the remains of the red wine from last night in the wine glass, the size of a small sip on the small white island of the kitchen side. I still hate the taste of alcohol after one year of trying to find joy in it, like you see in movies and perfect dinner dates. Drinking used to be fun in Kabul, though rare. Once a friend and I gave some money to a male friend to find us any kind of alcoholic drink, and he came back with a bottle in shining blue with the word Absolut Vodka written on it.  Anything forbidden seemed fun and exciting, so we tried drinking and smoking, putting on red lipstick and dancing, asking dangerous questions, and trying to find answers. Everything we could do in the hidden frames of our homes. But there were brave souls who were coming out of hiding and appearing on streets as tomboys, and emerging from the LGBTQ community. There were a few occasions when spotting girls with tattoos and fancy colors  would lead to having friendly conversations, and, more importantly, these would sometimes lead to explorations of our sexual orientations and desires. “Have you kissed a girl before?” asked Zari with her black eyes shining and her pale skin craving some warmth. The shy me replied, no, in denial, as her narrow peeled lips opened up and smiled, and her naughty eyes said, yes, she had. I looked at her in disbelief and we both laughed it off. We were ready to be ourselves in our conversations, and soon we were ready to be ourselves everywhere.

I have tried clubbing and dancing here, in Adams Morgan Street, at our small Afghan parties, between drunk strangers or friends, but alcohol hits me differently here. Maybe drinking and dancing in public is not my thing. Maybe being free is not my thing. Maybe I only enjoy things in captivity and in fear. I want to drink alcohol in a land where it is an elixir and prohibited. Here, alcohol doesn’t make me forget things or laugh or dance. It makes me self-conscious and aware of the facts and the past. That I don’t belong here. Way too many times, my partner and I found ourselves thinking about life in Afghanistan in the middle of a crazy drunk crowd. Sometimes we count the restaurant bill, and exchange currencies thinking how many poor lives can be saved with this money back in Afghanistan. We are living in two places at the same time and work twice as hard as the people around us. Sometimes, I can hear my plants making fun of me and judging me. And today is one of those days: She is unstable, she has changed, she doesn’t belong here, one of these days she is going to throw herself out of this very window while holding us in her hand. 

An hour later, I find myself pulling out of a nap, otherwise I will stay awake all night. It is only 6:30 p.m. and I can see the sun not letting go of the sky yet. I look at my daffodils and mini roses staring back at me from the window sill, and I block them with my toes. I look through the tall window with its greenish hue and body-size length, and see people in neighboring apartments. Little boxes on top of little boxes; each unit of the building seems to hide so many people with so many secrets. I can see a man on the eighth floor with restless fingertips. He is tapping constantly on his knee and is fixated on his computer. Just above him, a woman on the ninth floor holding a few papers paces back and forth in the room. They are right in front of me; yet I am so invisible to them and so indifferent to their lives and problems. Is this how God feels about us?! I try to suppress my thoughts and avoid telling myself he has abandoned us – in case he is listening. God is a psychopath, I whisper my disbelief.  I look outside my window again, at the endless lives and people out there, each trying to make peace with the contradictions, each finding beauty in the broken branches and nodes of their lives.

My body clock tells me it is past 7:00 pm, and I can hear my stomach growling. I get up and grab an apple from the fruit basket. I stand beside the window holding Reading Lolita in Tehran. The last sentence stays in my mind: “Standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as if we had been shaped by someone else’s dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.” (Nafisi 24). This book is full of resemblances of my life, about girls who are struggling to find freedom in their land and who do not belong; who find themselves between different identities. The ones they were born into and the ones they wish for. I stare for a while outside the tall window while picturing the sentences, then I look at my pothos leaves and their shining baby roots. I dream about the possibility of reading Lolita in Kabul. I dream of a circle of reading being held under the Taliban’s nose where girls and boys drink Absolut Vodka, dance, exchange philosophical books and openly express themselves. Then each goes back to a corner of Afghanistan, as if they were messengers of freedom and begins a revolution against this regime. We are the broken branches, but we grow and spread again from our nodes. I put the book down carefully on my shelf like it is my holy book. I wash the dishes and water the flowers.

I change into my running outfit, and look at myself one last time in the mirror. I am wearing my old running shirt that I brought from Kabul. It reminds me of the life I once had where limitations and deprivations pushed me to challenge boundaries and norms. It reminds me of the days I was pushed and assaulted on the roads because I was an Afghan girl and was not supposed to run on streets. I never fought back or cursed any of the men who attacked me on the runs – instead I would just get up and continue running and running until I was at a distance from them, and free from violence. This is how a new me was born, with a new identity chosen and created by me.

I put on my old running shoes and pull the laces really hard and tight because I have a long way to go. I am ready to become once again the girl I was one year ago in Kabul. A girl running for her freedom.

About Fatima Sadaat

Fatima Sadaat is a writer, runner and activist from Bamyan Province in Afghanistan. She moved to the USA on a Fullbright scholarship a week before the Taliban retook Afghanistan. She now lives in Maryland and works at George Washington University. She is one of the authors in the anthology My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird, New Fiction by Afghan Women, (MacLehose Press, 2022). She was also part of the writer’s group who created, Rising After the Fall, (Scholastic, 2023)

ABOUT UNTOLD NARRATIVES

Untold Narratives  is a small social enterprise that works with writers marginalised by conflict or community. Based in the UK, Untold has been working with Afghan women writers since 2019. The writers collaborate with international editors and translators in an intensive, virtual, editorial process to develop their work; share their stories with wider communities in their own languages and grow global audiences in translation. Recent publications include, My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird, New Fiction by Afghan Women (MacLehose Press, 2022).

As Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, many of these women writers left Afghanistan to start new lives as refugees in other countries. Farangis Elyassi and Fatima Saadat were the first of this writers’ group to leave Afghanistan.  Two months later Marie left, courtesy of the international organisation she was working for. They continue to stay connected and develop their craft with Untold, from their new homes in the USA and Germany. Parand has remained in Afghanistan, writing under a pseudonym to protect her safety.

All four stories are inspired by real life and reflect the breadth of the experience of Afghan women writers, living all over the world, forging new lives. These pieces were developed this year, through the Paranda Network, a global initiative from Untold Narratives  with support from KFW Stiftung to connect and amplify the voices of writers from Afghanistan and those in the diaspora.