PWhy, once they have already been covered from head to toe, prevented from working, from being educated, from playing music, from walking in parks, from looking men in the eye, from traveling alone…, go so far as to deprive women of their voice? “The voice is like the sign of lifeestimated Afghan journalist Hamina Adam on France Culture on August 27. It’s just a way to kill us even more. It’s a way to make women lose what little self-esteem they have.”
Since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, women’s rights have been destroyed. Thousands of women have been banned from the jobs they once held, thousands of girls have been excluded from school or university. Forced to stay at home, isolated from each other, they increasingly live like prisoners.
#MyVoiceIsNotForbiden
The new law promulgated August 22 strengthens these restrictions, to the point of completely prohibiting women’s voices in public spaces. They are forbidden from singing, reciting poetry or reading aloud in public, but also, quite simply, from speaking. When they leave their homes, women must now cover their mouths with a mask and ensure that their voices are not heard.
“The mere sound of a female voice outside the home is apparently considered a moral violation.”Roza Otunbayeva, head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, stressed on August 26 on TV5 Monde. In a country where women must hide from the gaze of men, their voice was their last mark of individual singularity, which the Taliban reduced to a lustful bait. If the voice forces the ear to listen, it also attracts the gaze like a magnet. Demanding that women be silent in public spaces makes them transparent, smooth to the eye, blended into the landscape; we can now almost forget that they are there.
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Let’s take a detour to Iran, where, since the 1979 revolution, women have been forbidden from singing alone on stage in front of men or a mixed audience. Ayat Najafi’s film, No Land’s Song (2014), retraced the long struggle led by the director’s sister, Iranian composer Sara Najafi, to organize a women’s concert in Tehran in 2013, with the support of French singers Jeanne Cherhal and Elise Caron. As Sara Najafi says in the film, making women’s voices heard in a country where they are disappearing is “the most revolutionary act one can accomplish”.
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