“They call me the Queen Bee,” says Afghan beekeeper Ghonda Gul. She trades in honey and thus defies the strict rules of the Taliban regime. To avoid the law, she rides around on a motorcycle dressed as a man. The Queen Bee herself looks quite fearless, but she is afraid of her daughters. She has already been imprisoned before, and her children were left to fend for themselves: “The Taliban are hateful. If they don’t catch me today, they will catch me tomorrow.” She then cries near a beehive, behind a bush, so that the children do not see it.
Ghonda Gul is one of the strong women that Hila Noorzai speaks to in the three-part documentary Hila beyond the Taliban (NPO 2). Together with director Nicolette Bloemberg and a largely female crew, she travels through Afghanistan to document the oppression of women.
That could be a depressing story. Women are not allowed to go outside, are not allowed to talk to each other in public, must adhere to strict dress codes, are not allowed to work or go to school. Women are abused, taken off the streets and disappear. According to a psychologist Noorzai spoke to, suicide, depression and intimate partner violence have increased significantly under the new regime.
But Noorzai focuses on the brave dissidents who, despite everything, still fight for a little bit of freedom. In addition to the Queen Bee, this is, for example, Doctor Roshanak, who is the boss of a group of men in her apple orchard. She wears a cowboy hat on her hijab. Noorzai also visits illegal girls’ schools, such as Khadija’s. The former headmaster has a weaving workshop where she secretly teaches girls.
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Wage gap
As a viewer you can shake your head – strange guys, those Taliban – and be happy that life is better for women here. But you can also think about what there is still to gain in the Netherlands. Fairly direct: the Immigration and Naturalization Service recently decided to send refugee women back to Afghanistan. Anyone who adheres to the rules there, the IND ruled, can live well there. And about women’s rights in the Netherlands: the satirical Saturday evening show Just see you here (NPO 1) paid attention to the pay gap between men and women, and the insecurity on the street for women. Joke de Kruijf sang a variation on ‘Being Together’ by Willeke Alberti: “Being a lady… is looking over your shoulders in fear.”
Thomas Erdbrink won a Nipkow disk for the comparable series two years ago Our man in the Taliban. Like Noorzai, he showed that free life can always be found under even the harshest regimes. Hila Noorzai’s series is even better. As a woman who was born in Afghanistan herself, she knows how to penetrate deeper into the lives of Afghan women. She goes to places you would otherwise never see, and encounters a lot of warmth, openness and life there. Laughter through tears, and a tiny bit of hope.
At the end of the first episode, Noorzai reads a poem from her father: “They said: all is lost. But I saw children laughing, and flowers blooming on broken ground. A mother hugging her child with hope in her eyes. And I knew: even when the world says it’s over, a single spark in the deep darkness can be the fire that ignites a new beginning.”
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