Afghan-American novelist Nadia Hashimi has described storytelling as an act of resistance against governments that seek to control public narratives, pointing to the Taliban’s restrictions on women’s writing and girls’ education in Afghanistan.
In an interview with Scroll, Hashimi said storytelling connects people, educates and inspires them, while allowing women to document experiences that might otherwise be excluded from history.
“It is also a profound act of resistance when a regime or government is trying to control the narrative and dismiss realities,” she told Scroll.
Hashimi linked this struggle to the Taliban’s ban on books written by women in Afghan universities and restrictions on girls’ education beyond the sixth grade.
She welcomed the growing number of Afghan women documenting their experiences through poetry, letters and journalism, saying their accounts were essential to a more complete understanding of the country’s history.
“Women’s lives are as important to the recording of history as men’s lives,” she said, noting that historical accounts have often overlooked women’s contributions and the effects of political changes on their lives.
Hashimi’s latest novel, City of Widows, explores the experiences of Afghan women following the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021. The story follows Marjan, an Afghan woman who served in an elite military unit, and her musically gifted daughter as they navigate a country transformed by political upheaval.
The novel also features women from different walks of life, including shopkeepers, journalists, teachers, musicians and soldiers. Through their stories, Hashimi seeks to portray Afghan women as individuals with distinct identities, ambitions and emotions rather than merely as victims of oppression.
“I always want readers to see Afghan women rise to their full height and be given grace for all their complexities and inconsistencies,” she told Scroll.
Hashimi said the idea for the novel began taking shape after the Taliban seized Kabul in August 2021. She was helping compile information about vulnerable Afghans seeking evacuation to the United States and later worked on a psychosocial support programme for evacuated Afghans.
She was particularly moved by accounts of Afghan women who served in the Female Tactical Platoon, whose members participated in missions against insurgents alongside American forces. The women faced the threat of Taliban retaliation for their service.
Hashimi also challenged the tendency to celebrate Afghan women’s resilience without recognising the responsibility of those who allow their suffering to continue.
“We comfort ourselves that if we turn our backs, their resilience will see them through,” she said, warning that such thinking overlooks women who suffer in silence, those whose lives are cut short by violence and those affected by deep-rooted inequalities.
She argued that international media coverage often reduces Afghan women to symbols of oppression, capturing only fragments of their lives instead of recognising them as multidimensional individuals.
For Hashimi, fiction offers a way to explore these complexities and help readers understand Afghan women beyond the limited narratives that often define them.
She said she writes for both Afghan and international audiences, but her primary responsibility remains to the characters whose lives she seeks to represent.