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Literary Review
Afghans' Anne Frank?
LATIFA was a teenager in Kabul when the Taliban's flag — ironically , it is a white one — began to fly in the city. Her family was one of the more affluent in Afghanistan despite being ruined several times over by the depredations of different regimes. The women worked; her mother was a gynaecologist, her sister a stewardess. They had their ordinary pleasures: swimming, watching movies. Suddenly, all that ended. This first hand account makes horribly real the generalised catalogues of Talib brutality we have been reading so far. That it is written by someone belonging to a sex the Taliban sought to erase, makes it more real. It is impossible to read this book as a literary work. It is a prisoner's diary, written by one who sees the cell becoming smaller and more airless every passing hour.
In some ways this books aspires to be the Afghan Anne Frank's diary. The guilty longings for "Indian films" and high heels in an incarcerated and ailing young woman aware of the magnitude of her predicament; the thoughts of love, the desire to make something of her life: these bring her close to that other teenager. However, unlike the solitary Anne writing for herself, Latifa escaped Afghanistan as a "witness" for Elle magazine in Paris and wrote this book as a consequence. Behind her one can sense a phalanx of editors examining her copy, seeking to make it a digestible mix of personal narrative and potted history. As a consequence it remains a disturbing account of a ghastly time but does not go beyond.
My Forbidden Face, Latifa, Virago, p.180, £6.50.
Anuradha Roy
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