The Afghan Women’s Writing Project is a nonprofit organization that provides tools and support to the women of Afghanistan to express their stories in their own words. Everyone involved in this project is ridiculously brave, from the Afghan women who carry their laptops under their burkas to the program volunteers who get death threats from the Taliban. Yeah. Program volunteers don’t get paid.
This weekend, I’m doing “Comedians for Change,” a literary event where we will be giving voices to these women’s words. We’re hoping to raise much-needed funds for the organization.(Full disclosure: It feels crazy to call myself a comedian so please don’t be like “um you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself.” I’m an imposter, consider myself checked.)
Here’s more info and ticket links and such. Rachel Dratch will be performing in Sunday’s show, and yeah I’m dropping that name because if that’s what’s selling tickets, then that’s how we’re gonna do this shit.And here’s some press.
Also: here and here and here.(Even more full disclosure: I haven’t met Rachel Dratch yet. We’re not friends. Yet.)
I’ve been working on this project for a few months now, and I hate to admit it, but I haven’t appreciated the full magnitude and responsibility of it all until only recently.
Gross: I have a lot of jobs. Some I do for the income, some I do for the joy, and some I do simply because I don’t like to close any open door if I can I help it.
I’m lucky and most of the time I know it. Being able to carve out even the most modest creative existence in this world is pretty good. But still, sometimes all these jobs really do feel like work and aren’t we all just so damn tired and if I eat another Lean Cuisine for dinner at my desk, I’m going to punch myself in the fucking face. I sometimes get lost in a corn maze of deadlines and forget what’s important. This was one of those “what’s importants,” which is infuriating of me because this is so much bigger than my bullshit and Lean Cuisines.
This is the biggest.
The fact that I’m writing this blog post right now—and all the other posts and articles and fashion copy I write as my livelihood—is something I take completely for granted. Even when when an opposite experience was starting me in the face, I was still like “Oh, lemme just write this tweet about Evanescence real quick.”
It wasn’t until this week, when I’d finally turned my brain off and had my writers’ (Fattema, Zahra A., Shogofa and Farzana) words in my heart that I … I don’t know … checked in, I guess? I’m mad at myself but grateful that it happened before the shows passed me by.We get to say these beautiful words:
In this world someone has the opportunity to be the best one, but he or she does not know the value of it. And there is someone who does not have the same opportunity, but still he or she is trying and grateful for the small opportunity.
Or:
You just have to kill silence. You have to speak up. Say whatever comes in your mind. Don’t be ashamed. Everyone here is the same. No one is better than any other … No one can give you your rights. You have to grab your rights.
These women learn English in secret. They write in hostile environments. They have stores of courage we’ll be lucky to never know if we have or not because our basic freedoms are like breathing. They just keep coming.
The picture here is of me in a hijab. Wearing it was strange. As a person who cares about fashion and spends a lot of time looking at it, I can talk about how it felt to lose a form of expression I so aggressively exercise, but I won’t. I’ll just say that it limits your world in a way that’s equal parts suffocating and comforting. “Comforting” might seem an odd descriptor for a garment that, to us, is such a hard symbol of oppression. But there it is.
These women are not just victims—a fact the directors of AWWP were very clear about. They are people with complicated points of view about their lives and situations. They’re not symbols in burkas or strange names on paper. They’re human beings.
Come hear their stories.
