THE HANDSTAND

SEPTEMBER 2003

 

Osama: Women Under Fundamentalism
By Sudhanva  Deshpande
ZNet Commentary August 19, 2003

>From the ruins of a country devastated by war and religious fundamentalism, comes a gut wrenching film about a young girl's struggle to support her family by masquerading as a boy.

Titled "Osama", the film is not about the elusive terrorist mastermind allegedly behind the WTC and Pentagon attacks in September 2001. It is rather about the havoc caused by barbaric rulers on a society crushed by unimaginable, grinding poverty.

The film opens with a demonstration of widows on the streets of Kabul, demanding the rightto work to feed their starving families. Here we see a young girl with her mother, and meet a spirited porter-boy, espandi, wrangling dollars from a foreign filmmaker. The Taliban swoop down on the demonstration, arresting many and beating up others.

The girl's mother works in a hospital. The hospital, already under-staffed and under-equipped to deal with the mounting count of the ill and injured, is being closed down by the Taliban. A white female medical worker is arrested. Unable to recover her wages from the hospital administrator, the mother strikes a deal with the son of a dying old man to tend to him in his house.

To go to the patient's house, however, the mother needs a male escort, because the Taliban forbid women to appear in public unaccompanied by a male relative. The old man's son pretends to be her husband when they are accosted by the Taliban. But this arrangement cannot last long, since the old man dies.

The family of three -- grandmother, mother, daughter -- are left without any means of livelihood. It is then that the grandmother narrates to the child the story of Rustam's bow, wherein a girl is transformed into a boy when she passes under the rainbow. It is decided that the pre-pubescent girl will be dressed as a boy, and sent out to earn for the family.

The boy-girl finds employment at a milk-shop run by a former comrade of the girl's father. The unrelenting eye of the Taliban, however, is everywhere. All males are forced to congregate to the local mosque to offer prayers five times a day. Here, the boy-girl makes a mistake in the ritual and thus catches attention of the Taliban who follows the petrified child home.

Worse follows when the Taliban round up all young boys and force them into the madrassa (seminary) where they are to be trained by mullahs in their bigoted and brutal version of Islam wherein, amongst other things, contact with women is prohibited.

In this masculine world, the frightened feminine boy is a misfit, the subject of derision and ridicule by her peers and teachers alike. The only friend she has is the porter espandi, who gives her her male name. When the girl is chased by a mob of young boys who challenge her 'male' gender, espandi comes to her rescue. He is a boy, espandi asserts, and his name is Osama. The name that has terrorized Afghans -- as, doubtless, many others -- is deemed sufficiently macho for the boys to back off.

In the entire film, this is the only name we hear: and this too, of course, is not the girl's real name. It is as if the Taliban have robbed the people of their identity.

Eventually the girl is found out. In an open, public trial -- where the accused does not have any right to defend herself -- the girl watches in horror as the white female medical worker she had encountered earlier at the hospital is stoned to death and the white filmmaker shooting the widows' demonstration is shot.

As the child awaits a certain death, the old mullah from the madrassa appears and gets the judge to give her away in marriage to him. The mullah has three other wives, and she realizes that by sparing her life, the Taliban have pushed her into living hell.

Humour in the film is fleeting and unexpected: a wedding celebration is transformed within a few minutes into a scene of mourning when the Taliban raid a house. Otherwise, the film depicts a scenario unremittingly horrific. While the title of the film could seem somewhat sensational, the film itself is not. The terror of the Taliban is created without recourse to scenes of explicit violence and blood and gore.

In fact, what makes the film truly frightening is when you see how brutalized and cruel children are -- both when they terrorize Osama, as well as the obvious glee with which they close in on the white woman to stone her. The film initially had a different name and a hopeful ending. Titled "Rainbow", the film ended with the women managing to escape. Facts of Afghan life, even after the fall of the Taliban, however, do not merit such optimism and the filmmaker changed the end to remain more faithful to reality.

"Osama" is Afghan director Siddiq Barmak's first feature film. It is also the first feature filmto be made in Afghanistan after 1996, when the Taliban seized power. Barmak, 40, learned filmmaking in Moscow and headed the Afghan Film Organization for several years before the Taliban put him under house arrest and banned all his films. He fled first to the northern provinces, and then to Pakistan. He has returned to his country to head the Film Organization and produce a remarkable film under daunting circumstances.

Afghanistan, in any case, never had a thriving film industry. It has produced some 40-odd feature films in its entire history. When the Taliban regime fell, the country possessed one nonfunctional 35-mm camera (repaired with Iranian help since), and today has about half a dozen film halls that screen American, Indian, Iranian, and Pakistani films. It has virtually no film technicians, actors, or studios. And almost no one interested in funding the making of cinema.

Barmak gathered funds from abroad: $ 25,000 were contributed by the government of Iran and $ 21,000 by the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The bulk of the crew and equipment also came from Iran. The actors are all amateurs, acting for the first time. Many actors had never been photographed. The Taliban in the film are ex-Taliban in real life.

The 13 year-old girl who plays the lead role, Marina Golbahari, had never seen a film before she acted in one. Barmak spotted her one day outside a Kabul restaurant, begging. Like thousands of children in that ravaged land, she comes from a family devastated by war, hunger, poverty and illness. Her sister was killed when a rocket exploded on their home in the Taliban years, her father has lost use of one hand to 'psychological problems', and the
child bears marks of leishmaniasis on her face, a disease spread by sand flies.


"Osama" was shot in 2002 and was premiered at Cannes this year, where it received a Special Mention in the Camera d'Or Section and was bought by United Artists for North American distribution. Screened recently at the 5th Cinefan Asian Film Festival in New Delhi, it won for young Marina the Best Actress Award.

Sudhanva Deshpande works as editor in LeftWord Books, New Delhi, India. He is also an actor and director with Jana Natya Manch, best known for its street theatre. He can be reached at deshsud@rediffmail.com.
Illustrations Afghan children etc.NOT from film

THE CONCERT
By Charu Shahane,BBC Report 2002

It was 2200 on a chilly autumn evening in Kabul and we were about to enter a partially destroyed building - one of several thousand in the city.

It was the venue for an evening of spiritual music and - hopefully - dance. Myself and six male friends and four armed bodyguards were acutely aware of how lucky we were.

The music we were about to hear is a riotous blend of South Asian and Middle Eastern instruments and vocals associated with a sect of Islam reputed to be moderate and tolerant - the Sufi sect.

This performance, like any other musical event, would have been unthinkable under the Taleban. We had heard a lot about these Sufi music evenings.

Sufi music

We had heard that the music was of the highest quality and that some of the audience would enter into a trance, some would dance and sing with the performers.

It is a form of spirituality frowned upon by the rest of Islam and so all the more astonishing for the vigour with which it has returned to Kabul.

We were keen to see this resurgence of Sufi music after six years of neglect and were determined to stay until at least two in the morning.

That would have meant returning during the curfew which locks Kabul's residents indoors from midnight to 0400 every day.

And so we needed the crucial password - which you whisper to soldiers at roadblocks so they permit you to pass.

A good-natured army officer said he couldn't possibly tell me the password but he could certainly send some men with us who knew it.

Head scarf

The venue didn't look like much - it was a two-storey house with a cavernous hole in the centre, possibly created by a bomb.

But enough of it remained for about 100 people to sit tightly packed, listening to the performers sitting on a gaudily lit stage.

We arrived after the performance had started but that is normal in this part of the world, so we were greeted warmly at the door by several young men.

I had covered my head with a scarf, as is the local custom, after a hasty conversation with the two Afghan men in our party.

Neither of them were at all convinced that I really needed to cover my head, but said I should do so just in case. Soon, I was picking my way through rows of men seated on the floor to the front of the room.

We sat down on the carpet to the strains of the traditional Afghan rubab instrument.

Although several men in the audience had looked up and stared as we filed into the room, we didn't think we had made much of an impact on the performers. We were wrong.

A man walked over to us, leaned over to one of my Afghan friends and said something in his ear.

Soon my other Afghan friend and two bodyguards were also involved in a whispered discussion while the music continued.

Tense debate

"What's the problem?" I asked my friend.

"Er... you're the problem," my friend said apologetically.

"They say they can't play with a woman in the room."

I was astonished. I had spoken to several people about the Sufi music evening I was due to attend, and not one, not even a well-known Sufi religious leader, had said women could not attend.

It was clear I was the only woman at the performance - but in Afghanistan, foreign women often find that they are the only women in public places.

While we debated what to do, my heart sank as I realised the music had stopped and members of the audience had started walking out. I was horrified at the scene I had inadvertently created.

We noticed that only one rather elderly musician had taken exception to my presence - the others were quite happy to let me stay.

When my friends ask me what the status of women is in Afghanistan it is hard to know what to say. You have men - and perhaps some women - like this man, who believe a woman makes a holy environment impure.

On the other hand you have men like my two bodyguards and my Afghan friends who used the break in the music to lecture the musicians on women's rights.

My soldier bodyguard stood tall and shouted that men and women walk side by side during the Islamic pilgrimage the Haj at Islam's holiest city Mecca - how could women possibly corrupt a holy atmosphere?

Low profile

My Afghan friend said: "She's a journalist, she's recording the culture and history of Afghanistan, and if a woman does that kind of work, is this the thanks that we should give her?"

I kept a low profile, interested in the spectacle of men arguing over a woman's right to stay.

I wondered who would win the argument - the religious conservative or the man with the gun.

Eventually, in the best traditions of cultural conflict and diplomacy, a compromise was reached.

My party ended up sitting on the roof terrace adjacent to the room, so close to the stage that we had a far better view from there than we would have had from sitting in the room.

This was enough to maintain the illusion that a woman was not in the room.

As we stepped over a low window sill to get the roof, one of the musicians put a warm coat over my shoulders.

I think it was his way of apologising, of making up for the hostile reception I had received from one of his colleagues.

The rest of the evening was magical, with many of our hosts eager to compensate for the ugly start by plying us with green tea and food.

The music and audience lived up to our expectations and we left during the curfew, with our friends from the army.

And we even got the password.