AfghanistanWith overall literacy presently estimated at no
more than 25 percent and rural female literacy in
single digits, Afghanistan has had an oral culture.
People maintain everyday information, community
historical memory, and entertainment “literature”
in memory and share it face to face. Afghan women
are vigorous custodians and important icons of
memory in the construction of social identity and
values.
As agents of memory, women participate in divi-
sions of cultural labor whereby different persons
(distinguished by age, gender, class, ethnicity, loca-
tion, education, work) may specialize in different
bodies of knowledge, communicated in different
contexts. While much of memory is verbal, some
(for example, music, crafts techniques) is commu-
nicated primarily by nonverbal performance and
imitative practice. Not all performances of memory
equip the audience in turn to transmit the specific
information communicated. In the women’s genre
of lament for the dead or in the personal experience
narratives women tell each other during their recip-
rocal gham-shàdì(Dari, sorrow and celebration) or
tapos(Pashto, inquiry) visits, women learn by par-
ticipation the sociolinguistic expectations for lis-
teners and tellers in those social events, then use
those verbal forms to claim their own social place
and perform their own memories movingly for
others on similar occasions (Grima 1992, Kieffer
1975).
Performers and listeners prize accurate memory
of specific textual content in proverbs, stories, or
songs (notwithstanding narratives’ transforma-
tions in transmission, Mills 1990). Oral tradition
communicates key social ideas, even in fictional
entertainment such as folk-tales and romances as
well as more serious, believed narratives such as
saints’ legends, or in didactic proverbs. Female and
male performance preferences vary: among Dari
(Persian) speakers in Herat City in the 1970s long,
multi-episodic romances were predominantly a
men’s genre, while both women and men would tell
folk-tales or afsànah, including international tales
(for example, Afghan variants of “Cinderella” and
“Beauty and the Beast,” told mostly by women).
While women were about equally likely to tell sto-
ries with female and male heroes, men mainly told
Memory, Women, and Community
male-centered tales (Mills 1985). Women and men
performed for family members at home; some men
did so in more public settings (shrines, bazaars, tea-
houses). Misogynist stereotypes of hypersexual,
greedy, or otherwise disorderly women are wide-
spread in tales and in proverbs, but tellers’ and lis-
teners’ constructions of female nature could be
paradoxical or resistant as well as stereotypical,
with particular tellers’ views only accessible through
interactive, context-sensitive analyses of particular
performances (Mills 1991, 2000, 2001).
The ubiquitously popular sung quatrain (Dari
chàrbaytì, Tajik Persian falak, Sakata 2002) em-
phasizes themes of love and separation. Women,
besides commanding a repertoire of traditional
marriage songs (of separation for the bride’s family
and triumph for the groom’s), enjoyed knowing
and singing numerous chàrbaytìtogether, accom-
panied by the dàyerehframe drum, at women’s
wedding parties and in informal home visits. A
singer may personalize traditional verses bemoan-
ing separation by naming absent or deceased rela-
tives in the verse, as did returned refugee women
recorded in Herat in the 1990s. Separation (of the
soul from God) is also a key theme in Sufi mysti-
cism, lending possible mystical-religious implica-
tions to verses addressed to an absent love. In
Pashto, the similarly popular two-line lyric lan∂ay,
considered women’s poetry but also composed and
sung by men, addresses themes including love, loss,
honor, and historical events. From the 1950s,
female and male performers on the radio (and later
on cassettes) added to local people’s memorized
repertoire and gave women, who rarely attended
public musical performances, access to professional
singers’ repertoires. The Taliban’s banning of wed-
ding and entertainment music on religious grounds
between 1996 and 2001 may not have much
affected the cultural survival of these short songs,
performed by women and men in private and often
already romantically opposed to public proprieties.
Three decades of warfare and displacement did
affect women’s status as objects of memory as well
as their repertoire and performance occasions. The
Marxist regime rallied Afghan women to revolu-
tion, invoking female icons of Afghan history
(poets and martial heroines), stressing the need for
activist women to help right injustice and build a
socialist nation. Women’s vulnerability to propa-