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A Time Woman of the Year, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Change Maker and honouree on the 2022 BBC 100 Women list, Zahra Joya is a courageous journalist and the founder of Rukhshana Media, a company telling the stories of Afghan women.
Zahra has worked tirelessly – and fearlessly – for over a decade, reporting on crimes against humanity, gender-based oppression and the brutality faced by Afghan women and girls for simply existing.
It’s a career that’s led to Zahra fleeing her country and her family, airlifted to live in exile in London since 2021. But she refuses to be silenced, detailing her story to date in The Vanishing Girl Of Kabul, co-written with journalist Amie Ferris-Rotman.
Part memoir, part investigative reporting, the book starts with a brief timeline of events that created, shaped and oppressed Afghanistan. From the first invasion by Alexander the Great to the Taliban banning girls from attending school in 2022, it’s a timeline that sets the tone for the rest of the story, which uses Zahra’s own experiences to chart how women and girls in the country have been abandoned on a global scale, especially by the West.
Told in a non-linear fashion, the narrative opens in August 2021. Zahra is at a hair salon in Kabul, watching a television in the corner of the room. The screen shows the Taliban taking control of two more provinces, the creep of authoritarian rule coming ever closer.
As a prime target for the Taliban, her fear is palpable on the page as she rushes to evade capture. We also feel Zahra’s pain at the thought of being a burden to her family, or being a risk to their safety.
From here, we jump backwards, returning to Zahra’s childhood and meeting her mother Aqila. With five daughters and only two sons, Aqila was mocked, chided and chastised. But, unexpectedly, her chance at seeing a son go to school came under the Taliban’s first rule in the 1990s.
Zahra watched enviously as her uncles were educated at the local mosque, until her family decided to disguise her as a boy. This ruse was common enough to have its own term: a girl who dresses and passes as a boy was known as a bacha posh.
So Zahra became Mohammad, learning how to inhabit her life as a boy and feeling “carefree” for the first time. She was able to stand up for herself, trade opinions with the men in her life and walk the streets at night without fear.
“Being Mohammad had given me more than education. He had given me permission to exist,” Zahra writes.
It arguably set the foundation for her later career, giving her the confidence to challenge Taliban officials to their faces.
This is where The Vanishing Girl Of Kabul is at its strongest. Zahra’s laser focus on the implications of Taliban rule on women and girls hammers home the colossal impact of gender-based oppression.
Zahra lists each new law as women are systematically removed from public life, barred from studying, playing sports, acting in TV dramas, travelling or attending health clinics alone, obtaining driving licences, or going to parks and gyms.
And it’s not just the laws themselves, but the ripple effects. With no women allowed to work in medicine as doctors, nurses or midwives, girls and pregnant women would die as male medical professionals weren’t allowed to examine them.
Boys were also impacted, as schools haemorrhaged teachers, schooling became even more rooted in religious violence, and they saw the women in their lives dehumanised, all of which primes them for radicalisation.
The narrative can become hard to keep track of, moving back and forth in time between Kabul, Bamiyan and London, but Zahra’s framing of events in the wider political landscape roots the story.
A later chapter lists how women’s rights are being rolled back at an alarming rate around the world, joining the dots between how global decisions continue to leave countries like Afghanistan in the lurch.
The US-led invasion in 2001 led to progress, but when their focus shifted to other countries and other wars, Zahra writes that their condemnation of what she calls ‘Taliban 2.0’ was not accompanied by any consequences.
Promises made by the West were broken or forgotten, and Afghan women were left to fend for themselves.
Describing an encounter in a drug rehabilitation centre, she compares the feeling to addiction treatment: “It requires many months of consistent, unwavering support. ‘The worst thing you can do is give them hope, only to abandon it halfway,’ [the doctor] told me. Like an addict on the fragile path to recovery, Afghanistan had begun to spread its wings, only to be forsaken and sent staggering back into ruin.”
In London, Zahra remains committed to giving a voice to Afghan women, rebuilding a life with her family in this unknown country.
It’s the first time Zahra saw women printed on money, and consequences for men: “I always understood that women have rights, but here they seemed to honour them,” she writes.
Thankfully, The Vanishing Girl Of Kabul never descends into trauma porn. No country is wholly ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and Zahra’s story isn’t written with the cloying sentimentality of other refugee memoirs, where hurdles and trauma have been overcome.
For Zahra, there is still work to be done. Although she is the thread of this story, she is part of a much bigger picture, where there can be no epilogue until women and girls, in Afghanistan and around the world, get the rights that they deserve.
As Zahra quotes towards the end of the book: “‘Women everywhere are under the same sky.’ In that moment, I understood that one woman’s suffering is the pain of all women. One woman’s resistance is hope for all women.”
Isabella Silvers is a multi-award-winning editor and journalist, having written for Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Refinery 29 and more. She also writes a weekly newsletter on mixed-race identity, titled Mixed Messages
Follow her on Instagram: @izzymks
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