Update November 2021
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/afghan-girl-national-geographic-italy-scli-intl/index.html
This Quilting Mama Post from July 2015...........
Her name is Sharbat Gula, but for the tech savvy print media consumed First World, she was simply known as "The Afghan Girl". Her image as seen here was taken in 1985 by National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry in a refugee camp in Pakistan when she was about 13 years old. For the next 17 years all the world had was her image to represent the plight of children in war zones the world over.
Thousands of miles away and living a life of privilege and peace, I saw that original National Geographic cover and remember being consumed with The Afghan Girl. My inner dialogue was full of preteen questions (for I was 12 at the time). "Did she have parents? Sibings? What does it mean to be in a refugee camp? Where is Pakistan? Wow, she is my age, I wonder if she has any friends there." My thoughts about her and her life came and went for many years ahead as we learned of the struggles in the Middle East.
Finally, in April of 2002, the Afghan Girl was found. 17 years later, she still lived in the war-torn countryside of Afghanistan with her husband and three daughters. She spoke little, but said much in the interview. Below is the full text from Steve McCurry's piece about his search for her.
I remember as a newlywed in 2002 and 29 years old, that I dreamed of having my own children, but couldn't ever imagine having three! Her oldest was 13 already! Then I was stopped and saddened by the idea that Sharbat Gula herself cannot read and that all she wants is education for her daughters. Some harsh realities of life come in waves. The idea of children NOT being educated at least to the level of basic literacy was new to me...or at least it truly sunk in with this moment, just as the idea of children living in a war zone was a revelation to me back in 1985 when I saw Sharbat for the first time. I felt deeply for this woman I did not know.
Finally in the Spring of 2015 at a the Northern Star Quilters' Guild Show in Somers, New York, Sharbat Gula returned and completely stunned me. I hadn't thought about her and her life in years, but here she was. All the feelings of connection and "relationship" (if you will) came flooding back. Quilt artist Marla Silbernagel of Warwick, NY created this piece during a workshop with Leni Weiner. The goal being to study color relationships as she recreated the original photograph.
I still don't really know what all this means, but I can say that Sharbat Gula's images from 1985, 2002 and 2015 have made me revisit many questions I still carry about the nature of war, the effects of war on the lives of children in war zones and beyond, our response to others even those who live on the other side of the planet, and how we can live daily keeping all of this in mind.
How many others has Sharbat's life impacted? We will never know, but I most certainly am thankful for my connection with her.
***
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/index-text
A Life Revealed
Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story.
By Cathy Newman
Photograph by Steve McCurry
She remembers
the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her
anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed
before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been
photographed since.
The photographer
remembers the moment too. The light was soft. The refugee camp in
Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her
first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he
could take her picture. “I didn’t think the photograph of the
girl would be different from anything else I shot that day,” he
recalls of that morning in 1984 spent documenting the ordeal of
Afghanistan’s refugees.
The portrait by
Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the
heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her
eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you
can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known
around National Geographic as the “Afghan girl,” and for 17 years
no one knew her name.
In January a
team from National Geographic Television & Film’s EXPLORER
brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes.
They showed her picture around Nasir Bagh, the still standing refugee
camp near Peshawar where the photograph had been made. A teacher from
the school claimed to know her name. A young woman named Alam Bibi
was located in a village nearby, but McCurry decided it wasn’t her.
No, said a man
who got wind of the search. He knew the girl in the picture.
They had lived at the camp together as children. She had returned to
Afghanistan years ago, he said, and now lived in the mountains near
Tora Bora. He would go get her.
It took three
days for her to arrive. Her village is a six-hour drive and
three-hour hike across a border that swallows lives. When McCurry saw
her walk into the room, he thought to himself: This is her.
Names have
power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is
Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the
Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her
eyes—then and now—burn with ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or
even 30. No one, not even she, knows for sure. Stories shift like
sand in a place where no records exist.
Time and
hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The
geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not
softened. “She’s had a hard life,” said McCurry. “So many
here share her story.” Consider the numbers. Twenty-three years of
war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: This is the story of
Afghanistan in the past quarter century.
Now, consider
this photograph of a young girl with sea green eyes. Her eyes
challenge ours. Most of all, they disturb. We cannot turn away.
“There is not
one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war,” a young
Afghan merchant said in the 1985 National Geographic story
that appeared with Sharbat’s photograph on the cover. She was a
child when her country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion.
A carpet of destruction smothered countless villages like hers. She
was perhaps six when Soviet bombing killed her parents. By day the
sky bled terror. At night the dead were buried. And always, the sound
of planes, stabbing her with dread.
“We left
Afghanistan because of the fighting,” said her brother, Kashar
Khan, filling in the narrative of her life. He is a straight line of
a man with a raptor face and piercing eyes. “The Russians were
everywhere. They were killing people. We had no choice.”
Shepherded by
their grandmother, he and his four sisters walked to Pakistan. For a
week they moved through mountains covered in snow, begging for
blankets to keep warm.
“You never
knew when the planes would come,” he recalled. “We hid in caves.”
The journey that
began with the loss of their parents and a trek across mountains by
foot ended in a refugee camp tent living with strangers.
“Rural people
like Sharbat find it difficult to live in the cramped surroundings of
a refugee camp,” explained Rahimullah Yusufzai, a respected
Pakistani journalist who acted as interpreter for McCurry and the
television crew. “There is no privacy. You live at the mercy of
other people.” More than that, you live at the mercy of the
politics of other countries. “The Russian invasion destroyed our
lives,” her brother said.
It is the
ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. Invasion. Resistance. Invasion. Will
it ever end? “Each change of government brings hope,” said
Yusufzai. “Each time, the Afghan people have found themselves
betrayed by their leaders and by outsiders professing to be their
friends and saviors.”
In the
mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to
her village in the foothills of mountains veiled by snow. To live in
this earthen-colored village at the end of a thread of path means to
scratch out an existence, nothing more. There are terraces planted
with corn, wheat, and rice, some walnut trees, a stream that spills
down the mountain (except in times of drought), but no school,
clinic, roads, or running water.
Here is the bare
outline of her day. She rises before sunrise and prays. She fetches
water from the stream. She cooks, cleans, does laundry. She cares for
her children; they are the center of her life. Robina is 13. Zahida
is three. Alia, the baby, is one. A fourth daughter died in infancy.
Sharbat has never known a happy day, her brother says, except perhaps
the day of her marriage.
Her husband,
Rahmat Gul, is slight in build, with a smile like the gleam of a
lantern at dusk. She remembers being married at 13. No, he says, she
was 16. The match was arranged.
He lives in
Peshawar (there are few jobs in Afghanistan) and works in a bakery.
He bears the burden of medical bills; the dollar a day he earns
vanishes like smoke. Her asthma, which cannot tolerate the heat and
pollution of Peshawar in summer, limits her time in the city and with
her husband to the winter. The rest of the year she lives in the
mountains.
At the age of
13, Yusufzai, the journalist, explained, she would have gone into
purdah, the secluded existence followed by many Islamic women once
they reach puberty.
“Women vanish
from the public eye,” he said. In the street she wears a
plum-colored burka, which walls her off from the world and from the
eyes of any man other than her husband. “It is a beautiful thing to
wear, not a curse,” she says.
Faced by
questions, she retreats into the black shawl wrapped around her face,
as if by doing so she might will herself to evaporate. The eyes flash
anger. It is not her custom to subject herself to the questions of
strangers.
Had she ever
felt safe?
”No. But life
under the Taliban was better. At least there was peace and order.”
Had she ever
seen the photograph of herself as a girl?
“No.”
She can write
her name, but cannot read. She harbors the hope of education for her
children. “I want my daughters to have skills,” she said. “I
wanted to finish school but could not. I was sorry when I had to
leave.”
Education, it is
said, is the light in the eye. There is no such light for her. It is
possibly too late for her 13-year-old daughter as well, Sharbat Gula
said. The two younger daughters still have a chance.
The reunion
between the woman with green eyes and the photographer was quiet. On
the subject of married women, cultural tradition is strict. She must
not look—and certainly must not smile—at a man who is not her
husband. She did not smile at McCurry. Her expression, he said, was
flat. She cannot understand how her picture has touched so many. She
does not know the power of those eyes.
Such knife-thin
odds. That she would be alive. That she could be found. That she
could endure such loss. Surely, in the face of such bitterness the
spirit could atrophy. How, she was asked, had she survived?
The answer came
wrapped in unshakable certitude.
“It was,”
said Sharbat Gula, “the will of God.”
