The Underground Girls of Kabul

I was really excited when a won a copy of Jenny Nordberg's book The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan (#434) from Good Reads.  However, the book turned out to be such a disappointment I gave up on it about half way through, a rare occurrence for me.  Maybe the early positive buzz about it was from critics who wished to appear politically correct - a new view of feminism from one of the most restrictive societies in the world.  It just seemed rather pointless to me.

Jenny Nordberg is a Swedish journalist who happened to chance upon what she hoped would turn out to be a scandalous story while she was interviewing a female Afghani politician; one of her four daughters was presented to the world as a boy.  She was given a boy's name, dressed like a boy and given all the privileges of a boy.  Why?  Were there more like her out there in Afghan society?  That's the story Nordberg set out to discover.  As it turns out, it's actually a fairly common phenomenon in Afghanistan where choosing to pass off a daughter as a son can provide the family with many benefits, as long as that child is returned to her true gender before puberty.  After all, the girl's virginity is still her sole worth and the family's only bargaining chip in this patriarchal society.

Let's be clear about one thing.  Ms. Nordberg is a journalist, not a social scientist.  She does report on a previously unacknowledged facet of Afghan domestic life, but her analysis and  broad, sweeping generalizations about those facts are what I question.  She similarly makes negative generalizations about Americans and aspects of American social life, some of which are warranted, but others are equally off target.  That made me wonder just how accurate and unbiased her reporting of Afghan's women's lives is, based on a limited number of interviews.  Since a foundation of the Afghani culture is hospitality to strangers, did her interview subjects tell Ms. Nordberg what they thought she wanted to hear about such an intimate and private topic they can't even bring themselves to discuss amongst themselves or were they telling her the truth as they experienced it?

Did Ms. Nordberg pursue this topic with any motive in mind other than money?  Does she expect to make these women's lives better, or stop the practice altogether?  I don't think from reading this and other books about the region that this is possible or even realistic anytime in the foreseeable future.

In this case, the cover art work is the perfect metaphor for the contents of The Underground Girls of Kabul.  You can color the girl's face to indicate she's passing as a boy.  You can also color me disappointed.