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Whatever Happened to the Afghan Girl?
Remember her? I do. It was 1985. Mr. She and I were still in Pittsburgh and had not yet moved out to the country. I was working for MCI Mail. And I still eagerly awaited the monthly delivery of National Geographic in my mailbox. It wasn’t woke. It didn’t lecture. And every month, it contained dozens of fascinating articles and vignettes about the human and the animal world. Yes, sometimes photos of bare-breasted women held one’s eye. And other times, primitive man’s “meat and two veg” were on–umm–prominent display. Somehow, though, we persisted through it all without blushing or averting our eyes, and along the way we read, we learned, and we delighted in the variety and the scope of this wonderful world.
But, Lord. I remember that face on the cover. Those cheekbones. That red scarf. The grubbiness. Her wariness in front of the camera. And above all, those arresting green eyes.
She was a teenager. A refugee from the Soviet bombing of her Afghan village who’d walked through the mountains with her family to the relative safety of a Pakistan refugee camp at the age of five or six in a parodic replay of the Von Trapp family’s escape from Hitler over the Alps. God only knows what atrocities she’d been subjected to or had seen.
She, anonymous at the time–just a fortuitous snap–made her photographer famous. And we didn’t even know her name.
Seventeen years later, we did. In 2002, Steve McCurry–who’d had an itch in his heart for almost two decades–found her in an Afghan village where she’d been living since her return to her native country in 1992. Her identity was confirmed via facial and iris recognition studies, and at this point, at the age of about 30, our darling looked like this:
Married somewhere in her mid-teens to Ramat Gul, Sharbat (Say Her Name!) had three living daughters, was a devout Muslim, and was reluctant to be photographed because of Islamic proscriptions against it. Still, she made the cover of NatGeo once more, becoming one of the exceedingly rare “double cover” subjects.
And then she disappeared again.
Until 2017, when National Geographic intruded into her life for the third time. By then, her husband had died of Hepatitis C, a disease for which Sharbat had also tested positive. She was 45 years old with four children, and with no special achievements to recommend her except a single photograph taken more than three decades previous.
Powerful stuff, in the ultra-connected twenty-first century.
And so, in 2017, to forestall a descent into even more dire circumstances (and probably a public excoriation of the state that had allowed it), she was gifted a home by the Afghan government, together with a $700-a-month stipend for living expenses and medicine. It’s the first actual home she’d ever known, and although her road to it had been rocky and had, at one time or another included the threat of imprisonment for simply trying to survive, she seemed–in this 2017 story–to be content to be part of a burgeoning Afghan minority–the 17% of native Afghan women who own their own home. She’d enrolled her daughters in school. She–an illiterate countrywoman–was thinking about becoming a spokeswoman for the oppressed: “My message to all my sisters is not to marry their daughters at a young age, Let them complete their education the same as your sons do.” (No argument there. She may not be literate, but she’s not dumb Bless. Bismillah.)
And yet today, I find myself drowning in pity and sadness for the fate of this woman, one whose image and circumstances were used for most of her life to enrich and enfame others. And who became, eventually, the star of what is essentially an Afghan reality show in the service of those who were afraid to look bad–“See, we took care of the ‘Afghan Girl!’–with gifts and largesse that she hadn’t really earned, probably didn’t understand, and no doubt didn’t know what to do with–just because those in power couldn’t bear the thought that they’d be ripped apart on Twitter for letting her descend into poverty and anonymity yet again.
I wonder what’s next for her.
And I hope she’s OK.
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I had her earlier picture posted on a bulletin board for years because of those eyes. People sometimes asked me why, but those eyes are arresting.
I did see a later picture of her, not the one you’ve posted, but at about the same age.
Yes. To those of us of a “certain age” (apologies), she was something of an icon.
Lol. I’m not of a certain age; I’m 70.
Yeah. You’ve mentioned that before. I’ll be 67 next month.
See? SEE?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37923826
A spring chicken.
My wife and I are making plans to go up north next year. We’ve not seen Niagara or New England. I’d like to see She. Is that possible?
Sure. That would be great. I’m in SW PA, about 40 miles SW of Pittsburgh, right on the way to Erie/Niagara. When the time approaches, PM me, and we’ll figure it out. Hooray!
Yeah. That’s mentioned in one of the links on my post. At some point she faked an ID. Maybe Pakistan gave her a break too.
I still hope she’s OK.
Thank you, @zafar, for posting the link. Such a sad story, but probably typical of so many people in that part of the world.
I remember when I cherished my collection of National Geographics for their photography, and I remember the original cover.
And I guess I’m the youngster in age claims since I am 61.
Damn, I miss what National Geographic was.
Except that, far too often, they kept the roads out of their photos.
I’m not sure what you mean. All I remember are memorable photographs and factual commentary. Or at least not obviously biased commentary.
I also remember being told that they took about 20,000 photographs per assignment, although writing that, 2,000 seems more likely.
In any case, the lesson is, if you want exceptional photographs, take many of your subject.
It’s been going woke for a long time, but I don’t remember just when I first noticed.
As for the photography, they may show beautiful shots of people in a village of “primitive” architecture in remote Africa, but not of how that village connects, physically, to its neighborhood and the rest of the world. (I like photos of roads and roadsides.) They also keep utility lines out of their photos, which means they go to a lot of work, but that doesn’t bother me so much. It’s even to be commended, in a way. But not showing us the local roadsides? Blech.
It may be different now; I haven’t looked at an issue in quite a while.
So the west thinks that the million-plus Afghan “refugees” who will swarm their nations are going to be the pretty green-eyed ones (Get her a modeling contract! Cover of Vogue!), not the 99 percent who favor making sharia the official law of their country. Now, that Pew report is from 2013, but since all these “refugees” have seen the collapse by the woke west it might stand to reason that they might want a little order imposed. Certainly more Ilan Omar and Rashida Tlaib types in government. Diversity is our strength…or our downfall.
I think much of [America] is fearful that the swarms trying to get out of Afghanistan are exactly those who favor making Sharia the official law of their [adopted] country, and that the pell-mell flight of many of them may not be for honorable or altruistic motives.
I’m not as reflexively averse as are some, to the sight of “military-age males” claiming to be friends of the US and trying to leave. After all, I suspect that almost all translation and other native support to the US in Afghanistan actually came from military-age males.* But I’d certainly like to have seen those folks evacuated in an orderly manner while we still knew who they were, rather than having to triage them out from a screaming rabble.
*Saw a statistic the other day that about 65% of the population of Afghanistan is under the age of 25. That means that 2/3 of the population was 4-years old or younger, or just not born, on September 11, 2001. That’s a sobering thought.
Why would that make them leave? Sharia is likely to be the law of Afghanistan shortly.
Anyway, an interview of the historian and journalist William Dalrymple (one of yours but part of the time also ours) on the subject:
Lots of at the very least anecdotal evidence that crime in Germany is driven by “migrants.” Here’s a recent one,
The brothers probably thought that their motives were honorable.
You must be partial to sheep and inquisitive, and possibly stowaway cats.
There seem to be an awful lot of people in the world who “flee” from things only to insist on recreating the same thing somewhere else. It’s not always an international problem, as can be seen in those who flee in droves from blue states to red states, and who then insist on turning their new locale into an over-regulated, left-wing dump just like the one they left. Prompting the increasingly popular bumper sticker in some areas: “To those who’ve moved here from California–Remember you’re a refugee, not a missionary.”
When the definition of “refugee” expands to include all those who find their lives their native country limiting or difficult in any way, and requires all such people to be admitted to a Western democracy so they can have “better” lives, then perhaps it’s not surprising that they bring with them what Dad would call the ‘soil-ball’ of their own culture and background, and nurture it, often at the expense of their adopted country whose own culture they have no intention of blending into.
LOL. Cat. Thief.
PS: Psymon psends his love.
Ilhan Omar, a refugee from Somalia to Kenya, left Kenya to come to the US, and she’s set on destroying what part of it she can. You are making an argument based on rationality to deny irrational behavior.
Yes, they sometimes left out the less attractive aspects of village and national–to coin a word–“infrastructure,” and so perhaps they glossed over some of the challenges of those primitive cultures. But I think they did a tremendous service in showing a lot of people worlds they’d never otherwise see, or even be able to imagine, decades before such things, with the advent of instant electronic communications, became even remotely possible. The birds of Costa Rica. The top of Everest. The “neck ring” women of Burma. Masai warriors. Pygmies. Reindeer. Laplanders. The Mongolian steppes. The secret lives of insects.
And there was the time I opened an issue, looked at a photo of the author, thought “Hello, I know that face,” to discover that one of Dad’s fellow Colonial Service officers from Nigeria had travelled from Nigeria to Libya along an ancient camel caravan road together with some Touregs and a couple dozen dromedaries (the expedition was funded by NG). He’s since made the preservation of such routes and the welfare of the wild camels his life’s work.
I used to love National Geographic too! I used to receive it monthly until they became global warming idiots. I still have all my issues, which must be twenty years worth or more, stashed in the basement somewhere.
I was wondering about that iconic woman too. I only remembered she went to Pakistan. I did not know she was back in Afghanistan and was given a home. Thanks for that
Gee, She, your writing here was not just good, it was superb You should be writing for a top magazine, if they exist any more
I used to go to the library in the 50’s and sit for hours looking at the WWII issues.
Me too. I’m 59.
Me too. I canceled my subscription.
Doing that kind of photography decades ago did indeed show us new places and people. But in more recent times it could have done more.