Paradise an Afghan rap singer who focuses on women’s rights and gender equality issues has recently returned to Afghanistan but faces huge amounts of difficulty; she was recently beaten and had to make her album in Tajikistan. In one of her songs Nalestan, which is dedicated to Afghan women, she sings: ‘I will get my rights whilst I am alive.’
Phillip Toledano has sourced censored packaging from Iran for his photography project ‘Absent Portraits.’ He says: Packaging in which the women have been erased. Inked out, individually, by hand. I remove the blacked-out figure from the surrounding image, and a transformation occurs. The censor becomes an artist. And the censored figure becomes a portrait. A portrait not of a person, but of absence. Of suppression. A portrait of a point of view. The censor, whose job it is to erase, becomes the person who makes us look.’
Karima Bennoune has just published her first book: “Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism.” Inspired by her father Mahfoud Bennoune’s work in Algeria, it tells the stories of progressive people (journalists, artists, women’s rights activists…) who have risked everything to stand up to extremism and terror – stories rarely heard in the West. She interviewed nearly 300 people of Muslim heritage from almost 30 countries – from Afghanistan to Mali – for her book.
Aryana, one of the judges of an Afghan singing competition The Voice, has received threats for appearing on TV unveiled. In an interview she says: “Being a woman, the problem is… whatever she does in Afghanistan is a problem.”
Here’s her song about the plight of Afghan women.
It ends with:
I am the subject of stoning by the nation
I am a dishonour to culture and tradition
I am a black mark on faith and religion
I am the Lady of the Land of Fire!
