AFGHANISTAN

"(…) I remembered one thing that had troubled me twenty years earlier when I had stayed in a Berber region in Morocco’s High Atlas: the most coveted status in terms of female autonomy was that of the war widow. This status conferred, on top of genuine freedom, the right to a pension! In Afghanistan, there is no real freedom, and even less, anything like a pension, but there’s no shortage of widows. As a result, it turned out to be easier to persuade widows to pose for photos and drawings here.

The destinies of these women told me about the last twenty-five years of war: the widow whose husband was executed by Russians, the one who lost hers to American collateral damage, the one whose husband was assassinated by the Taliban, another whose husband was killed by a bazooka during the civil war, or else the one separated from her husband who’s imprisoned in Guantanamo. Yet how many times did a cousin, a father, a brother or a son interrupt our posing sessions. 'He said no!' my interpreter would invariably translate, as if there were any need to."

Extract from Zoé Zoé, Femmes du mondes, 2007, Éditions Gallimard