WHY SITARA HAS HAD TO DISGUISE HERSELF AS A BOY FOR A DECADE
Male children deemed more useful than girls in patriarchal Afghanistan
When I put on boys’ clothes I wish I had a brother, then my dreams would have been fulfilled SITARA WAFADAR Bacha posh, 18
Sitara Wafadar yearns for long hair like other girls. But the Afghan teenager has disguised herself as a boy for more than a decade, forced by her parents to be the son they never had.
With five sisters and no brothers, Sitara, 18, lives by the gender-twisting custom known as “bacha poshi”, which in Dari refers to a girl “dressed as a boy”, enabling her to safely perform the duties of a son in the patriarchal country.
She lives with her impoverished family in a mud-brick house in a village in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar and has pretended to be a boy for most of her life.
Every morning she puts on the baggy shirt and trousers and flip-flops typically worn by Afghan males. Sometimes she covers her short brown hair with a scarf and deepens her voice to conceal her gender.
“I never think that I am a girl,” Sitara says, at the brick factory where she and her elderly father work six days a week. They are bonded labourers who work to repay money borrowed from the owner and to feed their family.
“My father always says ‘Sitara is like my eldest son’. Sometimes I attend funerals as his eldest son.” This is something she would never be allowed to do as a girl.
Bacha poshi has a long history in conservative Afghanistan, where boys are valued more highly than girls and women are often confined to the home.
Normally it is families with no male heir who make a daughter dress as a boy so she can carry out the duties of a son without being harassed, or worse.
But some girls choose to pose as boys so they can enjoy the freedom the young men take for granted in a country that treats women as second-class citizens.
While most bacha posh, as they are known, stop dressing as boys after reaching puberty, Sitara says she keeps wearing male clothing at the brick kiln “to protect myself”.
“When I go to work most people do not realise that I am a girl,” Sitara says. “If they realised that an 18-year-old girl was working morning to evening in a brick factory then I would encounter many problems. I could even be kidnapped.”
Sitara started working at the factory when she was 8, following in the footsteps of her four older sisters, who also made bricks instead of going to school until they married, after which they stayed at home. She makes 500 bricks a day for about US$2 (Dh7).
From 7am to 5pm she crouches on the ground preparing mud and clay, before pushing it into brick moulds under the hot sun.
“I don’t feel ashamed about what I am doing but people my age tell me, ‘You have reached puberty and now you don’t have to work at a brick factory’,” Sitara says. “But what should I do? I don’t have any other choice.”
Her father, Noor, says Allah did not give him a son, leaving him with no choice but to force his daughter to dress as a boy and work.
The family say they owe 25,000 Afghanis (Dh1,306) to the factory owner and to relatives from whom they borrowed to cover medical expenses for Sitara’s diabetic mother.
“If I had a son I would not have faced all these problems and my daughter’s life would be peaceful and prosperous,” Noor says. “All the responsibility is on my and Sitara’s shoulders. We have to provide for the family and pay back the loans.”
Bacha poshi tends to be followed in “particularly conservative areas” of Afghanistan, says Kabul University sociology professor Baryalai Fetrat.
But after years of dressing as boys, the girls can be left feeling confused about their gender identity and status in the male-dominated society.
“Girls find it difficult to go back to their normal self or act as a submissive wife to their husbands, which can lead to depression and also domestic violence,” Prof Fetrat says.
Sitara’s mother, Fatima, wishes her daughter could wear female clothes and stay at home but she needs her to “bring groceries, take me to the doctor and do other work because my husband is old”.
While Sitara recognises that her situation is “unfair and unjust”, she is resigned to it mainly because her younger sister, who is 13, would “face the same fate as me” if she stopped.
“I will do the hard work because I don’t want my younger sister dressing as a boy and working at the factory,” she says. “If I don’t work we will face a lot of hardship and problems.”
But even after years of acting as a boy, Sitara still finds herself imagining what it would be like if she had a brother and could be free to have long hair and go to school.
“When I put on boys’ clothes I wish I had a brother, then my dreams would have been fulfilled,” she says.