WUNRN
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/index-text
Afghan Girl’s Haunting Photo – Finding Her Years Later &
Telling the Realities of Her Life
Her eyes
have captivated the world since she appeared on our National Geographic cover
in 1985. Now we can tell her story.
By Cathy Newman - Photograph by
Steve McCurry
She
remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her
anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until
they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.
The
photographer remembers the moment too. The light was soft. The refugee camp in
Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her first.
Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he could take her
picture. “I didn’t think the photograph of the girl would be different from
anything else I shot that day,” he recalls of that morning in 1984 spent
documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan’s refugees.
The portrait
by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and
in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They
are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land
drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the “Afghan girl,”
and for 17 years no one knew her name.
In January a
team from National Geographic Television & Film’s EXPLORER brought McCurry
to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes. They showed her picture
around Nasir Bagh, the still standing refugee camp near Peshawar where the
photograph had been made. A teacher from the school claimed to know her name. A
young woman named Alam Bibi was located in a village nearby, but McCurry
decided it wasn’t her.
No, said a
man who got wind of the search. He knew the girl in the
picture. They had lived at the camp together as children. She had returned to
Afghanistan years ago, he said, and now lived in the mountains near Tora Bora.
He would go get her.
It took
three days for her to arrive. Her village is a six-hour drive and three-hour
hike across a border that swallows lives. When McCurry saw her walk into the
room, he thought to himself: This is her.
Names have
power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun,
that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are
only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes—then and now—burn with
ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30. No one, not even she, knows for
sure. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist.
Time and
hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of
her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened. “She’s had a
hard life,” said McCurry. “So many here share her story.” Consider the numbers.
Twenty-three years of war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: This is
the story of Afghanistan in the past quarter century.
Now,
consider this photograph of a young girl with sea green eyes. Her eyes
challenge ours. Most of all, they disturb. We cannot turn away.
“There is
not one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war,” a young Afghan
merchant said in the 1985 National Geographic story that
appeared with Sharbat’s photograph on the cover. She was a child when her
country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion. A carpet of destruction
smothered countless villages like hers. She was perhaps six when Soviet bombing
killed her parents. By day the sky bled terror. At night the dead were buried.
And always, the sound of planes, stabbing her with dread.
“We left
Afghanistan because of the fighting,” said her brother, Kashar Khan, filling in
the narrative of her life. He is a straight line of a man with a raptor face
and piercing eyes. “The Russians were everywhere. They were killing people. We had
no choice.”
Shepherded
by their grandmother, he and his four sisters walked to Pakistan. For a week
they moved through mountains covered in snow, begging for blankets to keep
warm.
“You never
knew when the planes would come,” he recalled. “We hid in caves.”
The journey
that began with the loss of their parents and a trek across mountains by foot
ended in a refugee camp tent living with strangers.
“Rural
people like Sharbat find it difficult to live in the cramped surroundings of a
refugee camp,” explained Rahimullah Yusufzai, a respected Pakistani journalist
who acted as interpreter for McCurry and the television crew. “There is no
privacy. You live at the mercy of other people.” More than that, you live at
the mercy of the politics of other countries. “The Russian invasion destroyed
our lives,” her brother said.
It is the
ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. Invasion. Resistance. Invasion. Will it ever
end? “Each change of government brings hope,” said Yusufzai. “Each time, the
Afghan people have found themselves betrayed by their leaders and by outsiders
professing to be their friends and saviors.”
In the
mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to her village
in the foothills of mountains veiled by snow. To live in this earthen-colored
village at the end of a thread of path means to scratch out an existence,
nothing more. There are terraces planted with corn, wheat, and rice, some
walnut trees, a stream that spills down the mountain (except in times of
drought), but no school, clinic, roads, or running water.
Here is the
bare outline of her day. She rises before sunrise and prays. She fetches water
from the stream. She cooks, cleans, does laundry. She cares for her children;
they are the center of her life. Robina is 13. Zahida is three. Alia, the baby,
is one. A fourth daughter died in infancy. Sharbat has never known a happy day,
her brother says, except perhaps the day of her marriage.
Her husband,
Rahmat Gul, is slight in build, with a smile like the gleam of a lantern at
dusk. She remembers being married at 13. No, he says, she was 16. The match was
arranged.
He lives in
Peshawar (there are few jobs in Afghanistan) and works in a bakery. He bears
the burden of medical bills; the dollar a day he earns vanishes like smoke. Her
asthma, which cannot tolerate the heat and pollution of Peshawar in summer,
limits her time in the city and with her husband to the winter. The rest of the
year she lives in the mountains.
At the age
of 13, Yusufzai, the journalist, explained, she would have gone into purdah,
the secluded existence followed by many Islamic women once they reach puberty.
“Women
vanish from the public eye,” he said. In the street she wears a plum-colored
burka, which walls her off from the world and from the eyes of any man other
than her husband. “It is a beautiful thing to wear, not a curse,” she says.
Faced by
questions, she retreats into the black shawl wrapped around her face, as if by
doing so she might will herself to evaporate. The eyes flash anger. It is not
her custom to subject herself to the questions of strangers.
Had she ever
felt safe?
”No. But
life under the Taliban was better. At least there was peace and order.”
Had she ever
seen the photograph of herself as a girl?
“No.”
She can
write her name, but cannot read. She harbors the hope of education for her
children. “I want my daughters to have skills,” she said. “I wanted to finish
school but could not. I was sorry when I had to leave.”
Education,
it is said, is the light in the eye. There is no such light for her. It is
possibly too late for her 13-year-old daughter as well, Sharbat Gula said. The
two younger daughters still have a chance.
The reunion
between the woman with green eyes and the photographer was quiet. On the
subject of married women, cultural tradition is strict. She must not look—and
certainly must not smile—at a man who is not her husband. She did not smile at
McCurry. Her expression, he said, was flat. She cannot understand how her
picture has touched so many. She does not know the power of those eyes.
Such
knife-thin odds. That she would be alive. That she could be found. That she
could endure such loss. Surely, in the face of such bitterness the spirit could
atrophy. How, she was asked, had she survived?
The answer
came wrapped in unshakable certitude.
“It was,” said Sharbat Gula, “the will of God."