Windows accompany our lives, punctuate them, bright or shady depending on the light, the seasons and our moods. Mediation between interior and exterior, they embody openness or confinement, escape or refuge. Along her recent paths, our collaborator Monique Durand opens a few windows overlooking here or elsewhere, very contemporary or reminiscent of History. Sixth of seven articles in our Windows series.
There are windows that curve our existence forever. But she barely saw them, drunk with fatigue, traumatized, half dead. Small double-walled watertight windows, portholes below which she was seated, in the military machine that carried her from Kabul to Paris with hundreds of other women, men and children fleeing the Taliban, all packed in like sardines , sitting on the floor of the aircraft.
Fatima was too exhausted to say goodbye to the world she was leaving, perhaps forever. Hadn’t been able to send a word to her mother to tell her: I’m gone. Didn’t even have the resources to say goodbye to herself. Because she would become someone else.
For a while now, she called herself Fati. “Fatima is the first name of the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. I wanted to get away from anything religious. I decided that my name would be Fati. Exit Fatima.
Fati, then. 22 years old. Eyes like living springs, a candor to disarm a legion. She is no longer afraid of anything after experiencing the dread of her departure from Kabul. I met her at the Intermondes center in La Rochelle, France, where she was accepted as an artist-painter.
His parents had fled Afghanistan during the first Taliban regime in the late 1990s to take refuge in neighboring Pakistan, in Quetta. It is in this city that Fati was born and grew up, in a conservative and rigorous family. “As a child, I loved to sing and take myself for a star. In my society, it is frowned upon to sing, to dance. I accepted reality. She loved running in the fresh air and in the sun with the other children, girls and boys.
“One afternoon, I was 10-12 years old, my mother told me: you can’t go outside to play anymore. You are too big now. Fati made that day his entry into the closed world of women in his society. It was from a window in the family home that she was now going to see the others playing, especially to hear them, and especially the boys.
Fortunately, there was the school to breathe a little moreover. She was a very gifted student. “We weren’t allowed to ask questions in class. Our teachers were considered competent when absolute silence reigned in their class. »
To discover yourself
In 2016, convinced that with the intervention of Western countries, the Taliban threat was averted, at least in Kabul, the capital, her family returned to settle there. It was shortly after that Fati was awarded an arts scholarship that would turn his life upside down. She is admitted to the University of Lahore, Pakistan’s second city, where she discovers that another world exists.
But Lahore is also a very conservative city, isn’t it? “The Faculty of Arts was a small enclave welcoming children from wealthy families, often educated in the West and sharing values other than those of their society. There, I could ask questions, I was even encouraged to do so! Oh ! My God, what I learned there! She bites into the Oh ! My God! “I had never talked about myself. No one had ever asked me what I liked, thought, what I wanted to become. I discovered myself. »
She shows me a photo of a painting in bright colors with, in the center, the face of a woman with sad, ringed eyes. Entitled mother face, she had painted it in Lahore. “You know, in our country, women are often beaten. They keep black and green eyes. I dare to ask: your mother too, Fati? Long silence. I guess the answer.
One day, in Kabul, in front of the window where the crazy light entered, she stretched out on the floor of her room, abandoned in the sun, offering her bare skin to the rays. Like a deed of emancipation. Another day, she took off the hijab covering her hair. She was on the plane between Kabul and Lahore. She just casually dropped it over her shoulder. Small ceremony of the intimate, oneself with oneself.
The return of the Taliban
August 15th. Almost a year ago to the day. The unthinkable happens: the Taliban are back in Kabul. Fati is there for the holidays, while waiting to return to his studies in Lahore. “Everything has stopped in the city. All. Silent theatre, general astonishment. Residents are shocked by the news.
An aunt based in Paris immediately put Fati’s name on a list of people in danger, likely to be targeted by the Taliban, as are art students. “Rush to the French Embassy,” his aunt told him. She must leave Kabul immediately. “I only took my laptop. After many maddening adventures, the hallucinated vision of men with beards, turbans and submachine guns, his bus to the airport caught in the middle of mortar fire, the infernal sound of helicopters above and, finally, the fear to die suffocated by the crowd that surrounds her from everywhere and rushes towards the planes — a taller stranger behind me blows into my nostrils so that I can breathe — she finally gets on board.
“I had so dreamed of seeing Paris. I saw nothing, I cried during the two weeks we spent there, in a hotel assigned by the French government. Then she was sent to Vannes, on the west coast of France, where a small apartment and a subsistence allowance awaited her. “When I arrived, I experienced a real nightmare. I was sobbing, shaking, delirious, I didn’t speak a word of French, I didn’t understand anything about this new life that I had so strongly hoped for. »
Sundays for dancing
She is recovering little by little, every day a little more. She knows it will be long. But at 22, you have your whole life. Fati enrolled in arts at the University of Lorient, a little north of Vannes. “A classroom is precious to me. I find my joy there. She goes there every day by rail. What does she say to herself, her nose stuck in the window of the train to see the landscapes of Brittany scroll by? ” Oh ! My God!Where am I ? she replies, laughing.
Her parents, at first bothered by the transformation of their daughter – “one day, I dared to send them a photo of myself on Instagram” – have now become her main supporters. She talks to them every day. Between Vannes, Lorient and Kabul, a long ray of joy, sometimes of nostalgia. “I share my readings with my mother. ” To an Afghan relative who criticized Fati’s way of life, her mother gave an unequivocal answer: “It’s my daughter’s life, period. “”These words are the most beautiful I have heard from my mother’s mouth, the young woman is moved. I changed my family a bit. »
On Sunday, Fati rests. “I sit in front of my window, I watch the passers-by, the cars, the trees swaying in the wind, the birds fluttering in the sky. My window is my ray of hope. She pauses. “Sometimes I dance. »