Unsaid

Growing up, I wasn’t much aware of the existence of different ethnicities in Afghanistan. Of course, they would make us sing the national anthem with our lungs, but that national anthem wasn’t in my language. I would sing it along with others because we had it on the first page of our school books, and they would take our entire class up to the stage to read it for all the other students once in a while. 

Despite my protestive personality, I never thought of it as unfair because they would write small subtitles under the Pashto version of the national anthem of the country I was a citizen of… Not to mention, there was another kind of that in my language, Farsi, which was rarely heard. I don’t know if it was my fault not to listen to the other one, although it existed, or is it that we didn’t know it existed? Do you want a reality check? Yep, the Farsi national anthem was never a thing during Taliban take-over and from the year I’m talking about 2015-2020. 

In the other version, when I was an elementary school student, there was a phrase of “De Pashtona o Hazarao…” By that specific time, I had no idea of what they meant, and looking around me in school, I didn’t see a difference between myself and other people in my class; although we were of different ethnicities, we were just unique. 

Everything changed when I came to the US, and by that time the #stophazaragenocide was also trending, a hashtag to hear the world the screams of many genocides that happened to innocent civilians. Then I was 12 years old, probably old enough to hear about it, here in the US. Then I recognized some faces like mine, with monolid and a shorter nose. Maybe it was all too direct when I heard all the genocide all at once like “Kale manaar” and about some king (Abdul Rahman) that decides to wipe out my people and land. 

I often get mistaken for Chinese or Filipino. I used to love it a few years ago, but now it also shows me that we Hazaras don’t have enough representatives of ourselves out there. And another thing I hate is when I’m asked if I speak Pashto, or Arabic, like Farsi is a dead language already. 

Shahid Mazari was the martyr of our rights. He chose to speak despite knowing what could have been the consequences, and he faced it, with his blood for us. So maybe if we are living somewhere, anywhere outside of Afghanistan, where we can talk without our throats cut, we can raise our voice. Shahid Mazari faced consequences, and we are responsible for him. uences, and we are responsible for him.