Unsaid

It has been 5 years since I’ve been out of Afghanistan. Since the country is in civil tensions within itself, the only thing that provides a sense of belonging is my culture, Hazara culture. Yet I don’t know it well enough to know how to embrace it. Born and raised in Kabul, neither my city nor village nor traditions and stories. 

I wish we had more writers about our stories. I wish we kept our traditions alive after Islam arrived in the country. I wish I knew more about those before me. I have so many questions about them, but my knowledge is limited to “there was a war going on at the time”. To know how they were taught, how they lived, and so many more, yet all became known to the next generation of us minorities, is the scent of blood that follows till later. 

I usually tell a lot of people to write about their lives as if in a book; who knows who was that carried their life burdens for the betterment of all, the ones that we never got a chance to meet, but with a picture of the author, a text someone can read, no doubt how someone can be immortal. Even if no one reads the book, it’s here to say I existed, I was also a person with interests, ambitions, and dreams once…

Many don’t realize that their life experience can be similar to many more, and some books can help other people more than you can imagine. It’s to keep living forever, in the tongue of those who read the book and the mind that remembers it.

Every little thing counts, everything that makes you feel alive, art, music, poetry, dance, and for me, literature, if not to anyone, to yourself. For a better understanding of my means, the movie “Freedom Writers” portrays the central idea.  

But I’m no more than a writer, it’s my idea as someone who writes, this view can be different for everyone, regarding what they are most interested in and know the best. So, to me, making yourself immortal is as simple as doing what makes you alive.