Oppression Feeds on Ignorance: A Story of a Banned Book

It was Wednesday morning, and apparently my mother was supposed to go to the hospital with my sister-in-law to have a decayed tooth treated. The house was dark, and sunlight was seeping little by little through the cracks of a broken windowpane. I was reading Sophie's World on my phone. Mohammad—my four-year-old nephew—was sitting beside me, drawing four parallel lines across his notebook with a pencil.

“What are you drawing?” I asked.

“A book,” he said.

That was enough for the buds of my heart to bloom and for joy to stretch across my face. My eyes followed the movements of Mohammad’s little hand. A cool breeze passed, and the rustling of falling leaves announced the arrival of autumn. Suddenly, my body trembled—I thought the earth was dancing.

I grabbed my phone. “Mohammad! It’s an earthquake!” I said.

Mohammad held onto his pencils. “Take bread and tea. We’ll have to live in a tent again like last time,” he said.

I rushed outside and sat under the almond tree. The earth’s dance had slowed. I went back to reading Sophie’s World. Some time passed, but there was still no sign of Mohammad. “Where are you? Why aren’t you coming out?” I called.

My eyes were fixed on the white door of the room. As soon as I finished speaking, I saw Mohammad struggling to come out. What had happened? I could hear his breathless panting—like a child chased by a dog, with an ankle twisted, unable to run or stop.

“I’m coming,” he said.

His voice was caught in his throat—sometimes loud, sometimes faint, sometimes muffled. I saw my little hero dragging himself toward me with two bags and a few books. I took the books from his hands. He set down his load. “Here, I brought your books. If there’s an earthquake, the dirt will fall and bury them, and then you’ll cry again,” he said.

My eyes filled with tears, and the trembling of the earth carried me back to the year 2021—a year with no good news.

That year, the sky didn’t shed a single tear, as if it had quarreled with the earth. My sunflowers dried up, and the sun only watched in silence. No one on this restless soil had any peace. It was the night of August 6, 2021. My cousin messaged, “The Taliban are near our village,” she said.

My veins pulsed faster than ever, sending blood back and forth to my hands and feet. I didn’t want to believe it and wrote back, “We’re not going back to the age of darkness again.” I hadn’t even sent the message when gunfire erupted from the next village. The electricity went out, and that was the last message.

That night was darker and heavier than all the nights before it. I don’t remember how many hours I slept—or if I slept at all. When the sun finally rose, I went to my aunt’s house. “People say the Taliban are taking the girls from the next village,” my uncle said.

My mother’s face turned as pale as the plaster on the wall. She bit her nails. “I’ll send you to my younger sister’s house,” she said. “Her home is in GazerGah. The Taliban won’t attack there.”

My mother feared they would take me away; I feared they would burn my books. Everyone was trying to protect what they loved most. I packed all my books into three backpacks—my brother’s old travel bags.

Days passed under the sound of gunfire. On the evening of August 9, 2021, the shots grew closer. “We have to leave,” my cousin said.

My mother handed me her burqa. “The city is safer. Go until things become clear.” My legs felt short, my breath tangled in my chest. I could barely see the road and almost fell several times. But for the first time, I saw the Taliban—through the tiny mesh holes of the burqa.

My cousin knocked on every door, asking who had a car or a rickshaw. Finally, someone agreed to take us. As soon as I sat in the rickshaw, my cousin pulled at my backpacks. “Why are you carrying such heavy bags? You’re thinking about books at a time like this? Bullets are raining on us! You need to save your life,” he said.

“I am saving my life,” I responded.

I stepped down from the rickshaw, lifted the burqa’s veil. “I’m not going without them.” The silence of the alleyways choked me. My tongue felt split and heavy.

“So you’re not coming, huh?” my cousin asked.

Without a moment’s hesitation, I said, “No.”

My heart was pounding harder than ever, but the thought of leaving my books behind made my skin crawl. I don’t know what he saw in my eyes, but he handed the bags back. “Get in!”

I climbed into the rickshaw, clutching the bags in my arms. My tears darkened the blue of my burqa.

“Look what I wrote,” Mohammad’s voice pulled me back from 2021 to the present. I looked at his notebook. On the cover of the book he’d drawn, imitating me, he had written: Neighbors: Banned...

I read it aloud. “What does banned mean?” he asked.

My lips locked, and the color drained from my cheeks. “It means don’t read, don’t know.”

“But why Neighbors? Does it mean our house and Shoaib’s house?” he asked.

“Something like that. It’s a book about a few neighbors.”

“The one you used to read in those days?” he asked.

“Yes, that one.”

He touched the covers of my books. “Then you should hide them from the Taliban—just like Khalid (the main character in Neighbors) hid his books from the police.”

I smiled at his face, remembering that story. “Do you still remember the page I read to you?”

“Yes, I want to be like Khalid. So teach me to read too—so I can read Neighbors.”

He placed his drawing in my hand and ran off after a butterfly that disappeared under the tree. The word banned weighed heavy in my head.

It had been days since the decree banning books was announced by Taliban. I no longer had any hope of buying new ones; all I could do was protect the ones I still had. When I was reading the list of banned books, I stumbled upon the name Ahmad Mahmoud—the writer I loved most, and his novel Neighbors most of all.

I asked myself: Why should books like Neighbors be banned? What’s wrong with knowing the truth through reading?

But I already knew the answer:

The Taliban don’t want us to read or to know—because they fear that once we read and know, we’ll raise our voices against all these prohibitions.

Oppression feeds on ignorance.

That’s why, with every new ban, they grow stronger—and we grow weaker, more exhausted.

— Saeeda Saee