Latifa was born into an educated middle-class Afghan family in Kabul in 1980. She dreamed of one day of becoming a journalist, she was interested in fashion, movies and friends. Her father was in the import/export business and her mother was a doctor.
Then in September 1996, Taliban soldiers seized power in Kabul. From that moment, Latifa, just 16 years old became a prisoner in her own home. Her school was closed. Her mother was banned from working. The simplest and most basic freedoms – walking down the street, looking out a window – were no longer hers. She was now forced to wear a chadri.
My Forbidden Face provides a poignant and highly personal account of life under the Taliban regime. With painful honesty and clarity Latifa describes the way she watched her world falling apart, in the name of a fanatical interpretation of a faith that she could not comprehend. Her voice captures a lost innocence, but also echoes her determination to live in freedom and hope.
Earlier this year, Latifa and her parents escaped Afghanistan with the help of a French-based Afghan resistance group.
Then in September 1996, Taliban soldiers seized power in Kabul. From that moment, Latifa, just 16 years old became a prisoner in her own home. Her school was closed. Her mother was banned from working. The simplest and most basic freedoms – walking down the street, looking out a window – were no longer hers. She was now forced to wear a chadri.
My Forbidden Face provides a poignant and highly personal account of life under the Taliban regime. With painful honesty and clarity Latifa describes the way she watched her world falling apart, in the name of a fanatical interpretation of a faith that she could not comprehend. Her voice captures a lost innocence, but also echoes her determination to live in freedom and hope.
Earlier this year, Latifa and her parents escaped Afghanistan with the help of a French-based Afghan resistance group.
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Reviews
A poweful and poetic account of life under the Taliban.
This thoughtful and affecting account...questions the complacency of Western feminism which has forgotten the many women across the world who still have nothing.
A salutary read for any Western woman, and one that makes you appreciate the freedoms we often take for granted.
Her descriptions of watching videos in secret, listening to the radio in terror lest she be caught and hovering on the edge of a black hole of depression during what should have been the liveliest years of her life give a very human face to the known facts of how the most repressive government on the planet operated.