Two years ago, a man was confronted in Kabul. He was asked, “why do you let your wife sell herself on television? Why do you let her be an actress?” He responded, “I am not going to stop my wife from doing what she loves.” Days later, a knock came at the man’s door. He was shot dead.
His wife is an actress in this play.
There’s one scene at the end of the play where there is a lot of crying. It’s hard to cry on stage on demand, and seeing these Afghan actors continually do so kind of makes you wonder what events in their lives they use to trigger the tears. Or if it’s just an instinct; they know that there has been tragedy in the past, and that’s enough to make them cry.
A thirty-two-year-old actress here already has seven children (six girls and one boy), but her husband keeps jumping her because he wants another male. Oh, and she came here three months pregnant and had a miscarriage a couple of weeks ago.
One of the actors is also puppeteer. He was once putting on a show for children when the Taliban came in and demanded that it was stopped. The actor told the Taliban officials that the performance adhered to Islamic values, imploring them to watch. So they did, and they enjoyed it apparently. Isn’t that an odd image? Taliban members attentively watching a children’s puppet show?
The family of another actor is really spread across the world: in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. They all went to those countries as refugees. I cannot imagine being separated that far from my family.
Another actress here (twenty-one and already married) took one of the Indian greeting cards she received upon her arrival and put it on her wall. The card was decorated with Hindu gods. In the first few days here, one of the actors (who has since dropped out of the project due to serious psychological problems) started spreading the rumour that she was worshipping Hindu gods. Then just recently this sort of came back up in conversation, perhaps just as a joke, but it started to get spread that she was becoming a Christian. She was terrified.
And rightly so, because being a Christian in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is extremely dangerous. And the rumour simply wasn’t true. But if that somehow carried through to when they returned to Afghanistan, it could have some seriously tragic consequences.
These things that go on and the stories that are told makes me want to speak Dari so much so that I can actually talk to these people. A couple speak English, but I’m not about to ask them to have a completely translated conversation about their lives.
The BBC is filming a documentary on this project. I’ll probably start to learn things that I didn’t know when I watch it... which is odd and a little backwards, but it shows either how important language is coming into a situation like this while wanting to know the people you’re working with.
Really makes you think “O Canada,” eh?
His wife is an actress in this play.
There’s one scene at the end of the play where there is a lot of crying. It’s hard to cry on stage on demand, and seeing these Afghan actors continually do so kind of makes you wonder what events in their lives they use to trigger the tears. Or if it’s just an instinct; they know that there has been tragedy in the past, and that’s enough to make them cry.
A thirty-two-year-old actress here already has seven children (six girls and one boy), but her husband keeps jumping her because he wants another male. Oh, and she came here three months pregnant and had a miscarriage a couple of weeks ago.
One of the actors is also puppeteer. He was once putting on a show for children when the Taliban came in and demanded that it was stopped. The actor told the Taliban officials that the performance adhered to Islamic values, imploring them to watch. So they did, and they enjoyed it apparently. Isn’t that an odd image? Taliban members attentively watching a children’s puppet show?
The family of another actor is really spread across the world: in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. They all went to those countries as refugees. I cannot imagine being separated that far from my family.
Another actress here (twenty-one and already married) took one of the Indian greeting cards she received upon her arrival and put it on her wall. The card was decorated with Hindu gods. In the first few days here, one of the actors (who has since dropped out of the project due to serious psychological problems) started spreading the rumour that she was worshipping Hindu gods. Then just recently this sort of came back up in conversation, perhaps just as a joke, but it started to get spread that she was becoming a Christian. She was terrified.
And rightly so, because being a Christian in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is extremely dangerous. And the rumour simply wasn’t true. But if that somehow carried through to when they returned to Afghanistan, it could have some seriously tragic consequences.
These things that go on and the stories that are told makes me want to speak Dari so much so that I can actually talk to these people. A couple speak English, but I’m not about to ask them to have a completely translated conversation about their lives.
The BBC is filming a documentary on this project. I’ll probably start to learn things that I didn’t know when I watch it... which is odd and a little backwards, but it shows either how important language is coming into a situation like this while wanting to know the people you’re working with.
Really makes you think “O Canada,” eh?
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