Issue 04
Uprising
By Anne KeehnPhotos By Sonali Kolhatkar
Portrait By Piper Ferguson
Illustration By Josh Cochran
Sonali Kolhatkar is not afraid of change. Formerly an astrophysicist, she now works for women’s rights in Afghanistan and hosts Uprising on progressive radio station KPFK in Los Angeles, tackling subversive and uncomfortable topics, such as the corruption of journalism through public relations, drug testing on minority orphans, and her own area of expertise, the U.S. Occupation of Afghanistan.
Her activism for Afghanistan is similarly against the grain. Her approach is simple: work in solidarity with the people on the ground, and don’t impose patronizing preconceived agendas. Sonali’s uncompromising adherence to this principle has put her outside the mainstream and alienated some heavy-hitters in activism.
Sonali has been on the radio for two years and is a relative newcomer to the public eye, grappling with the troublesome implications of being in the spotlight. When Indian political writer Arundhati Roy was a guest on Uprising last August, one of their exchanges went like this:
Sonali: “It’s very refreshing for me to see a South Asian woman, a woman who looks like me, be the new superstar of the left. How do you deal with that, and is it healthy for the left?”
Arundhati: “I think it’s very unhealthy. The process of iconization is a political one. It is a way of making real political resistance very brittle. Individuals who are picked out…we are very fragile things. How easy is it for the propaganda machine to try to discredit me tomorrow?”
With “superstar” activism, there is the danger of the celebrity overshadowing the cause, or what Sonali describes as “the Noam Chomsky Effect”: “When he walks into a room, he gets a standing ovation before he even says a few words.”
Sonali’s work with Afghanis was already underway when the twin towers collapsed in New York, but the tenor of her activism changed that day. After 9/11, there may not have been a Middle Eastern, Central Asian, or South Asian person who didn’t feel the cloud of tension and hostility hovering overhead. Iranian, Afghani, Indian, or Bangladeshi, Sikh, Muslim, or Catholic - it didn’t matter. After 9/11, they were all lumped together, their ethnicity subliminally linked to terrorism.
Activism, like art, can be a reflection of the person practicing it. And Sonali’s art, like her activism, is a window to her inner world.
Just days after 9/11, Sonali painted “September 11 Dream Nightmare.” It is a harrowing portrait of a South Asian woman who resembles Sonali: cocoa-brown skin, long dark hair, with ribs and a lung exposed ala Frida Kahlo, a smoking airplane crashing into her mouth.
In March 2002, six months after 9/11, Sonali wrote one of her first and most passionate essays on Afghan activism. “Saving Afghan Women,” initially published on Znet, then circulated around the web and picked up in magazines around the world, was a vitriolic stream-of-consciousness send-up of the mainstream activism community’s patronizing approach to Afghan women. A humiliating meeting with one of her heroes, peace activist Dr. Helen Caldicott, inspired the essay.
Sonali was flattered when Caldicott invited her to a radio interview. But she was crestfallen when Caldicott asked pointed rhetorical questions like “Why do Afghan men treat women the way they do?” Caldicott’s air of moral superiority and judgmental assumptions, including falsely claiming that Afghan women underwent genital mutilation, left Sonali angered and hurt. “It was one of my first experiences with a conflict with the liberal perspective,” she recalls.
She went home seething, and banged out an essay that skewered not only Caldicott but the Feminist Majority Foundation’s “Gender Apartheid” campaign, in which burqa eyepieces were sold with the slogan “In remembrance of Afghan women”-”As if they were already extinct,” Sonali wrote.
“How ‘effective’ would the Feminist Majority campaign be if they made it known that Afghan women were actively fighting back and simply needed money and moral support, not instructions?” She proposed an alternative to the burqa eyepiece: “a pin of a hand folded in a fist, to acknowledge the very real struggle that Afghan women wage everyday.” The Caldicott incident put Sonali face-toface with the patronizing prejudice-racism, even-that can drive activism. “I just don’t like this approach,” she says. “Let us save them. How different is that from what Bush is saying?”
Sonali also learned-not for the first time, and probably not the last-that “no pedestal is well deserved; greatness is an overrated perception.”
Sonali’s conviction that “agendas don’t always coincide with the lived experiences of the people on the ground” might be rooted in her experience as a cultural outsider. She grew up in Dubai, capital of the United Arab Emirates, often called the Las Vegas of the Middle East. Millions of South Asians, Sonali’s parents among them, emigrated to this cosmopolitan nation for a piece of the pie. Sonali attended a Catholic school run by Italian nuns, though her classmates were a religiously eclectic group of Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists. Annual trips to India to see her grandparents and a couple visits to the U.K. Rounded out a childhood of cultural fluidity. Her horizons expanded even further at age 16, when she left home to attend the University of Texas.
She had a life-long dream of getting a PhD and becoming a tenured professor, but after encountering sexism and “judgmental hostility” while pursuing her master’s degree in astrophysics at the University of Hawaii, Sonali took what she thought would be a temporary break. Then she took to the streets for her first demonstration in 1999, protesting NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, and felt engaged with the world in a way she never had before.
In that same year, she began working with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a womenled organization whose work is both political and humanitarian. They’ve opened hospitals, schools, and orphanages, and started prostitute rehabilitation programs and “income generation” projects to help Afghan women become economically selfsufficient. RAWA supporters include 26-year-old Malalai Joya, who in 2003 was elected to Afghanistan’s grand council to draft a new constitution. In front of her fellow delegates, she denounced the warlords in government-some sitting in the very same room- as criminals who should be tried in national and international courts. “We were so impressed by these young, soft-spoken women, who were total revolutionaries.” Sonali accents this last word by gently raising her fist.
In 2000, Sonali and her husband Jim helped start the Afghan Women’s Mission, a non-profit that supports RAWA. Their initial goal was to raise money to reopen a hospital for Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
“RAWA was the kind of activism that I was desperately looking for,” Sonali explains. “I wanted to go someplace where nobody else was doing any work, to unearth something that really, desperately needed our attention. We discovered the U.S. Had done very dirty work in Afghanistan, and we discovered a group of women who were struggling and resisting against it, who were indigenous women, who were our heroes.”
The “dirty work” to which she refers is a chapter of U.S. History that gets little play in the mainstream media. In 1978, a Soviet-backed communist government was placed in Afghanistan, and a violent Islamic fundamentalist backlash rose up against the attempt to secularize the country. The Soviet Union sent in troops, and the U.S. Intervened in the conflict by supplying weapons to the insurgents. When the Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the warlords turned their U.S.-supplied weapons on each other.
The Taliban, one of the warring factions that benefited from U.S. Support during the conflict, controlled 90% of Afghanistan by 1996. Under the Taliban, women were not allowed in public without a burqa covering them head-to-toe, could not be treated by male doctors, could not gather for public functions, nor talk or laugh loudly. Disobeying meant torture, beatings, and even executions.
The democratic elections in 2004 symbolically freed women in Kabul to wear leather jackets and loose headscarves, but the government still has little control outside the capital. Warlords are still armed with U.S. Weapons; women still adhere to Taliban-era rules.
In the spring of 2004, Sonali traveled to Afghanistan. She met Joya and spoke with social workers, journalists, and activists. She and her husband visited orphanages, schools, and RAWA’s income generation projects. She recorded interviews for Uprising, and took photographs to illustrate her speaking engagements back in Los Angeles.
“When we went to Afghanistan, Jim and I, it was very emotional,” Sonali recalls. “There was an armed convoy that came to meet us in Kabul. They were mostly men, and a couple of women. They were carrying guns, and they said, ‘We’re here to protect you, we’re with RAWA.’ The whole drive to Farah province, there was one car in front of us, and one car behind, to protect us.
“When we arrived, there was a group of about 30 women who just came to us silently. They knew we didn’t understand their language and vice versa. All they could do to express themselves was come and hug and kiss me. Jim, being a man, they shook his hand. Their whole thing was ‘thank you so much, thank you so much.’ And I said, ‘We don’t need your gratitude. We are trying to undo some of the damage we’ve done.’ And they sat there, and they were like, ‘You’re right!’” Sonali erupts in laughter, rocking back in her seat.
“And their dignity, oh, it was amazing. Everywhere I went I was like, ‘Don’t thank us. Our country has put in billions of dollars to destroy and damage your country. Instead of funding armed groups, we want to fund the weapon of the pen, and of the school, and of the health care center. We’ll never be able to undo all the damage; we’ll never be able to undo the scars, the trauma of the deaths, the disappearances, the mutilations, the killings-because it’s too late. But maybe we can just help in some way. And you are doing us a favor, allowing us to help you.’ And they got it! They were like, ‘Yeah, you’re right!’”
Sonali’s work with Afghanistan and RAWA continues. Money needs to be raised, and she continues to speak at college campuses about Afghanistan. And of course there is Uprising five days a week, airing the “voices of mass dissent.”
The photo shoot for this article takes place at Sonali’s home a week after the interview. She is uneasy in front of the camera because, in a small, unintended way, her image is being distorted and manipulated by the photographer - the troublesome quandary of being in the public eye.
When everything is done, Sonali says, “I’m going to say bye to you now, because I have work to do.”
She gives me a hug, then gently, but firmly closes the door behind me.