My Dear Kabul review – inspirational resilience in an Afghan women’s writing group

The collective diary of 21 women, compiled using WhatsApp messages, is an intimate, courageous chronicle of life as it unfolds under Taliban rule

In the immediate aftermath of Kabul’s shocking and rapid fall to the Taliban in August 2021, women across the Afghan capital began a painful process of textual self-erasure in anticipation of the house-to-house searches that would inevitably follow. Precious books that had helped them become themselves were set alight, proof of qualifications earned through years of hard study was destroyed in an instant, journal pages were rinsed of ink, bowls of lapis-hued water all that remained of the bold hopes and dreams confided within them.

For the 21 members of a women’s creative writing group, a single lifeline to the outside world would be preserved: the WhatsApp group chat set up by Untold Narratives, a UK-based development programme for marginalised writers that had been helping them compile an anthology of their stories.

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