Outspoken

Starred review from March 18, 2024
Memoirs don’t come much more inspirational than this dispatch from medical doctor and activist Simar detailing her women’s rights advocacy in Afghanistan. Born in 1957 to a Hazara family—an often-persecuted Afghan ethnic minority—in the Jaghori district, Samar learned via childhood exposure to novels like Les Misérables that “other people didn’t live by the same strict rules that the people in Afghanistan adhered to,” and that her country “needed change.” After graduating from medical school in 1982, she founded a hospital in the Jaghori region that specifically served women and children. Over the following decades, Samar created a clinic that helped educate women health workers, and visited patients in remote areas by foot, donkey, and horse, even when her efforts angered Taliban forces who threatened to kidnap and kill her unless she stopped “promoting the rights of women every chance I got.” In 2002, Samar began serving as Afghanistan’s Minister of Women’s Affairs, and her achievements included helping to found Kabul’s Gawharshad University. Acknowledging that “most of the world sees us as a people at war,” Samar carefully balances a steely indictment of her country’s repressive tendencies with an affection for her heritage. It’s a crucial complement to American narratives about Afghanistan, like Elliott Ackerman’s The Fifth Act. Agent: Hilary McMahon, Westwood Creative Artists.

March 1, 2024
A profile of an Afghan women's rights advocate who defies political roadblocks and cultural boundaries. As an adolescent, Afghan physician and humanitarian advocate Samar demonstrated a desire to help others, particularly women stripped of their human rights in her home country under the misogynist Taliban regime. Once she fully comprehended how "the unfairness of being a woman" in Afghanistan made the country unjust, she made it her life's mission to educate, motivate, and empower Afghan women. In her memoir, the author offers a robust combination of historical data and heartfelt stories of growing up beneath the weight of her family's suffocating expectations with a father who had two wives. Most illuminating are the details about her enthusiastic work founding hospitals and clinics for Afghan refugee women as a medical professional and a political activist on behalf of women's human rights. Samar relates the embattled history of Afghanistan with lucid facts personalized with deeply felt impressions about her homeland's perpetual unrest. The author opens readers' eyes to the harsh realities of life for Afghan women, who are denied access to health care, education, and basic human liberties. Throughout her career as an activist and doctor, Samar has worked tirelessly on both peace negotiations and human rights education, while raising awareness about the benefits of equality, fairness, and justice reform to her country's decision-makers, even in the face of death threats. Setbacks like sieges and terrorist attacks still threaten to undo her diligent work. "The fight for human rights and equality requires long-term commitment for generations to come," she writes at the end. The author's vital memoir forms a fitting companion piece to co-writer Armstrong's Veiled Threat, which chronicled her vigilant search to find Samar throughout Taliban-occupied Afghanistan in 1997. Samar's inspirational lifelong legacy of resistance and resilience is palpably present in this memorable self-portrait.

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