Sitara Wafadar yearns for long hair like other girls. Instead, the Afghan teenager has disguised herself as a boy for more than a decade, forced by her parents to be the “son” they never had.
With five sisters and no brothers, Ms. Sitara lives by the gender-twisting custom known as “bacha poshi”, which in Dari refers to a girl “dressed as a boy”, enabling her to safely perform the duties of a son in the patriarchal country.
The 18-year-old, who resides with her impoverished family in a mud-brick house in a village in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar, has pretended to be a boy for most of her life.
Talking like men
Every morning she puts on the baggy shirt and trousers and flip flops typically worn by Afghan males. Sometimes she covers her short brown hair with a scarf and deepens her voice to conceal her real gender. “I never think that I am a girl,” says Ms. Sitara. She and her elderly father work six days a week as bonded labourers to repay money they borrowed from the owner and feed the family.
“My father always says ‘Sitara is like my eldest son’. Sometimes... I attend funerals as his eldest son,” she says.
Normally it is families with no male heirs who make a daughter dress as a boy.
While most “bacha posh”, as they are known, stop dressing as a boy after reaching puberty, Ms. Sitara says she keeps wearing male clothing “to protect myself” at the brick kiln. “When I go to work, most people do not realise that I am a girl,” she says. “If they realised that an 18-year-old girl was working morning to evening in a brick factory then I would encounter many problems. I could even be kidnapped.”
No choice
Ms. Sitara started working at the factory when she was eight, following in the footsteps of her four older sisters, who also made bricks instead of going to school — until they married, after which they stayed home. She makes 500 bricks a day in return for 160 Afghanis (just over $2).
From 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. she crouches on the ground preparing mud and clay and then pushing it into brick moulds under the hot sun that has turned her skin brown. “I don’t feel ashamed about what I am doing but people my age tell me ‘you have reached puberty and now you don’t have to work at a brick factory’,” Ms. Sitara says. “But what should I do? I don’t have any other choice.”
Ms. Sitara’s father, Noor, says “almighty Allah” did not give him a son, leaving him with no choice but to force his daughter to dress as a boy and work.
The family says they owe 25,000 Afghanis to the factory owner and relatives that they borrowed to cover the medical expenses of Sitara’s diabetic mother. “If I had a son I would not have faced all these problems,” Mr. Noor said.
Ms. Sitara’s mother, Fatima, however, wishes her daughter could wear female clothes and stay at home, but she needs her to “bring groceries, take me to the doctor and do other work because my husband is old”.
While Sitara recognises that her situation is “unjust”, she is resigned to it, mainly because her younger sister, who is 13, would “face the same fate as me” if she stopped.
