Several months before it was taken in February 2024, the family in this photograph were living lives of relative comfort in Pakistan. They had a house, the girls were in school, there was a future ahead. Then Pakistan’s government ordered the mass deportation of undocumented Afghans. Along with many thousands of others, this family was sent across the border to Afghanistan, where they had few connections and no place to live.
When Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Kiana Hayeri and French researcher Mélissa Cornet found them, the extended family were renting a dilapidated mud house outside Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. “There was no carpet and barely any furniture,” Hayeri recalls, “and the windows were covered with plastic to keep heat in. There was no electricity. The family, being so desperate and having no money, had to marry off one of the daughters [a cousin of the girls in the picture] to the son of the landlord, in exchange for a well and a solar panel.”
Not only had their lives been turned upside down but the family was now under the rule of the Taliban, who since returning to power in August 2021 had been rapidly restricting the rights of women across the country. In this harsh new world, women and girls were banned from secondary schools, universities and most workplaces, and excluded from many other aspects of public life. Even going outside for a walk or dancing to music felt like an act of resistance that could be punished. (The pink light, introduced by Hayeri, was an attempt to bring an element of playfulness to an otherwise grim situation.)
Hayeri and Cornet made two five-week trips to Afghanistan in the first half of 2024 to gather material for their book No Woman’s Land. Even in that short period, they could see the situation for Afghan women going from bad to worse. “At the very beginning there was a little hope, a little flickering light,” says Hayeri. “But then it was gone. By the end, it was a dark tunnel with no hope in sight.”
No Woman’s Land, co-published by Raya Editorial, Kiana Hayeri and Mélissa Cornet, is out now
Related articles: