Between Silence and Return

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An Iqra Dialogue Series · Volume I Between Silence and Return is a visual-literary meditation on Afghan women, exile, memory, and freedom—a living dialogue between Afghan artist Kimia (Angela Gulistani) and Afghan writer Anosha Zereh. Through fifteen original artworks, poems and contemplations, the book creates a shared language between image and text. It does not present art as an illustration of suffering, nor poetry as an explanation of art. Instead, each work listens to the other, opening a space for interiority, memory, longing, grief, endurance, and the quiet insistence of selfhood. Structured in three movements—Departure, Distance, Return—the volume follows the inner life of a woman whom the world has spent two centuries debating, governing, rescuing, disciplining, and symbolizing, often without ever asking what she wanted for herself. Empires, revolutions, wars, occupations, and regimes have repeatedly invoked Afghan women’s freedom as proof of their own virtue. This book does something else: it hands her back the sentence. The volume concludes with a fully sourced historical afterword, “The Instrument,” tracing two hundred years of political uses of Afghan women’s lives, images, and freedoms. It is offered not as an argument, but as a record—so that the art and poetry may be read alongside the histories that have shaped Afghan women’s representation, displacement, survival, and resistance. “What these pages offer isn’t imagery adding power to words or words taking flight from imagery... together these two artists achieve something haunting.” —Tamim Ansary, author of West of Kabul, East of New York This is not a book of victims. It is a book of sisters still standing, still reading, still telling their own truth.

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