Mina Keshwar Kamal
2006
oil on canvas
40" x 30"
(SOLD) Afghanistan
At 20 years of age, Meena Keshwar Kamal began her work to empower the women
of Afghanistan. In 1977 she founded the Revolutionary Association of the Women
of Afghanistan (RAWA) to provide education, shelter, and healthcare to Afghani
refugees of the Soviet occupation. In 1981, she launched the feminist magazine
Payam-e-Zan ("Woman's Message"). Attaining international recognition
for her work, she made several trips to Western Europe to testify of the plight
of women in Afghanistan and surrounding refugee camps.
A decade later, she fell prey to the same forces she had spent her adult life
fighting against. 1987, she was assassinated in her home in Pakistan along
with two members of her family.
Her legacy lives on through RAWA, whose existence became all the more essential
with the institution of the extreme fundamentalist rule of the Taliban. Smuggling
cameras under their burkas at grave personal risk, RAWA members documented
public executions, floggings, and amputations, its website often representing
the only window to these and other Taliban abuses available to the world. The
organization provided an underground network of services to a desperate population
of women forbidden to work, banned from education and sequestered in homes
with blackened windows.
Clandestine schools taught girls to read and write in dark basements, mothers
learned handicrafts to earn money to feed their children and mobile medical
teams provided health care to women who could neither leave their home nor
legally speak to a male doctor.
Though Meena Keshwar Kamal had been silenced and martyred, RAWA continues
to thrive out of necessity. And in doing so, it still provides hope to a population
of Afghani women otherwise condemned to linger without purpose in a culturally
mandated state of solitude and isolation.
All images on this site are copyright © 2008 by Tom Block Arts.
Please contact the artist for use of these images.
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