Review: "Playing for Freedom" by Zarifa Adiba

Playing for Freedom by Zarifa Adiba and Anne Chaon
Translated to English via Susanna Lea Associates
English translation published May 2024 via AmazonCrossing
★★★

As a young music student, Adiba's concern was not how to find time to practice or whether she could afford a better instrument—both owning her own instrument and practicing at home were unthinkable. This was Afghanistan, after all, and music was at best distrusted. People who played music were distrusted. Girls who played music were distrusted. Adiba held fast to her dreams of playing viola for Afghanistan and for the world, but every day was a challenge.

In those days, writes Adiba, I had so little money that I couldn't even afford the ten afghanis (less than four American cents) it took to take the bus to music school. Instead, I walked for two hours every morning, from home to the ANIM, pacing along the damaged sidewalks of Kabul and crisscrossing the dusty city where high concrete walls had gradually sprung up in response to various threats, and to protect against explosions. (loc. 104*)

Adiba's story takes place before the Taliban took power in Kabul. She discusses this takeover at the beginning and end of the book, but for most of the book she is in an Afghanistan with some bare bones of possibility. Make no mistake: she had just about nothing easy. Start with being a girl in Afghanistan and add in poverty, and living with relatives who didn't want her family there, and a mother pushed to the breaking point by her own hard life—and then multiply that by, say, the pressure to get married to a man, any man, and turn away from any kind of freedom in exchange for a constrained and compliant life.

Everyone around me seemed genuinely hopeful that I would go with him, settle in his village, and stay locked in his house, having children and doing chores for the rest of my life. The worst part was my mother seemed delighted at the prospect, which only reinforced my despair and sense of abandonment. (loc. 1262)

It's a journey full of impossible choices. I wouldn't have minded a more chronological structure—it's largely chronological, but with frequent zigzags—or more about Adiba's daily life in Afghanistan: what home looked like, what a school day looked like, how it felt to leave the viola at school at the end of each day and pick it up again in the morning. Most of what I've read about Afghanistan is from the perspective of outsiders, and I'd have loved to see it better through Adiba's eyes. Her experience was unusual, too, in that although her family was poor she managed some travel, in and outside of the Middle East, while still quite young; among other things, she lived at various times in Pakistan, and I'd love to know more about how she experienced the differences of living there.

In many ways what interests me most is the way Adiba talks about her mother's life—with frustration, sometimes, and with hurt, because her mother was not always able to offer the kinds of emotional support that Adiba needed. But their stories are illustrative of two different ways in which women in oppressive societies struggle—Adiba, young and fighting to be allowed to follow her dreams; her mother, long since having lost sight of her own dreams and also unable to trust in her daughter's. It's a complicated story, and I'm glad it's been translated for an English-speaking audience.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.