Outspoken
My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 MOORE PRIZE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The impassioned memoir of Afghanistan's Sima Samar: medical doctor, public official, founder of schools and hospitals, thorn in the side of the Taliban, nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, and lifelong advocate for girls and women.
“I have three strikes against me. I’m a woman, I speak out for women, and I’m Hazara, the most persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan.”
Dr. Sima Samar has been fighting for equality and justice for most of her life. Born into a polygamous family, she learned early that girls had inferior status, and she had to agree to an arranged marriage if she wanted to go to university. By the time she was in medical school, she had a son, Ali, and had become a revolutionary. After her husband was disappeared by the pro-Russian regime, she escaped. With her son and medical degree, she took off into the rural areas—by horseback, by donkey, even on foot—to treat people who had never had medical help before.
Sima Samar's wide-ranging experiences both in her home country and on the world stage have given her inside access to the dishonesty, the collusion, the corruption, the self-serving leaders, and the hijacking of religion. And as a former Vice President, she knows all the players in this chess game called Afghanistan. With stories that are at times poignant, at times terrifying, inspiring as well as disheartening, Sima provides an unparalleled view of Afghanistan’s past and its present.
Despite being in grave personal danger for many years, she has worked tirelessly for the dream she is convinced is an achievable one: justice and full human rights for all the citizens of her country.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Memoirs don't come much more inspirational than this dispatch from medical doctor and activist Simar detailing her women's rights advocacy in Afghanistan. Born in 1957 to a Hazara family—an often-persecuted Afghan ethnic minority—in the Jaghori district, Samar learned via childhood exposure to novels like Les Misérables that "other people didn't live by the same strict rules that the people in Afghanistan adhered to," and that her country "needed change." After graduating from medical school in 1982, she founded a hospital in the Jaghori region that specifically served women and children. Over the following decades, Samar created a clinic that helped educate women health workers, and visited patients in remote areas by foot, donkey, and horse, even when her efforts angered Taliban forces who threatened to kidnap and kill her unless she stopped "promoting the rights of women every chance I got." In 2002, Samar began serving as Afghanistan's Minister of Women's Affairs, and her achievements included helping to found Kabul's Gawharshad University. Acknowledging that "most of the world sees us as a people at war," Samar carefully balances a steely indictment of her country's repressive tendencies with an affection for her heritage. It's a crucial complement to American narratives about Afghanistan, like Elliott Ackerman's The Fifth Act.
