Preface by Guest Editor: Mapping our Tellable Histories

Each work in this issue reflects jagged edges and partial embodiment, glimpses and shifting insights, dispatches from a territory of borderless living.

The first time I encountered the idea of Afghan exile was in Kabul. It was 2006, and this was my first journey to the country, where I was working with Afghan TV and media professionals. It was five years after the first Taliban government had been overthrown by the US-led military force, and the city was abuzz with international aid, foreign consultants and optimism. That summer evening, I was sitting in a friend’s garden with his aunt, who was visiting from California, where she had lived for decades. I was talking about how Kabul felt strangely familiar to me, an Indian journalist, how I found threads connecting it to my home in Aligarh, a town located near Delhi. “She is in love with Kabul”, my friend joked. “Really,” the lady replied, in delicate disbelief, or perhaps it was weariness at explaining her sense of being an outsider in her city of birth to yet another new arrival. “But this is not Kabul anymore. You walk into an office and nobody knows you.”

I thought of her when I began working on this special issue, and of Edward Said’s remarkable essay Reflections on Exile.

“Paris may be a capital famous for cosmopolitan exiles, but it is also a city where unknown men and women have spent years of miserable loneliness: Vietnamese, Algerians, Cambodians, Lebanese, Senegalese, Peruvians. You must think also of Cairo, Beirut, Madagascar, Bangkok, Mexico City. As you move further from the Atlantic world, the awful forlorn waste increases: the hopelessly large numbers, the compounded misery of ‘undocumented’ people suddenly lost, without a tellable history.”

This issue takes up this idea of the “tellable histories” of Afghan exiles, through the diverse temporal forms and locations they take.

These stories together demonstrate how creativity and beauty, poetry and imagination, permeate the everyday lives of Afghans across generations and geographies, an idea that is stubbornly erased in popular representations of the community. They also demonstrate how the experience of exile is not static or finite, but what Said describes as “a condition of terminal loss”. A feeling that is embedded in the most mundane of gestures, and is encountered in the most unexpected ways.

Afghanistan’s modern history is one of displacement. From the Soviet invasion in 1979 to the civil wars of the 1990s, from the Taliban’s first government from 1996 to its overthrow by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. In 2021, another cycle of displacement took place after the Taliban’s takeover of the country, and the massive, panicked exodus of Afghans who fled their rule.

Afghans have now endured more than four decades of war, economic suffering and forced movement. They are one of the largest refugee communities in the world, and are among the largest communities under protracted UNHCR care. What this means in the specifics of life is that for millions of Afghan families, exile is generational; something passed like an heirloom, from one border to the next.

The geographies of Afghan exile are as diverse as its histories. In Pakistan and Iran, refugee camps became semi-permanent cities. In Europe, Afghans navigate asylum systems that are meant to offer care but often deliver precarity. Even within Afghanistan, as we find in the essays in this issue by women writers living in Kabul, there are forms of exile experienced by ordinary people– walking the same streets where their previous lives haunt them.

The stories in this issue reveal different facets of the condition of exile, spanning generations and locations. Moshtari Hilal, an Afghan–German visual artist, writes about the inheritance of patriarchy and the ugliness of being an outsider in Europe, where she has lived since she was a child.

Ghafar Azad, a filmmaker who left Afghanistan during the more recent 2021 evacuation, grapples with what the repeated exodus of artists means for the future of creative resistance in the country. And from Delhi, a location that rarely comes up in mapping the diaspora, Heela Kakar writes of her journey to becoming an Afghan influencer and finding a home on the internet.

The title of the issue is “Afghans on Exile,” a framing that foregrounds the persons and their tellable histories over the idea of exile. Most of the contributors in these pages are artists in the widest sense of the word, and their writing engages with their creative work—how it shifts, and in some cases, what has stayed constant over decades of change.

Filmmaker Siddiq Barmak, for instance, shares his playlist of music that has accompanied him on his various journeys, from Kabul before the Soviet invasion to life as a film student in the USSR to France, where he now lives.

Mohammad Ali Sheida, now living in the UK, turns his gaze as a cinematographer to the social media influencers visiting his country under the Taliban’s rule, mining the landscapes he knows intimately for content. And Laila Ghezal Azimi encounters the tactile experience of loss in her mother’s tiny kitchen in Delhi.

These stories together demonstrate how creativity and beauty, poetry and imagination, permeate the everyday lives of Afghans across generations and geographies, an idea that is stubbornly erased in popular representations of the community. They also demonstrate how the experience of exile is not static or finite, but what Said describes as “a condition of terminal loss”. A feeling that is embedded in the most mundane of gestures, and is encountered in the most unexpected ways. Something as fleeting, and as unremarkable, for example, as walking into an office and not knowing anyone there.

The form of the issue follows this structure of fragmentation. A demand that is often placed on asylum seekers and exiles is to produce a straightforward, linear narrative of their lives—a manufactured version of their erased “tellable history”, to go back to Said’s phrasing. They are required to produce, in short, a perfect story to go with the behaviour expected of a good refugee. The vignetted nature of the essays and stories in this issue shatters this requirement.

A sentiment I hear often from people living away from their own settings is that they don’t feel whole. The fragments in this issue reflect that feeling– of jagged edges and partial embodiment, glimpses and shifting insights, dispatches from this territory of borderless living. So each of the texts here disrupts expectations of stories by refugees and exiles, while also crucially acknowledging the wholeness that lies around them and has been erased from their stories.

As the different stories from our contributors came together, I was struck by the varied viewpoints they revealed. Equally, I was drawn to how they speak to an essential truth about dispossession, that resonates outside the context of Afghanistan and exile. The lives of exiles are no literary metaphor.  They are their lived existence and carry intense challenges.

Yet it is worth noting that we are reading these stories having witnessed a livestreamed genocide in Gaza, in a world where international institutions have failed to curb Israel’s horrifying crimes against Palestinian civilians, and where a shocking number of major media platforms have either erased, distorted, or colluded in these crimes.

Simultaneously, we are seeing western democracies not only qualify the protections that were previously guaranteed to their own citizens, but methodically strip away the very idea of citizenship and belonging itself. In this context, it is possible to read the stories as addressing this broader sense of dispossession, of speaking to borders that exist all around us.

Historian Mejgan Massoumi, in her piece on music as a space for memory-making for the Afghan diaspora, speaks about the creative possibilities embedded in ephemera and how it could be used to craft a people’s history of Afghanistan. She also pointed to Said’s use of a musical term—exile as a contrapuntal space, holding multiple, often contradictory truths.

“…Listening isn’t passive — it’s an act of participation as well as preservation. It’s how Afghan communities decide what to remember, what to mourn, and what to carry forward. In exile, that act of collective listening becomes a form of home-making. It reminds people of their collective strength, their shared grief, and their enduring connection. As Said might say, it transforms the pain of exile into a vantage point — into awareness, into solidarity, and into resistance,” she writes.

In this framing, each work in this issue can be read as a contrapuntal expression of creative resistance. Together, they form a map of our collective tellable histories—offering pathways to recognise what has been silenced and to narrate exile as an act of homecoming.

Image credit: Asad Hussain