Everyone who reproduces that photograph reproduces the camp. The dark wall behind her, the dust, the torn shawl. That’s what made Steve McCurry’s 1985 National Geographic cover impossible to put down, and it’s what people reach for when they paint her.
I kept her face and threw the rest out.
I painted this in April 2013. Nothing about the place I gave her has become true since.
Behind her there’s open turquoise with light coming through it. Color falling across the top of her head, pink and yellow and blue, petals or confetti, I didn’t decide which. The shawl isn’t torn. It’s embroidered, magenta and white beadwork, navy and yellow dots, small green leaves worked into the folds. Somebody made that shawl with care and she’s wearing it. Underneath her, pale pink and white, a field in bloom.
I wanted her somewhere peaceful. A place she never got to.
The one thing I didn’t change is the eyes. The cover of the June 1985 issue said they were full of fear: “Haunted eyes tell of an Afghan refugee’s fears.” Seventeen years later, when someone finally asked her, she said it was anger. I believe her. I also think anger is only where it starts. What I see in that face is what anger becomes in a girl who has to survive with it. Strength. Something fierce and very still, that doesn’t need your permission to stare back at you. I gave her a better background and a shawl nobody had ruined yet, but I wasn’t going to soften that.
She was about twelve, living in a refugee camp in Pakistan after her village was bombed. When a foreign man raised a camera in her school tent, she covered her face, and it was her teacher who told her to uncover it. By her account, nobody asked if she wanted her picture taken. Nobody wrote down her name.
It became the most recognized photograph in National Geographic’s history. McCurry’s studio prices an open-edition print at $18,000, and larger prints have sold for as much as $178,900 at auction. She didn’t know any of it existed. She was married at thirteen, raising children in a camp, living a life nobody thought to ask about.
When they found her in 2002, National Geographic gave her financial assistance, the first compensation she’d ever received for the image. I want to be fair about that. I also know how she took the news. She and her husband were nervous and sad, and she later said, “The photo created more problems than benefits.”
Then the rest of it. Two of her children died. So did her husband. In 2016 she was arrested in Pakistan for getting identity cards so she could stay there with her family, and she was deported. Five years later the Taliban took Afghanistan back, and she was evacuated to Italy, where she lives now. The girl the world used as the face of Afghan suffering went on to live nearly every chapter of it.
Afghans are known for hospitality. In Dari we call it mehmannawazi, and it means you honor any guest who comes to you, stranger or not, whatever their religion or wealth, and you expect nothing back. Nearly two hundred years ago a British envoy wrote that it was the most remarkable thing about us.
I grew up inside it. Nobody came to my parents’ house without being fed. My mother was a great cook, but that was only part of it. She made every guest feel special, like the house had been waiting for them. She was petite and beautiful and attuned, a strong Afghan woman in a petite frame, and her strength showed up as softness toward whoever walked through the door.
Sharbat Gula was raised the same way. A stranger walked into her classroom, and she gave him the one thing he came for. She didn’t offer it. Nothing came back to her for seventeen years.
Forty years after that magazine hit newsstands, Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bans girls from high school and women from university. And the girls are still going to school anyway. Every morning at dawn, teenage girls in Kabul slip through an unmarked door and down a dark stairway to a hidden basement classroom. One woman’s secret online school now teaches 12,000 girls across the country. A seventeen-year-old wrote that the Taliban never considered how long Afghan women have been practicing resistance. For generations, she said.
The place I painted her into doesn’t exist, not for her and not for the girls going down those basement stairs every morning. I made it anyway. I didn’t ask her permission either. I couldn’t. That’s the part I keep sitting with.
Where to help
Aid Afghanistan for Education was founded by Hassina Sherjan, an Afghan woman, and has run accelerated learning programs for over 22 years, putting more than 7,000 Afghan girls and women through school. Sahar Education partners with local schools inside Afghanistan on literacy, coding, and English programs for girls banned from the classroom.
