Outspoken: My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan

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. Agent: Hilary McMahon, Westwood Creative Artists. (Feb.)