Possessing Brilliance, Mitra Hussaini

Mitra Hussaini, a woman of unmatched resilience, power and intellectual beauty. Her story; fleeing the Taliban, escaping the archaic patriarchal handcuffs of an outdated system, and the strength of Afghan women.

‘Every single day I was told that you are a girl, and you will get married, and you don’t need an education to wash dishes and take care of your children. Slowly and gradually, I kept going to school and proved them wrong’.

Mitra wearing traditional Hazara dress ....

I felt a hesitancy to go, uncertain that it would be worth having to put a jacket on and brave the evening cold. However, after inviting a friend along to a woman in business talk, I couldn’t back out. And so, in CWA hall, seemingly untouched since the 70s, the same age as most of the people in the room, where doilies adorned the walls and fraying knitted blankets covered the pale lounges, I met Mitra Hussaini. And the evening in that dusty hall paid its dividends tenfold. Mitra and I began work on a mutual project and quickly became friends who collect washing machines for each other and spend evenings laughing over the idiosyncrasies of Aussie life between mouthfuls of cardamom-infused Afghani desserts.

She is a woman of astounding power, unmatched resilience and possesses the brilliance of chutzpah like no one I know. She has an intellectual beauty I feel our small town is almost undeserving of. Mitra Hussaini is a Hazara woman from Afghanistan, a human rights advocate and women’s rights activist who in 2021 fled from the Taliban under the incredulous conditions of Kabul airport. She has sat with the world's leaders and former Afghani presidents. You can hear it in the recordings, the sweetness of her laugh and the self-belief she emanates. I wish it was she that our young girls took their inspiration from.

Currently, Mitra lives in an overcrowded share house to the west of town, still settling into the community. She financially supports her family overseas as they cannot leave their homes for the threat of the Taliban. Mitra tells me she sends gifts to family to get through the terror. She wants her community to remain stimulated, for the children to know fun. In blow up swimming pools delivered by trusted drivers, Mitra’s income, during a cost-of-living crisis in Australia, is keeping the hopes of her far away community alive. She is the woman who invites you around for giant Afghani feasts and turns up to a birthday celebration with a cake, candles, and two wrapped presents in hand. She mentioned months after my own birthday that she noticed I must always be cold as she’s only seen me in jumpers and suddenly the beautiful knit, she handed me on my birthday became evermore sweeter. Mitra gives proportionality more than anyone I’ve seen before. She keeps so little for herself, and munificence is woven into her being.

In Sun Tzu’s Art of War he says, ‘he confronts chaos with discipline, he treats tumult with calm. This is mastery of the mind’. He might as well have been speaking about Mitra. This is a small part of Mitra’s story. I write this for Mitra, for her friendship and determination and for Australians, to know how deeply enriched we have become with her here.

Mitra’s Story I meet Mitra in her almost deserted office as the sun begins to set and galahs jump around on the grass below the window. She tells me nonchalantly that the Taliban was in her dream last night. We sit down and I place the phone in the centre of the table to begin recording. Our conversation flows fluidly and Mitra guides me through her story. Mitra was born in Afghanistan but spent most of her life as a refugee in Pakistan. She was educated in a refugee school there. She says how being a girl in that age and society it was not easy to go to school. ‘Every single day [she] was told that you are a girl and you will get married and you don’t need an education to wash dishes and take care of your children’.

She was taught that a good girl is a ‘person who stays at home, who is shy, calm and clean’. The sweetness of her laugh erupts cheekily, ‘I was not that type of girl’. When you have a male guest at the house, women are supposed to hide their face, to be invisible. But Mitra, a smile upturning on her lips says how she would, pop her head round walls and shout, ‘Hello? How are you?’ She never wore the full covered hijab. She didn’t follow most of the tradition that stopped her becoming an independent woman, she says. ‘When I was told that you don’t go to these places because you are a girl, I was getting very angry and I was doing what I was told not to do. This was making me more curious to do it, you know. That was the difference between me and other girls. Slowly and gradually I kept going to school and proved them wrong’. Mitra persisted, finished school in Pakistan but continued to learn English on the side. Mitra moved back to Afghanistan and there, she was offered a job from the World Bank at the Ministry of Higher Education. The salary there was very decent, she says. She was scolded for going to school every day, she was seen as a waste to her family, until she was now the one started supporting them.

However, she saw that her education was only a basic education from an outdated Afghani system. She wanted to go for a higher, quality education. She received a full scholarship to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics, minoring in Development Studies at the Asian University for Women. She was wholly focused on her studies, Mitra knew her time at university would never come back. She engrossed herself in her education. Mitra was the president of the Coding Club, ‘just for fun’, each summer break hosting women empowerment events for the community, organizing conferences. She finished university and began working for the United Nations, yet in 2018, Mitra was put on the Taliban’s hit list following a conference in which she spoke about the rights of women and sexual consent. She received an anonymous phone call which informed that her car would be stopped in a Taliban controlled province and there, likely assassinated.

Mitra addressing a conference in Afghanistan, 2018

But in an exhale of grief, she says, ‘I used all my time to build my capacity and now I am here again, starting from scratch’. She pauses for a moment, and continues, ‘But I am thankful for what I did’ because she knows what her capabilities can do for her here. Mitra says, through all of this she believed that good days will come. She always believes that good days will come. Her resistance and strength is characteristic of Afghan women. The Power of an Afghan Women ‘I don’t think more powerful in the world exist than them [Afghani women]’. Mitra says how ‘we Afghan [women] are demolished in every stage of life. They deprive us of our basic human rights’. At home, she saw women with guns pointed to them, standing up and arguing with Taliban soldiers. Afghan women are very strong. They love their family and stand with them; however, Mitra is saddened at what the world thinks of her people. That she sees people second guess her, ‘oh an Afghan girl, maybe she doesn’t have the capacity’. ‘It makes me feel good but I feel sadness what people think about us. They are powerful but the only thing is that life is not supporting them. We are very confident and I am proud of Afghan women’. And it was this embedded strength that saw Mitra survive one of the worst atrocities our modern world has seen.

Mitra with former Afghani President Hamid Karzai and political leaders August, 2021- Fleeing from the Taliban

One week after the Taliban took over the country, Mitra knew she must leave. She tells me the story of fleeing Afghanistan from Kabul airport. It is far too graphic and heartbreaking to put into words and Mitra prefers to keep much of that story private. In short, she spent 5 long days trying to flee. Her days were punctuated with stampedes, snippers and beatings. Ailing bodies in the Afghani heat. At one point she says, ‘the chance of staying alive were sometimes for me, maybe, 5%. Maybe I will stay alive, maybe I will not’. She says ‘I thought this just happened in movies, but it happened to me’. Yet through all this, Mitra felt she must help these people. Thousands and thousands of people sat lifeless and unconscious in airless tents. She used her English language skills to coordinate with guards and soldiers, often forcefully, to get food, water, biscuits for the dying people around her.

Scenes Mitra captured from Kabul Airport Her life came down to one final moment, whether, undocumented, she would be getting onto the plane for Australia. Her fate was in the hands of a single Australian soldier. She handed over her UN card and any information and documents she could gather. He took them from her and, pausing, said ‘Australia needs you’. She called her family. ‘I am going to Australia. I am saved now’. Australia and Beyond I have to pause for a moment. Not because of the traumatic moments Mitra has detailed but in pure awe of the aberrated, formidable woman that sits across from me. I ask Mitra what she is proudest of. She says she is most proud of her education and for her family, she is proud to support them and knows she is their biggest hope in the world. ‘Education means the world to me. My message is always to girls, to any body of any gender, if you want to be powerful, go for education. Everybody has the qualities to get educated. That is a power that nobody can take away from you’. Currently, her hopes for the future are to be ‘somebody useful for the country of Australia’. To do something for the community. To do good’. She says, ‘if I can’t bring a big change, I want to bring a positive change’. And then she laughs, ‘long term of course, my goal is to be in the parliament. I think people might read this and laugh at me, ‘oh no, an Afghan girl in the parliament?’ I think to myself at this comment, I know no one better. Over spiced liver and sugared almonds in a suburban kitchen framing hilly banana plantations, Mitra, my partner and a close friend chat for hours. We learn she changed her own name as her previous name wasn’t ‘strong’ enough for her, that her family have Masters degrees as well and that she can’t fathom why Australians make their lives harder by desiring to partake in sports like sea kayaking.

Like with Htun, I take immeasurable pride in being the one to document and record these stories. Htun told me he hadn’t shown anyone else the pictures of his life before, Mitra tells me she hasn’t allowed her story to be told. As I write this, I have my sunset song (Vance Joy, Mess Is Mine) on in the background and am on the precipice of happy tears. I am so proud to know Mitra, and to present her story. She enriches my world with a child-like playfulness and brings a perspective to my life that I could not have dreamed of. What these interviews and friendships have taught me is to approach the world with the presence of mind that everyone you meet knows something you don't. In a Western culture with capital economics at its center, our gaze is often directed only at our feet. I am learning to unwrite this entrenched behaviour, and to meet Mitra at her eye line.

In a candlelit kitchen weathering an evening blackout, the shadows of warm yellow flames flicker across my computer screen. My book is open to a line by Socrates in which he advised the Greeks to ‘concern [themselves] less with what you have than with what you are, so that you can become as excellent as possible’. Mitra’s life is an art which teaches us to do just this. To appreciate the gifts on our doorstep and capacities within us. To invest in ourselves through education so as to be as excellent as possible. Not only for ourselves, but our community. I type the final lines of this piece hoping that it is our country's leadership, our school textbooks, and our communities which will become filled with people like Mitra Hussaini. The most powerful woman I know.