Singer Elaha Soroor on her anthem for Afghan women

It’s a little over three years since the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan and the situation for Afghan women has steadily worsened. Women can’t attend secondary school and are forbidden from most paid work. A newly introduced law states that when they venture outside the home, women must be completely veiled, and their voices should not be heard in public. Data compiled by health workers in the country suggest that Afghanistan is now one of the few countries where more women commit suicide than men.

It’s to counter this suppression of women’s voices that UK-based Afghan singer Elaha Soroor has written “Naan, Kar, Azadi!” (“Bread, Work, Freedom!”). The song was premiered last month at the unprecedented All-Afghan Women Summit, attended by female activists and former politicians in Tirana, Albania. “I don’t want to preach to anybody, but I can talk about my own experience,” says Soroor, not her real name but a pseudonym which means “Goddess of Happiness”. “The song’s an expression of a woman’s struggle for autonomy, identity and liberation from the constraints imposed by patriarchal authority.”

Soroor was born in Iran, but her parents returned to Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Despite strong disapproval from her parents, she became a singer and competed in the popular talent show Afghan Star in 2009. But this — and a hit she had with Afghan band Aryan — led to threats against her. She had stones thrown at her, was falsely accused of making a porn video and was ultimately forced to live in hiding. She left the country in 2010. 

“As soon as a woman is assertive and has a vision, it’s not acceptable in this misogynist society. If you wear make-up, express your femininity and particularly if you sing, you are a loose woman. In Afghanistan there is this problem that music leads you to being seen as a whore.”

In the UK, Soroor recorded her debut album Songs of Our Mothers in 2019 with the group Kefaya. It is a brilliant collection of female-oriented Afghan folk and popular songs in which the expressive power of her voice is clearly heard.

The music of “Naan, Kar, Azadi!” is her own and is performed with a band of six, including women on sax, drums and percussion, Kefaya’s Al MacSween on keyboard and Afghan musicians Asif Karimi on plucked dambora and Ramesh Karizi on dholak drum. Soroor also invited US-based Afghan rapper Sonita Alizadeh to contribute. They still haven’t met in person, but have been admiring each other’s music from afar. Alizadeh is best known for “Brides for Sale”, a rap against forced marriages — something she escaped from twice, aged 10 and 16. 

“I listened to Elaha’s voice, her message, and I was inspired to add more to encourage Afghan women to stand up for themselves,” says Alizadeh. “I didn’t add anything new but put more emphasis on what Elaha was saying: ‘Why should I be afraid, because I have not committed murder or robbed anyone? Stop threatening me, because I will not listen any more. I want to stand up for myself. In Afghanistan every whip has kissed my body and I’m still standing. You can ask the Hindu Kush mountains, the dusty road of Herat, I’m still standing strong like them.’”

Can a song change anything? “Definitely, if people are looking for change.”

Alizadeh cites as an example the Iranian song “Baraye”, written by Shervin Hajipour after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 in police custody, who was arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. The slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” was chanted at protests and included in the lyrics. It was declared “Best Song for Social Change” at the 2023 Grammy Awards and is clearly an inspiration for “Naan, Kar, Azadi!”.

“The women of Afghanistan have to understand that nobody is going to empower them if they don’t empower themselves,” says Soroor. “If we hold each other’s hands and empower our children and teach them better, that’s the power of the mother in society and that can make the difference.”

Her song is in Farsi, but towards the end she uses the words of a lullaby in Pashto, the other main language in Afghanistan. This is a tribute to her maternal grandmother, who was kidnapped by her grandfather to be his bride and died by suicide when Soroor’s mother was still young. One of the few things she knows about her was that she spoke a different language, which she assumes was Pashto. The lyric goes: “Grandmother, grandmother, push the swing/So high that it becomes remarkable./If I get cold up there,/My mother’s warm embrace will hold me.”

“I think that sentiment is so beautiful. It gives me goosebumps every time I think about this image,” says Soroor.

Her own parents are still in Afghanistan: does her mother know about her singing this song? “No, she doesn’t know. We don’t talk about what I do. . . My parents love me, but they disapprove of my singing. The reason they disapprove is because they’re surrounded by people who disapprove of what I’m doing. They only hear Taliban propaganda and it goes inside your brain. If my parents were living in London, it would be different.”

The tightening repression of women under the Taliban has been widely condemned and the Afghan Women’s Summit declared it “gender apartheid”. But in a way, Sonita Alizadeh welcomes it: “In truth, I was happy when they created these restrictions because I want them to show that this is who they really are,” she says. “I am mostly disappointed in our people, not in the Taliban, because they are cavemen. Afghan people say Afghanistan is the land of lions. They should prove it. You can’t be afraid of being killed because living under the Taliban regime is dying every day, to be honest, especially for women. So I’m shocked that our people, especially men, are so quiet. If they want to live freely they have to take the risk.”

Since the return of the Taliban, there have been protests by women in Afghanistan shouting “Naan, Kar, Azadi!”, but since 2023 they have largely stopped. People in Afghanistan do have access to the internet, and music is shared on YouTube, WhatsApp and Messenger, so Soroor believes the song will be widely heard.

“In Afghanistan, it’s not done to talk about your emotions,” she says. “But as a musician, as a singer I think I can enter people’s subconscious and make them feel differently.”