Statement of Solidarity with the Ukrainian People

Today, we at AAAWA stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people and its diaspora, who have been impacted by the Russian state’s invasion of their homeland. We recognize the millions of Ukrainians who are being subject to imperial violence at the hands of the Russian state and the thousands of displaced people who seek refuge. We hope the voices of those who are speaking truth to power will be elevated in this critical moment.

Statement on the 20 year Anniversary of “Operation Enduring Freedom”

October 7th, 2022 would have marked the 20 year anniversary of the United States’ commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom, the military operation that officially began the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan. While the US military formally withdrew from Afghanistan on August 31, 2021, what does endure is the violence of US empire and the many political actors and state institutions with whom it has colluded. That violence continues in the lives of the millions of Afghans who remain stuck within their country’s borders, in the lives of the 5.3 million people displaced since the War on Terror, and in the lives of the survivors who lost (and continue to lose) loved ones in US-led drone attacks and targeted civilian attacks by state and non-state groups. We acknowledge and recognize the ongoing ways that the Afghan people continue to live under inhumane conditions but also continue to fight for their right to self-determination and self-expression. October 7th marks almost twenty years of war, marked by complicated periods of hope, uncertainty, and fragmented futures. In this recognition, we express our ongoing solidarity with all parts of Afghan society, including the LGBTQ community, the Hazara people, Afghan women, and other historically marginalized peoples who are courageously fighting for a more just and equitable future.

Emergency Funds for Afghan Artists – GoFundMe Updates

March 20, 2022 | Thank you to each and every supporter of our fundraising campaign “Emergency Funds for Afghan Artists.” With your generosity, we were able to raise a total of $53,283.22 (through GoFUndMe, PayPal, Venmo, and direct donations)! As of January 2022, we stopped accepting new donations and formally closed our fundraiser as we completed our goals. Please read our full update here.

Thank you all for your support over the past seven months. We–and the families we have been assisting–cannot overstate our gratitude to each one of you who has contributed to this campaign. Together, you have helped us raise more than $41,000 in direct assistance to evacuate and resettle vulnerable Afghan artists, writers, cultural and civil society workers. Below we share our latest update on our activities, including the current status of each of the families we’ve been assisting.

Also, please note that as of January 2022, we stopped accepting new donations and formally closed our fundraiser as we completed our goals. We have successfully applied for Humanitarian Parole for all of the original nine families we were assisting–a total of 44 applications. Coordinated international evacuation efforts have drastically slowed, so we focused our recent work on providing direct relief to the families as they await their parole applications in country or as they resettle in a third country. As the people of Afghanistan continue to face a dire humanitarian and economic crisis, and as more than 30,000 Humanitarian Parole applications await decisions by USCIS, we will continue to call for immediate humanitarian aid, the unfreezing of assets, and humane immigration/resettlement policy.

Here is an update on each of the families AAAWA has been assisting:

M., Visual Artist
M is a visual artist AAAWA has worked with in the past. We assisted him and his wife in evacuating to Pakistan, where he was awarded a prestigious academic fellowship to the UK. AAAWA assisted the couple with their temporary housing and basic food costs in Pakistan, their Covid testing kits for travel to the UK, their flight tickets, basic living costs in the UK until their fellowship funds arrived, as well as a laptop and arts supplies. They have since settled into an apartment in London provided by the university and M is beginning art school while also contending with PTSD and culture shock. Additionally, M was told that the university would not renew his fellowship for the coming year (September 2022), so AAAWA is assisting him to explore other funding options. We welcome any assistance in the way of connections and/or grant writing.

Z., Filmmaker & Theater Artist
Z is an award-winning filmmaker and social theater artist that an AAAWA member has worked with in the past. AAAWA assisted him and his family of four with evacuating to Pakistan, where he awaits his Humanitarian Parole and P-2 cases. Along the challenging land journey, Z’s four-month-old son became badly ill and had to be hospitalized for a few days. Recently, his 5-year-old had to undergo emergency surgery. Both children are now okay, but these experiences compounded their many stresses, including fear of deportation and lack of sustainable employment. AAAWA has provided the family funds to cover their rent and basic living expenses (prices in Pakistan are nearly double that in Afghanistan) while Z transitions from earning $2/day selling tea to now working as a tailor. This year AAAWA hopes to support Z in continuing his film work.

N., Journalist, Theater Artist, & Filmmaker
N is a theater maker and filmmaker, as well as a former state journalist for Afghan Radio & TV. We assisted N. and his family of five (including a pregnant wife) to secure new national IDs, to apply for new Afghan passports, as well as to make several attempts at crossing the border to Pakistan. It took five months before they were finally able to successfully evacuate–a journey that took them 85 hours(!) by bus and resulted in two of his children becoming severely ill. Fortunately, the family is healthy and safe now, though they, too, face the threat of deportation. AAAWA has helped the family secure housing and basic household furnishings, as well as to cover their monthly expenses over the next few months as N looks for work. We’ve also been trying to advocate for him to the @CommitteeToProtectJournalists. His P-2 visa application is in its initial processing, and he currently awaits the outcome of his Humanitarian Parole case. This year AAAWA hopes to support N in safely continuing his journalism work.

S., Theater Artist, Voice Actor & Writer
S is a well-known writer for theater and radio, as well as a recognizable voice actor in popular radio dramas. He is also the father of seven young children. He has been virtually unemployed for months, doing some minimal and clandestine film dubbing work, which earned him less than $2/day. S also recently lost his mother to a sudden heart attack and has been in mourning. AAAWA has provided him with funds to secure passports and to cover his family’s basic living expenses over several months while he pursues more sustainable work and awaits the outcome of his Humanitarian Parole application. We hope to support S in safely resuming his artistic work.

R., Civil Society Worker
R is a former civil society worker, who has been unemployed since August and heads a household of nine children and an ailing mother. Several of his children were locked out of school by the Taliban, who closed public universities and barred girls from grades 7-12 to go to school. This affected R.’s eldest son (a journalism student at university) and his three teen daughters, whom he determinedly kept enrolled in private English courses. AAAWA helped his eldest son apply for a journalism fellowship for Afghan students at Hong Kong University. We also provided funds for R to keep his daughters enrolled in the English courses, to secure passports for the family and to cover their basic needs over the next months while they wait on their Humanitarian Parole applications and R finds more long term work.

In addition to these five cultural and civil society workers, AAAWA assisted with the filing of Humanitarian Parole applications for an additional five families. These included two widow-headed all-female households, two families working in food security, and one family of former government workers who are presently in hiding. These families remain in Afghanistan. USCIS has received over 30,000 parole applications and have also altered the qualifications to include prohibitive elements, such as third-party evidence of danger to the applicant. Advocacy is currently underway to pressure Congress and President Biden to remove these obstacles and expedite the cases. For more info check out @ProjectAnar and @AfghansForABetterTomorrow

Lastly, AAAWA is also renewing our creative energies in this new year as we mark officially becoming a 501c3 nonprofit organization! We are also at work on a digital exhibit featuring Afghan artists in country and in exile. You can follow our updates and find more information on our website (www.aaawa.net).

Thank you again for your generous support and for being in community with us!

The AAAWA Fam

AAAWA Statement on Anti-Asian Violence in the US

We at the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association join a number of Asian American and Asian American & Pacific Islander collectives throughout the country in condemning the countless number of violent attacks against Asian Americans over the past few months. Much has been said about the violence, including how it represents a symptom of a broader affliction this country suffers from–white supremacy, misogyny, the exploitation of women’s labor, and toxic masculinity–amplified through a gun-obsessed society. 

In this statement, we first express our solidarity with the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. We also want to offer new dimensions to the conversation on anti-Asian violence that need to be more explicitly spotlighted. First, these attacks should not be read as ‘senseless’ violence as we have seen some news headlines depict them. They are very much rooted in racialized, misogynist, and capitalist logics of domination. By calling them ‘senseless’ we treat the perpetrators as those who do not live in a larger culture that glorifies violence against minorities through the usage of weapons and physical domination. Second, the violence against Asian Americans, especially the March shootings in Atlanta, cannot be disentangled from the history this country has of treating Asian women specifically as sexual commodities, which is tied to deeper histories of US imperialism in Asia and decades of representing Asian women as subjects that can and should be dominated within Western colonial sexual fantasies. Third, in emphasizing this and other attacks as only symptoms of white supremacy, we inadvertently ignore how white supremacy itself is a system of domination that inherently relies on racism, misogyny and capitalism to thrive. If we are to stand in true solidarity with Asian Americans, we need to also dismantle these systems as they all work together simultaneously to erode and in this case, literally destroy, the lives of BIPOC communities everyday. 

We at AAAWA commit to continuing our educational and awareness-raising efforts around both the structural harms that we, the AAPI, and BIPOC communities at large confront through our public-facing programming in the months to come. We also, however, are committed, through art, writing, and scholarship to show the full and complex humanities of our communities, the full breadth of their lived experiences, so that we can continue to rehumanize those who have been denied their full humanity.

We have also enclosed a list of organizations that are actively working to promote the wellbeing of AAPI communities throughout the United States (see below).

Organizations and Resources 

AAPI Women Lead and #ImReadyMovement

https://www.imreadymovement.org/

Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities

https://aaww.org/project/black-asian-feminist-solidarities/

Stop AAPI Hate

https://stopaapihate.org/

Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ)

https://www.advancingjustice-atlanta.org/aaajcommunitystatement

CAAAV (originally Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence)

https://caaav.org/

Desis Rising Up and Mobilizing (DRUM)

https://www.drumnyc.org/

Red Canary Song

https://www.redcanarysong.net/

API Equality—Northern California

http://apen4ej.org

Asians4BlackLives

https://www.instagram.com/asians4blklives/

Resources to Support Queer Afghan American Experiences

Thank you again for all who could join us on Friday, October 30, 2020 for Reimagining Queer Futures: Afghans and Art in the Diaspora. Below you will find some additional resources (including a zine) to support Queer Afghan American experiences:

Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love, a storytelling performance featuring Wazina Zondon and Terna Tilley-Gyado 

Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV) LGBTQI Resources Page

The Samovar Network (TSN) podcast: Queer and Trans Afghans in Conversation

Not For Your Orientalist Gaze – Queer and Womxn Muslims: A Zine on Community, Art, and Organizing (written and compiled by Rumsha Sajid)

We hope you find this helpful and a source of strength in this time.

AAAWA Statement and Action Plan for Black Lives Matter

We, the Afghan American Artists’ and Writers’ Association (AAAWA), affirm that Black lives matter. This statement is not only a declaration of solidarity. It is also a commitment to sustained allyship with Black communities and an invitation to other members of the Afghan diaspora to commit to doing the same. We recognize that the struggles of our fellow Afghan Americans and other marginalized groups are intimately connected with those of Black people living in the United States. The continuing impacts of colorism, militarization here and abroad, economic and cultural oppression, and the intersection of white supremacy and American imperialism, have brought us to a critical point. We must play a more active role in creating a world that is just, equitable, and affirming for Black communities.

As members of the Afghan American Artists’ and Writers’ Association, we have been wrestling with a number of questions since the extraordinary uprising in response to the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, David McAtee, and the countless other victims of systemic racism in the U.S. How can the Afghan diaspora, particularly in the United States, actively support the Black Lives Matter movement in its mission for freedom and justice? How can we take responsibility for our complicity in the anti-Blackness and white supremacy that manifest within our Afghan American communities and families? Additionally, as relatively new immigrants from a Muslim-majority country in the age of the War on Terror, what are the connections between white supremacy’s oppression of our own communities and Black communities? As marginalized peoples who often share neighborhoods, scarce resources, and are subject to policing regimes, how can we defy polarization and build solidarity movements with each other?

Our commitment to engaging with these questions is motivated by a number of reasons. First, we oppose the system of white supremacy and racism that enable and actively encourage the systematic killing of Black people at the hands of the police and white nationalists. This system also facilitates the murder and oppression of Black people through state-sanctioned policies such as segregation, redlining, the school-to-prison pipeline, environmental racism, and the ongoing traumas of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery. 

Second, we feel compelled to convey to the Afghan American community the importance of standing with Black communities in their struggle for justice. As members of a diaspora, we have experienced racialized, gendered, and ethnicized forms of marginalization, but we recognize that our experiences are not the same as those of Black communities. In fact, our social and economic livelihoods in the U.S. have benefited from the ongoing disenfranchisement and criminalization of Black people, and the racial hierarchies on which these processes rest. These hierarchies have been instituted to divide communities of color. It is undeniable that many of us, as Afghan Americans, have participated in reinforcing them. Afghan Americans have participated in practices of colorism, gentrification, ‘white flight,’ allying with policing apparatuses post-9/11, and anti-Blackness. AAAWA commits to using our platform to raise awareness among Afghan American communities about these issues and the history of the country that we now call home. This commitment entails unlearning hegemonic ideals of whiteness. Uncovering this history means doing the intellectual labor of understanding the fundamentally racist, settler-colonial foundations that formed the U.S., and the economic, social, and political systems that sustain the status quo domestically and globally.

Third, we believe that Black liberation is bound with the collective liberation of Afghans and other communities of color. We recognize the Black activists and leaders who have paved the way for other communities to fight for equality for hundreds of years. It was the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s that paved the way for legislation that improved the rights and livelihoods of immigrant communities in the U.S. Some folks in our communities have asked, “How can you protest the death of Black people and not Afghan people?” We can do both. By saying “Black lives matter,” we are not saying that only Black lives matter or that Black lives are more important than all other lives, including Afghan lives. In fact, we are saying that if Black lives–their preservation and their flourishing–do not matter to the government and institutions of the United States (as clearly they have not), then how can all lives matter to them? If the occupation and militarization of Afghanistan is an extension of the domestic regime that polices Black bodies in the United States, then the Afghan American diaspora has a role to play in the liberation of Black communities here. 

We vow to adhere to the above statement through a range of projects we are organizing, as listed under “Long-Term Goals & Actions.” We also ask our fellow Afghan Americans to take specific actions now. We recognize that we will need to continue to develop and question this action plan as we continue to educate ourselves about movements for Black liberation.

LONG-TERM GOALS & ACTIONS

  • Undertake a rigorous examination of the intersections between Black communities and Afghan American communities in the U.S. This includes: educating our communities about the history of African Americans in the U.S.; the history of immigrant communities particularly within the context of the Civil Rights Movement; the existence, manifestations, and impact of anti-Black racism in Afghan American communities; and drawing connections between the domestic police apparatus and U.S. militarization abroad (including of Afghanistan). 
    • Create conversation guides and facilitate workshops on unlearning colorism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness in the Afghan diaspora. 
    • Develop and/or help distribute multilingual (English, Dari, Pashto, Uzbek) informational and educational resources.
    • Organize a monthly decolonial reading series that will address issues of colorism, racism, settler colonialism, and imperialism. 
    • Lead public dialogues about how the increase in surveillance and entrapment of Muslim communities in the U.S. post-9/11 is part of a long history of violence toward communities of color.
  • Support national advocacy campaigns within our local communities. 
    • Concretely support campaigns that call for the abolition of the police and the redistribution of money to sustain initiatives that provide and improve housing, food security, medical care, mental health services, and education.  
  • Foster durable and mutually nourishing relationships between AAAWA and other groups. 
    • Collaborate with other social justice groups within and outside Afghan communities, including Black-led organizations, to advance social justice for marginalized communities globally.

IMMEDIATE ACTIONS

DEMAND POLICY CHANGES: 

  • Sign the Justice for Breonna Taylor Petition.
  • Sign petitions such as this one from Reclaim the Block that call for defunding and abolishing the police, and redistributing money to services that help sustain communities, such as reliable housing, food security, schools, mental health support, and medical care. 
  • Write emails and make calls to our local council members, representatives, and senators at the state and federal level that directly address the above. 

DONATE TO: 

READ, LISTEN, AND SHARE WITH OUR COMMUNITIES: 

Thank you to the many other groups that have provided resources on ways to support this movement, including the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University.