Elaha Soroor interview: “Modesty is part of the identity of Afghan women and if you don’t have that identity you don’t exist”

“The Taliban wouldn’t let you live for a second if you were here, they would take your breath straight away. You are very lucky that you are not here.” This is Elaha Soroor’s mother talking from Kabul to her daughter in London after the Taliban had re-taken Kabul last year. Soroor is a singer, who participated in the TV show Afghan Star and tried to make a career as a singer in Kabul before she fled to the UK where she’s now a dynamic voice for Afghan women. There have been powerful performances at WOMAD UK and Førde Festival, Norway in July this year. 

The irony is that Soroor’s mother doesn’t approve of her musical career at all. Her mother describes her as khefat, a shame to the family, for not being a decent Afghan woman and dressing respectably. Soroor’s mother wears a headscarf, though doesn’t approve of the chador or burqa. “She wants me to keep that modesty even in Europe,” explains Soroor. “Modesty is part of the identity of Afghan women and if you don’t have that identity you don’t exist.” They had barely been in touch for years, but the dramatic events in Kabul last year at least rekindled that contact, if tenuously. 

The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021 with an undignified flight of British and American forces, leaving many Afghans who’d been assisting them to fend for themselves. Soroor’s immediate concern was for her sister and her children. “My sister was at Kabul airport trying to get out with her two kids and husband – she was pregnant. But they didn’t make it.” Her sister had to have a caesarean in Kabul and then next day got a car north to a safe house in Mazar-i-Sharif to wait for a call to get on a plane out of the country. It took around two weeks, but they are now in a refugee camp in Abu Dhabi. 

Most of Soroor’s cousins were in the former Afghan army and are now jobless – three of them lost their lives. Two of them were killed in military action, the third lost his mind and unsuccessfully tried to kill himself by jumping off the fourth-floor roof of an apartment block before getting beaten to death by the Taliban when he said he wanted to go back to the army. Sadly, there are hundreds of other heart-breaking stories to be heard from Afghanistan as women’s education is curtailed, music is silenced, aid is dramatically reduced and hunger and poverty close in. 

Just as another wave of refugees tried to leave Afghanistan last year, Soroor started rehearsals on a play about an Afghan family travelling to the UK and setting up home here. The Boy with Two Hearts premiered at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff last October and also ran at London’s National Theatre until November 12. It was Soroor’s first participation in a theatre piece, “but I was very keen to get involved, particularly as they wanted a musician to perform live.”

The Boy with Two Hearts is based on the autobiographical book by Hamed Amiri, which tells the story of how Fariba, mother of Hamed, Hessam and Hussein won’t submit to the restrictions and tyrannies of the Taliban regime. “Allah knows a woman is so much more than this,” she says, and the whole family – mother, father and three boys – must flee. By car, plane, train and ship they travel with fake passports, via refugee camps and the Sangatte camp near Calais, finally making it to the UK and settling in Cardiff. The second part of the play is about getting the heart treatment their brother Hussein urgently needs. 

‘The play keenly explores how a sense of home can be quickly lost but also re-established in precarious circumstances,’ wrote Chris Wiegand in his review in The Guardian. ‘Clothes hang from the rafters of Wales Millennium Centre’s studio space and half-unpacked cases surround the stage, with the multi-role actors picking up and discarding jackets for different characterisations.’ 

Adapted for the stage by Phil Porter, there’s a cast of five playing the Amiri family (and other roles), plus Elaha Soroor as a kind of storyteller, or ravi – a spiritual presence moving through the piece. She also co-composed the music with Tic Ashfield. “There is a whole song inspired by the folk music of Herat, because the family are from that city. And there’s a falak, a folk style from Badakhshan [and Tajikistan] and then different music – Middle Eastern, Kurdish, Balkan – on the journey from Afghanistan to Britain.” 

Of course, there’s a close connection with Soroor’s own personal story. Her name is not her real one. It’s a stage name, meaning ‘Goddess of Happiness.’ While working as a singer in Afghanistan she had stones thrown at her, got falsely accused of making a porn video, was forced to live in hiding, disguising herself as a boy, and more. “When I was in Afghanistan, I was effing scared, even without the Taliban,” Soroor says. “I felt very vulnerable in Kabul, and you are even more conspicuous if, like me, you’re from a working-class family as opposed to one with a wealthy background.” 

She fled Kabul via India in 2010 and arrived in the UK as a refugee in 2012 after a long circuitous journey. “What I identify with most in the play’s story is this uncertainty of not knowing what will happen next.” She won’t say much about her journey, but about finally getting across the Channel she says, “my dream was to jump on a chocolate lorry, but I got in a watermelon lorry.” She laughs. “For me it’s a very emotional piece because we all have connections with the story. There’s a lot of Afghan-ness in that show.”

Elaha Soroor’s debut album, Songs of Our Mothers, was a collection of songs by Afghan women, recorded with the group Kefaya and released in 2019. It included a lament of a mother for a daughter in an arranged marriage, the pain of a woman whose lover is to marry another, and a song popularised by Abe Mirza, a female singer who was imprisoned and silenced in the 1970s by the conservative society around her. Now Soroor is preparing to release her second album, which was actually started before Songs of Our Mothers. “As a solo artist, I wanted to create an album that is about me, about the new generation and the sound of the diaspora of Afghanistan.” She says it will be more acoustic than its predecessor and is provisionally titled Geranium. “It’s such a resilient and rebellious plant, you can take a branch and put it somewhere and it starts growing,” she says. The symbolism is clear – Soroor has also been taken from one place and is resiliently growing somewhere else.  

Most of the lyrics are by Mohammad Sharif Saiidi, an Afghan poet now living in Sweden. Soroor says, “I do write lyrics, but Saiidi writes poems.” She met him back in Afghanistan around 2008. Like her, he is from the marginalised and discriminated Hazara community. “We met at a dinner, and he gave me his book. As a young person it was great hanging out with intellectual Hazara people like him. It made a massive difference, building my confidence in Afghanistan.”

One of the songs, ‘Lamentations’, is in the Hazara dialect. “It’s a makhta, a lament,” she says. “A makhta is a melodic way of crying so people can relate to your sadness. It’s about a mother crying for her son killed in a bomb attack.” 

‘He went to university and his qualification he received / They took his life away on the streets, shrapnel his body received / I know quite well that his body is torn to pieces / For tulips have taken over the burial shroud that he received.’ Soroor explains that unlike most folk songs which have a rural feel, “this has a much more modern setting and has the feeling of a mother performing this lament in the city. These are songs after 20 years of democracy. Women were going to school; women were going to university and this album is a reflection of these 20 years.”

‘Attan’ is another song with musical subject matter – the attan being the popular Pashtun dance. It begins like a celebration: ‘We gyrated around each other and called it attan / The dhol raged on, and we lost ourselves in the rhythm.’ However, as the dance builds into a frenzy it gets darker, as if violence and bloodshed have become inevitable in a kind of dance of death. ‘If we found no innocent whose blood we could spill / We sparked a fight among ourselves, and tussled for a lifetime.’ 

Other songs have more optimistic themes, like ‘Little Bird’ in which the winged protagonist is a symbol of freedom and liberty in love, while ‘Olive Eyes’ “uses the poet’s signature style of using vivid imagery to express himself using words that mean multiple things at the same time.” ‘Your eyes are savoury cheese / Within which two olives rest / The two olives rest beneath the kohl / Both the almonds are fresh and defiant.’

“I hope the audience can taste the lyrics, as the poetry makes you hungry for love,” she laughs. “There’s a lot of Afghan flavour in there, because that’s who I am.”

The Taliban declared a national holiday last August 15 to celebrate a year back in power. But the country has lost four billion US dollars a year in international aid and the UN World Food Programme says over 22 million Afghans, over half the population, don’t have enough to eat. Most secondary schools for girls are closed and the jobs open to women are severely restricted. In 2021, the British government said that it would take 5,000 Afghan refugees per annum as part of a scheme to resettle 20,000 over the next few years, focusing on those at greatest risk from the Taliban. 

Hamed Amiri, author of The Boy with Two Hearts, thought he was re-telling a story from 20 years ago, but now he says, “I feel I am telling a story that could be happening right now back home in Afghanistan.”   

This interview originally appeared in the November 2022 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today