Free In My Father's Country by Saima Wahab

prejudices; they would never wander off from Southwest Portland to look for me in Northeast. I had so much to learn about life. My landlord, Jimmy, had to show me where the grocery store was, where to buy gas, and how to get to my new job, since I had left the language agency and started working in an office downtown. I had to learn about utilities. Until I got my own place I never realized you had to pay for water—we never paid for it in Afghanistan.
    Far from leading the raunchy American life my uncles gossiped about,I was probably clinically depressed for a few years after being cast out from my family. In Pashtun culture, if you commit a crime or an offense against the community in which you live, the shura , a gathering of the residents, much like a jury of peers, decides to burn your house and, in some cases, kick you out of the village. I felt like I had been tried in the court of Pashtunwali and punished accordingly. I felt guilty for not following the ways of my loving Baba, who had protected me in his soft embrace. I slept long hours and lost weight. My days were dull and identical: I went to work, grabbed some takeout on the way home, ate it sitting in front of the TV, and went to bed. When I lived with my uncles and we battled over my 9:00 P.M . curfew I used to think, If I could just stay out until eleven, my life would be so much more fun. Suddenly I could stay out as late as I liked, but I didn’t care. I was asleep by nine. I made a lot of tea, but I don’t think I turned on the oven even once the whole time I lived there.
    I’d fought for my freedom, achieved it, and then I withdrew from life. I didn’t go on dates. I didn’t travel. I didn’t even go to the homes of my girlfriends. I didn’t go to clubs, the very activity my uncles had claimed was the reason I had left their home, until nearly three years later—and even then it was only to spend time with my brother and his friends. I had no desire to enjoy my newly acquired liberties, because I felt the price I had paid for them was too great.
    I slept a lot to try to avoid dwelling on my new reality and my choice to have walked away. In Afghanistan and Pakistan I’d grown up in a house with siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. In the United States I’d spent every night eating dinner with seven people. Now I was completely alone, except for Jimmy, the landlord, who was rarely there and who certainly wasn’t a replacement for a family. My father was long dead; my mother was all the way over in Pakistan, raging and ashamed at the trouble I was causing; my uncles had declared me the source of irreparable family embarrassment; my brother was busy living his own American life; and my sister, in her typical way, hid her feelings, but I know how I would have felt in her place—abandoned, forgotten.
    Who is an Afghan woman without her family? I had no idea.
    I had no real understanding of what an American woman was capable of doing, of what choices she had, but I wanted to find out. As a Pashtun female, from the age of about six I had been told how to behave, what it meant to be a Pashtun woman. Part of me was very secure and comfortable with this role, because I knew so much about it. Another, newer part of me wanted me to be an American woman—free, educated, resourceful, and most of all, independent. This was a role I didn’t know half as much about, which made it difficult for me to balance the two parts. I wanted to take the good from the Pashtun in me and combine it with these new rights and choices I had been offered as an American—to blend the two to make a perfect woman, or at least a woman who would be perfectly me. To be honest with myself is to recognize that I also wanted to earn the envy of my friends back home, who believed I was enjoying an unimaginably carefree and happy life.
    TO THIS DAY , my uncles have not forgiven me for walking out on their insanity in order to preserve my own sanity. I’ve realized that