An Afghan Author On Losing Her Homeland — For The Second Time

8/28/2021

Essay: Author Nadia Hashimi On The Taliban Takeover Of Kabul : NPR

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An Afghan Author On Losing Her Homeland — For The Second Time August 26, 2021 · 5:00 AM ET NADIA HASHIMI

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/26/1031103863/nadia-hashimi-author-afghanistan-kabul-taliban

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8/28/2021

Essay: Author Nadia Hashimi On The Taliban Takeover Of Kabul : NPR

William Morrow

“

It is too cruel to ask if it hurts more the first or second time a homeland is lost. I know one never becomes numb to it.

Nadia Hashimi

The week Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, I had gone out of town with my parents and in-laws. While my children played, their parents and grandparents sat riveted to our phones, speaking in fragments. Thoughts interrupted. Plates half eaten. Nothing was whole anymore.

It is too cruel to ask if it hurts more the first or second time a homeland is lost. I know one never becomes numb to it. Across social media, family and friends were relatively silent as one province after another fell. Forty years of conflict means that generations — plural — of Afghans carry with them some form of trauma or loss. The headlines of that week were making an inevitability clear. We braced ourselves for what might unfold in Kabul, the seat of power.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/26/1031103863/nadia-hashimi-author-afghanistan-kabul-taliban

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